IN APRIL 2020, the world is in lockdown as the coronavirus pandemic rages on. But in the foothills at the south end of Oregon’s Coast Range mountains, resource extraction is going full speed ahead. On Kenyon Mountain in eastern Coos County, about 50 miles from the Pacific Ocean, a crew of loggers is chopping down 51 acres of old-growth and mature trees. Some of these trees have been alive since George Washington was president, based on a count of rings on the stump. Maps say the closest town is the aptly named Remote, Oregon, a town so small it’s no longer mentioned in US census counts, yet long ago was important enough to merit a profile in the New York Times.

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Wildfires are a yearly threat to anyone living near a forest, grassland, or chaparral, which includes about half of all U.S. addresses. President Joe Biden’s administration has introduced an ambitious 10-year, $50 billion plan it claims will protect those homes, to be funded partly with taxpayer dollars and other sources yet to be determined. The administration’s plan focuses on a massive increase in logging across the country in order to reduce fuels in bone-dry forests. Very little will likely be spent on making homes near forests more fire resilient. But the fires in Paradise and Maui show that the administration is on the wrong course.

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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.

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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.”

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