Description:
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
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