In Canopy of Titans: The Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest, we are offered a timely, welcome and provocative biography of our corner of the world’s greatest assets, our life-affirming forests. We are also served up a gut-wrenching chronicle of how recklessly we have laid, and continue to lay, waste to the richest forest ecosystem on Earth.
Read the full interview here.
If you live in the Pacific Northwest, one of the biggest keys to holding back the destructive momentum of global climate change lies in your backyard.
This, anyway, is the conclusion of an absorbing and important new book, Canopy of Titans: The Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest.
Early in their book, Portland authors Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate lay out their case. The vast, unnamed temperate rainforest that stretches some 2,500 miles from northern California through Southeast Alaska and the Gulf of Alaska plays “a crucial role in mitigating human-caused climate change, and no forest is more valuable to the climate than this one.”
Read the full article here.
“Drawing on research and interviews with more than a hundred scientists and other experts, Koberstein and Applegate, who run the environmental outlet Cascadia Times, make a persuasive case that the region deserves an elevated profile and that logging and pollution are threatening the rainforest’s ability to stabilize rising greenhouse gases. And the solution to prevent further degradation, they maintain, is not to plant more trees — or “carbon-capturing machines” — but rather to protect the oldest among them and prevent unsustainable logging.
To bolster their argument, the authors journey throughout the Pacific coastal region, building a detailed portrait of the forest and its constituent parts, its environmental value, and the various threats it faces. There are vivid accounts of California’s redwoods, Oregon’s wetlands, Washington’s colossal Douglas firs, British Columbia’s salmon runs, and Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest, which abuts Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. We learn, for example, that the Pacific rainforest houses three of the world’s seven species of trees that grow over 300 feet tall and that the roots of one of these, the coast redwood, may only reach 10 feet deep while its first branches can be 250 feet above them.”
Read the full article here.
“When most people think of rainforests, they conjure up images of the Amazon, the Congo, and Southeast Asia — vast verdant expanses of densely packed forests, dripping with moisture and rich with tropical life. But in fact, there’s a huge rainforest in North America, unheralded and underappreciated: the sprawling forested region that stretches some 2,500 miles along the Pacific Coast, from just north of San Francisco to Kodiak Island, Alaska.
Part of the problem, according to Oregon journalists Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate, is that the area has no popular name. As a result, we’re missing the forest for the trees, and U.S. and Canadian policymakers and scientists are neglecting a valuable opportunity to marshal resources in their backyard to hit wider climate change targets and improve conservation.”
Read the full article here.
In this week’s episode of Terra Verde, host Gary Graham Hughes talks with Cascadia Times investigative journalists Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate about their new book, Canopy of Titans: The Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest, which celebrates the beauty and complexity of these ecosystems and uncovers how climate policy mechanisms that favor extractive industry are contributing to the ongoing degradation of this amazing rainforest.
Listen to the full episode here.
