This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the National Geographic Society.
Imagine a black hole in the center of a green donut, Malcolm North said.
A USDA forest ecologist in the Sierra Nevada of eastern California, North was at the center of a new experiment in forestry with global implications. In September 2014, the King Fire ripped through 150 square miles (390 square kilometer) of the Eldorado National Forest. North was part of a team of scientists studying new ways to bring the forest back.
That put him at the center of one of the hottest new fields of climate adaptation—and a quiet revolution in his own field. Throughout the 20th Century, the Forest Service grew trees by, well, planting them. “We’d go out to a big fire or clear cut,”
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