Canadian scientist John England stands by a tree trunk at Ballast Brook on the northwest coast of Banks Island where trees such as redwood grew as high as 22 meters and were as thick as 60 millimeters in diameter between 2 million and 10 million years ago. Photo by Edward Struzik. Canadian scientist John England stands by a tree trunk at Ballast Brook on the northwest coast of Banks Island where trees such as redwood grew as high as 22 meters and were as thick as 60 millimeters in diameter between 2 million and 10 million years ago. Photo by Edward Struzik.

It's quite chilly here in D.C. and this week marked the publication date of Edward Struzik's Future Arctic: Field Notes from a World on the Edge, so it was the natural choice for this week's #ForewordFriday, and I really couldn't top the fantastic title of the first chapter, "Eight-Foot-Long Beavers, Scimitar Cats, and Woolly Mammoths: What the Past Tells Us about the Future Arctic." In it, Struzik, a journalist who has spent decades covering the Arctic, takes us into the deep past of what we think of as a frozen, sterile, landscape, and shows us its vibrant life. He shows how the changing Arctic is nothing new and sets the stage for a book that argues that if we act now and with an understanding of how the Arctic connects to the world, we don't need to be afraid of this change.