“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.”

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