Seattle is about to step inside the largest forest on Earth — without leaving the University of Washington campus. Knowing Nature: Stories of the Boreal Forest / Historias del bosque boreal opens at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture on November 7, and Happy City News readers who love wild places have a joyful new reason to visit.
The boreal forest is Earth’s largest terrestrial ecosystem and the last intact forest on the planet, a vast northern world of spruce, lakes and wetlands that stores enormous amounts of carbon and shelters caribou, wolves, migratory birds and hundreds of Indigenous communities. This bilingual exhibition, presented in English and Spanish and developed by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, brings that distant landscape vividly close to home.
Visitors will see, hear and feel the forest through stunning photography and videography, interactive displays, commissioned artworks, first-person stories and objects from the Burke Museum collections. The boreal speaks in many voices here: Indigenous community members, scientists, conservationists, artists and writers share stories of resilience, strength and hope in a changing world, and show how knowing nature can offer a vision for a sustainable future.
It is a perfect fit for the Burke, where working labs and visible collections already turn every visit into a conversation with researchers. Plan a fall visit, wander the permanent galleries of fossils and Northwest cultures, and then lose yourself — happily — among the northern trees.
Photo: USFWS Alaska via Wikimedia Commons
