
On beings and biomes–the boreal forest
Welcome to the first in our series called “beings and biomes.” For the purposes of this series, we will define a biome as a community of living beings that has formed in response to the physical environment and regional climate that nourishes life. Here, we think of beings as all living things, from wolverines and mosquitoes to black spruce, chaga, and bacteria. Our work may be laden with technical language and bounded by laws and legal analysis, but it’s always been about protecting beings and biomes.

A bull and cow moose eat near Wonder Lake in the boreal forest of Denali National Park as the sun begins to rise around 3:30 a.m. in late June, 2017. Photo by Emily Mesner
By Dawnell Smith
Boreal forests cover over half of Alaska and about a third of Earth’s forest area. This coldest of terrestrial biomes can look like an undulating expanse of variated moss and lichen, or like stands of spindly black spruce heavy with snow, or like weedy thickets of willow along glacial rivers, or like green treetops vanishing into the horizon, or like bogs, meadows, marshes, and lakes.
It is a biome of many landscapes. For some people, boreal forests provide them with food and their home. For others, these forests also called “taiga”—Russian for “land of the little sticks”—offer glimpses of wondrous natural beauty and animals like moose, bear, porcupines, wolverines, hares, and resident and migratory birds ranging from boreal chickadees and owls to merlin, common loons, trumpeter swans, and ducks, geese, sparrows, hawks, and more.

Boreal Chickadee. Anchorage, Alaska. By Tim Bowman
Subzero winters and short summers define this biome of mostly coniferous forest with a low diversity of tree species—dominated by spruce in Alaska—yet it supports thousands of living beings and entwined communities of life.
Remarkably, the boreal forest contains more surface freshwater than any other biome and holds immense amounts of carbon in the soil and roots of trees.
Things are shifting dramatically due to climate change, however. Boreal forests are warming at rates higher than the global average. Permafrost that supports the roots of trees has thawed and, in some places, drowned whole stands of trees, sometimes then called “drunken forests.” Warming further influences the survival and growth of many trees—trees that right now hold as much as twice the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere.
Water and fire
If the trees do not hold, neither does the boreal forest as we know it.
In an article published in 2023, four scientists talked about growing evidence that boreal forests are shrinking. Already climate change has impacted the number of birds and animals in certain boreal areas and, especially in the southern boreal, warming has led to much drier trees more prone to wildfires.
Boreal tree roots draw water up from the soil and into their needles, and release it into the air as vapor. This process called transpiration helps these forests make their own rain and indeed spread water to other biomes.

Hoar frost catches the morning light in the boreal forest. By Lisa Hupp, USFWS
In “Alaska’s Vast Boreal Forest and Its Species Face a Reckoning,” published by The Conversation and Mother Jones in 2024, the reporter Lois Parshley talks about shifts in the boreal forest. “Transpiration contributes roughly half of annual rainfall in European forests, and helps drive the Amazon’s seasonal monsoons. Spruce are particularly good at it, releasing compounds that condense water molecules—essentially seeding raindrops. Collectively, these exhalations also make the boreal the greatest planetary source of oxygen.”
What happens when warming reduces the water these trees can pull from the soil or when the seasons seem to shorten and the spring and summer become hotter?
The article notes that when trees die, “the loss of their transpiration can spark hotter and drier conditions; recent models predict that deforestation will reduce rainfall in some regions by almost a third. Hot, dry summers are killing spruce that shrug off polar winters but can’t cope with drought. Higher temperatures have also catalyzed once-rare lightning strikes across Alaska, kindling unprecedented wildfires. Every year since 2000, 50 percent more of the Arctic has burned than in any decade of the previous century.”
The birds, the trees, the future
The book, “Fire Weather: On the Frontlines of a Burning World” by John Vallient, talks about the boreal forest both as a hemispheric sponge for fresh water covered by trees and a “phoenix among ecosystems” that is literally reborn in fire. Black spruce cones open up and drop in heat, for one thing.
The book’s story centers on a massive 2016 fire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, “an island of industry in an ocean of trees,” and presents the catastrophic burn as a sign of things to come. Fires will get more colossal, more powerful, more capable of creating their own weather. Warming alters the boreal forest, which leads to intensified fires, which feeds more climate disruption, which alters the boreal forest.
It’s easy to ignore the connection between our daily lives, actions, needs, desires, and conveniences with these results and what they mean for our future. And it certainly doesn’t help that the ongoing corporate, government, and institutional resistance to truly effective climate action has failed to meet global goals.

Boreal owl perched in a spruce tree in Denali National Park, NPS photo.
We now live in a world where arguably the most vital biome on Earth has spun into a feedback loop of great consequence. We do not know entirely how these forests will shift and what it will inevitably mean to human communities, but we can see the changes in birds and trees and fires and more.
We know this shift will hurt. Bird species now vulnerable and imperiled could disappear; food sources for communities reliant on boreal forests will diminish and potentially vanish; forests gutted by fires may not grow back, replaced by some other plant life. And the fires that rage through areas populated by people will have lasting effects on families, communities, and all their interconnections with the world.
When we talk about protecting places in Alaska because of their importance to ways of life, regulating climate, and for future generations, this is what we mean. This is why we do what we do. This is how lawsuits matter to biomes.