Last Stands: A Journey Through North America's Vanishing Ancient Rainforests
Editorial Reviews
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Larry Pynn, a reporter for the Vancouver Sun, has spent his life among the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest--and not just as a chronicler. When he was young, he writes in Last Stands, he labored on the "green chain" of a sawmill, a job in a lean economy that brought the possibility of earning enough for the motorcycles and cars of a teenager's dreams. Half a century later, Pynn harbors evident regret for his work, but his experience affords him an unusual depth of firsthand knowledge in exploring the controversies surrounding the temperate rain forest--a threatened ecosystem that has been much in the environmental news since the spotted owl first flushed into the public spotlight in the late 1980s. Although the forest is supposedly better protected now than in the past with updated logging regulations, it has still been trimmed to something like 13 percent of its former extent, and old-growth continues to fall at a terrific rate.
Having traveled the length of the rain forest from northern California to southern Alaska, Pynn turns in a report on this embattled ecosystem that rings with both hard data and anecdotes from loggers, Native Americans, forestry industry officials, and Canadian and U.S. government workers. Preserving the remaining forests and the wildlife they shelter will require much additional work, he reckons. And it will require overcoming the "obscenity of polarized debate" that turns the forest into an object of rhetoric rather than a living place. It is that real place, and not an abstraction, that Pynn celebrates in these pages. --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
The remarkable Pacific temperate rainforest has become an endangered landscape, rarer than even the embattled tropical rainforest. In "Last Stands," award-winning environmental writer Larry Pynn plunges into coastal forests from California to Alaska to explore this unique ecosystem and the complex factors that threaten it. Whether standing with new-age loggers as they toil beneath the churning blades of a heli-logging operation, witnessing the wolverine's legendary ferocity, bouncing along in the back of a pickup with a couple of bear hunters, or embarking on a week-long solo hike through an uncharted wilderness, Pynn's approach to understanding North America's temperate rainforest--and the creatures and people connected to it--is as diverse and unconventional as the forest itself. The result is a fascinating book, one part impassioned travelogue and one part natural history.
Last Stands: A Journey Through North America's Vanishing Ancient Rainforests
Last Stands: A Journey Through North America's Vanishing Ancient Rainforests,Larry Pynn,Oregon State University Press,0870710273,Ecology,Environmental Conservation & Protection - General,Nature,Nature/Ecology,Rain Forest Ecology,Trees & Forests - Rainforests
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