A Publication for West Coast Alumni and Friends
Vol. 2, No. 2 / August 2003

Standing Up For Nature's Giants

"I came to value our parents' ideal vision of responsibly making the least possible demands on the earth."

Sequoidendron giganteum, the giant sequoia. One of these trees, with a volume of 55,040 cubic feet, is the largest living organism on earth. It's the job of five-foot-ten-inch Athena Demetry '91 to protect them.

A restoration ecologist for the National Park Service, Demetry works in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, which contain the world's premier stand of sequoias. She directs a complex project aimed at restoring to a natural state a 231-acre site that once contained the Giant Forest Village tourist camp. Under her direction, the Park Service has performed the minimal intervention necessary to permit the ecosystem to regenerate naturally. The restoration plan is based on extensive research by Demetry and others on the way nature fills gaps in the Sequoia forest caused by fire.

Demetry has devoted the last decade to the grand sequoias guarding the broad western slope of the Sierra Nevada. She says she marvels every day at the cathedral-like setting. "I love being in Giant Forest in the evening," she says. "The golden light makes the cinnamon-colored bark glow like no other tree."

She traces her interest in the natural world to a summer job mowing lawns and weeding at Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston, Mass. "My love for working outdoors pushed aside my pre-med ideas," she says, "and my biology major at WPI was aiming me toward a career in ecology."

Her sense of mission is rooted in her childhood in Holden, Mass., on a 18-acre homestead dubbed "Back Acres" by her father, James Demetry '58 ('60 M.S.), emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering, who has taught at WPI since 1971. She helped milk goats and made cheese, slopped pigs, tended a big garden ("my favorite") and learned much about self-sufficiency.

"My sisters, Sara and Chrysanthe ['88, asso-ciate professor of mechanical engineering at WPI], and I came to value our parents' ideal vision of responsibly making the least possible demands on the earth," she says. "For this I'm grateful."

At WPI, she won the Class of 1879 Prize for a humanities and arts project titled "The Individual in Israeli and Palestinian Literature." She ran fast enough to make the NEWMAC All-Conference track and field team, and also wrote a weekly column, Wilderness Writer, for the student newspaper. After graduation, she earned a natural resources fellowship in the West. Having falling in love with that part of the country, she stayed to earn a master's degree from Northern Arizona University.

The Giant Forest Village project involves undoing nearly a century of development. In all, 282 buildings, including a gas station, grocery store and cabins, have been demolished. The human impact of this development had moved the forest past the threshold where it can recover on its own. Ecological restoration began in 1998 and appears on course for completion by 2005. While her work and extensive scientific writings on the project use the recovery of the forest after fire as a restoration model, Demetry's plans and techniques appear applicable in restoration work following hurricanes, landslides, coastal erosions, insect outbreak and other natural disturbances.

As the project winds down, Demetry has moved on to other work that will make a difference for the giant trees and other natural treasures in her charge. For example, she has embarked on a major effort to prioritize the removal of 210 invasive plants (introduced by park visitors) that threaten thousands of acres of pristine meadows, canyons, uplands, waters and, of course, giant sequoias.