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My first book began as a journalistic explanation of the political and environmental battle over the spotted owl and old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. Its focus on people as well as nature, and its portraits of scientists, loggers, environmentalists and politicians has given it consistent popularity since its first publication in 1992. It has been used as an undergraduate and high school textbook for environmental, forestry, sociology and political science classes across the United States.
The book won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association award and the Washington Governor Writer’s award.
A controversy that began over an endangered but obscure bird, the spotted owl, grew in the late 1980s and early 1990s into a fierce battle for all the owl represents: an entire ecosystem worth billions of dollars if logged and virtually priceless as an environmental storehouse of beauty, diversity, and genetic information. As the environmental reporter for The Seattle Times I covered this dispute as it developed and became fascinated with the personalities, political strategies, and the forest that was at stake. Traditional logging of what had once seemed an inexhaustible supply of ancient trees was fast disappearing, a victim not only of deforestation but of automation, globalization and new scientific information about ecosystem importance. Not only were jobs threatened, but so was an historic and controversial way of life.
The Final Forest takes the reader to Forks, a logging community on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Not only was the population there particularly outspoken about the despised owl, but the town’s very name conjures the image of a dividing point, a decision to be made, where the lives of everyone – not just loggers – are deeply affected. Going beyond the news broadcast pictures of environmentalists chaining themselves to trees and logging truck rallies in state capitals, the book tells the story of this dispute by focusing each chapter on individuals who explain eloquently, and in sometimes heart-breaking detail, their love for trees, for a way or life, or for an ecosystem. The people in this story all appreciate the forest in different ways – as a laboratory, as a fiefdom, and as a temple – and find themselves caught up in America’s struggle to reconcile its love for the land with its exploitation of it.
Written with sympathy for both sides, but with a critical eye toward the claims of each, the book attempts to transcend a regional dispute and say some basic things about both nature and human nature. This is a book about the nation’s last great forest, a symbol for all that we cherish and exploit on earth.
Reviews
“William Dietrich has gone to the heart of the greatest forest left in North America and returned with a clear and compelling story of why so many people are fighting over it. This is not so much a book about trees as it is about what great trees mean to people. Like the towering firs of the Olympic Peninsula, this book will stand the test of time.”
-Tim Egan, author of The Good Rain
“In writing as lush as the threatened forests he describes, William Dietrich captures why the battle isn’t merely for the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest and California but for the health of the planet itself.”
-Michael L. Fischer, executive director, The Sierra Club
“William Dietrich sympathetically addresses the conflicting views of those who depend on the forest for a livelihood and those who value the forest for other reasons, and does so in a balanced way. The Final Forest eloquently captures the essence of the cultural clash that is so deeply rooted in timber issues.”
-David Thorud, Dean, College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington
“Engrossing and well-written, this is a model of balanced reporting and reasoned analysis.”
-Publisher’s Weekly
“A remarkably readable and lucid account.”
-Audubon Magazine
“The best book about the environment that I’ve read in a year.”
-Newsday
“The clash of value systems jumps off the page.”
-Eugene Register-Guard
“A moving assessment of an ecological dispute with global implications.”
-Kirkus
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