What Was the Conversion to Animism?

This is my 12th novel. I've been writing novels for over a third of a century. It's the first novel that ever moved me across the country and literally changed my life in terms of what I do all day long, how I live and where I live. The story is this, I was stunned when I began to read about the redwoods of Northern California to discover that of their initial range somewhere between five and two percent of old growth redwood forests still exist. And as I read deeper into the history of trees in North America, it stunned me once again to discover that that same proportion holds true for all of the forests of North America.