By Eliza Murphy / Columbia Insight
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 back yard.
This, anyway, is the conclusion of a new book, “Canopy of Titans: The Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest.”
Early in their book, Portland, Oregon, 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.”
Home to some of the world’s largest trees, the forest surpasses the Amazon in its capacity to sequester atmospheric carbon, thereby preventing it from being released into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change.
That “nameless forest” thing, the authors believe, is a problem. They’d like scientists to officially name the entire ecosystem the “Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest,” and the rest of us to start thinking of it as the “Amazon of the North.” Both would heighten awareness of the role it plays in the planet’s overall health and the peril it faces from logging.
In California’s redwoods, the authors write, “the Grove of Titans contains 2,596 tons of carbon per hectare, more than any forest on Earth, and about six times the carbon density of the Amazon.”
Long overdue for recognition as a single, contiguous organic network—not disconnected pieces of timberland managed in wildly inconsistent ways by county, state and provincial agencies—this colossal forest holds a key to combatting the global climate emergency.
Braiding gripping narrative, historic data and new research, Canopy of Titans tells the story of a forest besieged by industrial logging and accompanying disinformation campaigns that conceal its long-term devastation, and influence policies at all levels of government.
Koberstein is a veteran environmental journalist with The Oregonian, Willamette Week and Cascadia Times (which he co-founded in 1995). Applegate is a longtime environmental activist and founding member of Eastside Portland Air Coalition. The authors answered questions in an in-person interview and follow-up email.
Columbia Insight: Why the need to put a label on what you’re proposing be named the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest?
Paul Koberstein: Back in the ‘90s, I was aware a group called Ecotrust published an atlas of the coastal temperate forest. I knew in the eyes of some this was a single rainforest that connected the redwoods to the Tongass [National Forest] in Alaska. Activists working in conservation in Oregon, California, Washington, Alaska and British Columbia were all working on protecting their own neck of the woods. No one knew what the other was doing.
CI: So all these groups work piecemeal on forest protection?
PK: Yes. And, politically, each state and Canada regulate, govern and manage the forest independently of each other. Everyone is focused on their own territory. I assumed the forest had a name, but it didn’t. I realized no one had a name for the forest. It is a further indication that no one was looking out for it as a whole.
Eighty percent had been clear-cut. The redwoods, 96% clear-cut. It’s vanishing bit by bit. No one was paying attention to the overall gross impact of the logging operations going on independently throughout the rainforest.
CI: How do Oregon and Washington differ in their approach to preserving forests to fight against climate change?
Paul Koberstein/Jessica Applegate: Under former Gov. Kate Brown, Oregon began to embrace proforestation as a climate mitigation strategy, as recommended by the (UN’s) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2022. But Washington under Gov. Jay Inslee is defying the IPCC. In 2020, Inslee signed a law that deems logging to be a solution to climate change, rejecting proforestation.
Washington has shown no interest in amending the law. Instead, it embraces a timber industry talking point that says it’s better to store carbon in long-lived wood products like lumber than in the forest. Meanwhile, Washington is aggressively logging its carbon-rich mature forests on state-owned lands, with the backing of industry-funded academics at the University of Washington. We wrote about this situation in an article in Earth Island Journal after writing Canopy of Titans.
CI: Where does the value of trees for storing carbon come into play?
PK: I read a study about proforestation in 2019, about the value of protecting existing trees—old growth, mature trees and extending the rotation between cutting to 80 or 100 years instead of 40. The entire redwood area region, acre for acre, is the most carbon dense forest in the world. The eucalyptus trees of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand are second. The Douglas-fir forests from northern California to Vancouver Island are third.
CI: You write: “Proforestation could steer the entire planet toward victory in this epic battle for the future.” What is “proforestation” and how does it differ from “reforestation”?
PK/JA: Reforestation means replanting the forest after a harvest. Proforestation means protecting old-growth trees as well as mature trees greater than 80 years of age. It also means increasing harvest cycles to no fewer than every 80 years, and preferably 120 years.
CI: How does the Pacific Northwest fit into the story?
PK/JA: This book argues against seeing this forest as a bunch of ecosystems that happen to be located next door to each other. We see it as a single ecosystem that has a number of things in common: same species of salmon, same species of trees and the climate that allows them to flourish. The Columbia River Basin plays a crucial role in its support of an abundance of forest and fish. But its abundance is compromised when actors outside of the Basin exploit the resources, especially salmon and the forest, through logging.
We want people to think of the region as part of the whole, which is contrary to the way many people see it. The ecological problems in the Columbia Basin are very much the same ones they’re facing in the Fraser River, the Sacramento River.
CI: You write, “Wall Street investors control pretty much everything that happens in Oregon forests.” Can you elaborate?
PK/JA: The timber industry of today is nothing like the timber industry of past generations. Timber companies at one time were an integral part of the communities where they operated. Today, many timber companies are real estate investment trusts (REITS) including, to cite one example, Weyerhaeuser. Their only concern is growing trees for profits. If they can profitably log their tree farms every 20 years, they’ll do it, despite several studies that show short rotations are bad for the climate, such as Bev Law’s groundbreaking study in 2018.
CI: You quote the Meat Puppets, which marks you out as Gen Xers. How do you view conservation attitudes and actions of generations coming up behind yours?
PK/JA: We think the younger generations are far less willing to compromise their conservation values than older generations. They are also less willing to buy timber industry propaganda and greenwashing.
CI: “Amazon of the North” is a great hook—is marketing part of the obstacle environmentalists face in their effort to save forests?
PK/JA: We think that giving the entire rainforest an internationally recognized name like the Amazon would be a major step toward rallying the public to protect it.
Eliza Murphy is an Oregon-based freelance writer and visual artist.
Columbia Insight, based in Hood River, Oregon, is nonprofit news site focused on environmental issues of the Columbia River Basin.
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