Last Stands
A Journey Through North America's Vanishing Ancient Rainforests
New Star Books
6 × 9 inches. Map. Index. 224 pages.
2000. ISBN 978-0-87071-027-8. Paperback, $18.95.
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, bounding 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.
Cathedral, cash crop, the Earth's respiratory system: the rainforest is all this and more. The incalculable wealth and magnificence of these last stands spring forth in this savvy, down-to-earth chronicle.