Canopy of Titans: The Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest - Hardcover

by Jessica Applegate (Author), Paul Koberstein (Author)

Trees are crucial in preserving a liveable future. Canopy of Titans makes an eloquent plea for saving one of North America's last great forests.
-- Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

In Canopy of Titans, Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate examine the global importance of the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest that stretches from Northern California to Alaska. Their urgent and authoritative account sets out the threats facing a vital environmental resource, and celebrates the beauty and complexity of one of the world's great forests.

Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting, Koberstein and Applegate pull back the curtain on policies of governmental bodies that have seriously diminished the rainforest's capacity to store carbon, and uncover industry practices that have led to the destruction of swaths of a major ecological resource. Additionally, using an environmental justice perspective, Canopy of Titans shines a light on the Indigenous communities that have lived in the rainforest for millennia, and the impact forest policies have had on their lives.

Author Biography

Paul Koberstein co-founded Cascadia Times in 1995 and has been its editor ever since. Paul, a journalist for 40 years, was a staff writer for The Oregonian and Willamette Week in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1995, Utne Reader named Cascadia Times one of the best new environmental publications in North America. In 2016, Paul won the Bruce Baer Award given annually to an Oregon journalist for excellence in investigative journalism in recognition for his investigation of industrial toxic air pollution. In 2004, he won the John B. Oakes Award for the most distinguished environmental journalism in the United States for a series of articles on wildlife poaching in the North Pacific Ocean. Paul is a native of Oregon and currently resides in Portland.

Jessica Applegate is managing editor and photographer for Cascadia Times. She is a lifelong environmental activist and public servant and works with young children with special needs. Jessica is a founding member of Eastside Portland Air Coalition, a grass roots group that spurred creation of statewide air toxics regulatory overhaul, Cleaner Air Oregon. She was appointed by Governor Brown to the subsequent rules advisory committee resulting in the passage of historic legislation curbing industrial air pollution in Oregon. She is currently an advisory board member for Beyond Toxics in Eugene, Oregon. Jessica holds a master of communication sciences degree from California State, Northridge. During her stint with Cascadia Times she co-wrote award-winning articles exposing fraud in California's carbon offsets program. She also owns a small-scale organic vineyard in Douglas County, Oregon and loves to wander in the woods whenever the stars align. Jessica resides in Portland, Oregon.