In “Canopy of Titans,” environmental journalists Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate examine the global importance of the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest that stretches from Northern California to Alaska. 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. 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.

Paul Koberstein is the editor of Cascadia Times, which he co-founded in 1995. He was previously a staff writer for The Oregonian and for Willamette Week. In 2016 he won the Bruce Baer Award given annually to an Oregon journalist for excellence in investigative journalism and, in 2004, the John B. Oakes Award for the most distinguished environmental journalism in the United States.

Jessica Applegate is managing editor and photographer for Cascadia Times. A lifelong environmental activist, she works with special needs young children and is a founding member of Eastside Portland Air Coalition, a grassroots group that spurred creation of statewide air toxics regulatory overhaul, Cleaner Air Oregon.

The following is an excerpt from “Canopy of Titans,” by Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate, published by OR Books, 2023, and has been reprinted with permission. 

Where the Forest has no Name

Fifty miles north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, you enter the world’s largest temperate rainforest, an inspiring cathedral of ancient redwood, Douglas-fir, and Sitka spruce, the tallest trees on Earth. If you travel the entire length of the rainforest, you will end up 2,500 miles away, on the far western side of the Gulf of Alaska.

Don’t look for any signs marking an entrance to the rainforest. There aren’t any. What’s more, the rainforest has no official name, according to the National Geographic Names Information System database. So, what should we call it? We asked James Meacham, a professor of geology at the University of Oregon and an author of the Atlas of Oregon.

 “Great question,” he told us. “I don’t have a definitive answer for you.”

There is no shortage of suggestions, however. At various times, people have called the temperate rainforest Salmon Nation, the Rainforests of Home, the Northeast Pacific coastal temperate rainforest, the Pacific Rain Forest, the Cascadian Raincoast Forest, or the Northwest Coast Cultural Area. None of the names have stuck.

Don’t look for any signs marking an entrance to the rainforest. There aren’t any.

Indigenous nations living in the rainforest for millennia had names for many of the places within the temperate rainforest but no name for it as a whole. The Oregonian newspaper often refers to the rainforest as “Northwest Forests,” a plain vanilla handle you could attach to just about any old stand of trees in the region. The distinguished environmental newspaper High Country News has used something almost as generic: “The ecosystem that runs from Northern California to the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.” That’s like identifying the Amazon, the world’s greatest tropical rainforest, simply as an “ecosystem running from the Andes to the Atlantic,” and leaving it at that.

All these names are technically accurate, but where’s the inspiration? The name we use in this book is “Pacific coastal temperate rainforest.” Outside a small cadre of scientists, no one calls it that. We admit: this name is boring, too. We just aren’t sold on any of the alternatives.

Settlers arriving in the temperate rainforest during the 19th century attached names to everything, including seven national parks: Redwood, Crater Lake, Mount Rainier, Olympic, North Cascades, Glacier Bay, and Kenai Fjords. Canadians also attached memorable names to their special places: Tweedsmuir, Strathcona, Pacific Rim, Clayoquot Sound, and the Great Bear Rainforest. Even individual trees were named Hyperion, Stratospheric Giant, Del Norte Titan, Illuvatar, Kootchy Creek Giant, Cougar Flat Sentinel, Carmanah Giant, Nooksack Giant, Big Lonely Doug, Doerner Fir, and Goat Marsh Giant. Most of these trees are over 300 feet tall, the height of the Statue of Liberty, or taller. Hyperion, the tallest tree in the world, exceeds 380 feet. The tallest tree in history, so far as we know, may have been Nooksack Giant, a 465-foot-tall Douglas-fir in Washington’s Whatcom County that was logged in 1897. In the arboreal race for the sky, the runner-up might have been another Douglas-fir, the Lynn Valley Tree, a 415-foot monster in Vancouver, B.C., that was cut down in 1902.

Before Europeans began colonizing the West in the nineteenth century, the Pacific coastal temperate rainforest was fully stocked with carbon in gigantic trees, large accumulations of dead wood, and rich, loamy soils interspersed with some burnt areas. Today, most old growth, generally defined as a forest older than 175–250 years, is gone.

Some of the giant trees of the past were taller than the giants of today, but there’s no record of them, other than Nooksack Giant and the Lynn Valley Tree. As you journey deeper into the temperate rainforest, you will see large, ugly, empty wastelands enveloping the hillsides where monstrous trees once stood. These are clear-cuts. Clear-cut logging rips almost every tree in sight off the land, all at once. Compared with less intensive forms of logging, like selective harvests, clear-cutting saves the logging companies time, effort, and money. Corporate accountants approve, even if the tree-hugging public does not.

Clear-cutting drains most of the forest’s carbon. After a forest is clear-cut, a little less than half of the carbon—leaves, branches, stumps, and roots—remains in the forest. The rest of the carbon remains embedded in the harvested logs and eventually will become stored in manufactured wood products like lumber, plywood, and toilet paper. As these products decay slowly over time, their carbon will also return to the air. While it’s alive, the tree continues to sequester carbon. Wood products are dead and sequester nothing more. After each clear-cut, that part of the forest transforms immediately from a carbon sink to a carbon polluter. Even if quickly replanted, the clear-cut forest won’t sequester any significant amount of carbon again for many years. As Suzanne Simard, a University of British Columbia professor of ecology, points out, clear-cutting destroys much more than just trees. Simard, author of the insightful book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, explains that each clear-cut drives out a hundred species from the area, reduces the forest’s ability to retain water, and removes the top few feet of soil and humus. Typically, a forest stores at least half its carbon in the soil. Repeated clear-cutting can release up to 90 percent of this carbon back into the air, she says.

Not long after clear-cutting the trees, loggers often set fire to the slash—the dead leftover branches, leaves, needles, and unmerchantable downed logs. These slash fires emit carbon while killing soil microbes, plant roots, and seeds. Then, the loggers summon a helicopter to shower the ground with herbicides, spelling death to the forest’s remaining understory, and replant the now-bare ground with rows of saplings. Again and again, every forty years, they repeat the destructive cycle of clear-cutting, spraying, burning, and replanting. This is how industrial forestry destroys natural forests and, as we document in this book, wrecks the climate as well.

Until thirty years ago, ecologists paid little attention to the rainforests that border the continents in the temperate latitudes. Instead, they focused on protecting the exotic, but vastly different, rainforests in the tropics, the planet’s hot zone between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, with the Equator drawn down the middle. Temperate rainforests exist in the cooler zones outside the tropics, in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Temperate rainforests are home to a large number of species, but tropical rainforests harbor ten times more.

On rare occasions, ecologists mention temperate rainforests in their scientific papers, and they usually refer to them as “high-latitude rainforests.” That changed in 1991 when Paul Alaback, an ecologist at a Forest Service research station in Juneau, took a closer look. He noticed that forests in Southeast Alaska were much like forests in British Columbia and Washington and even bore a striking resemblance to rainforests in the Patagonia region of southern Chile.

Alaback realized he had discovered a special, often overlooked type of ecosystem: the temperate rainforest.

Alaback realized he had discovered a special, often overlooked type of ecosystem: the temperate rainforest. In a paper published in a Chilean journal, Alaback was the first to define temperate rainforests. They are close to an ocean, cool in summer, very wet year-round, and far from the tropics.

Almost all temperate rainforests exist in just seven regions of the world: the northern Pacific Coast of North America; eastern British Columbia; eastern Canada; Japan; Patagonia; northern Europe; and Australasia (southern Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand), according to Oregon ecologist Dominick DellaSala. In his 2011 book Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World, DellaSala calculates that about eighty million hectares of temperate rainforest still remain on Earth. The Pacific coastal temperate rainforest makes up a little more than one-third of that total, and by far is the largest.

In 1995, Ecotrust, a non-governmental organization based in Portland, published The Rain Forests of Home: An Atlas of People and Place, the first detailed maps of the rainforest. Two years later, Ecotrust produced a companion book, The Rain Forests of Home: Profile of a North American Bioregion, an anthology of essays about this “new” temperate rainforest. Spencer Beebe, Ecotrust’s founder, told us Rainforests of Home and the companion atlas were inspired by a visit to Alaback’s research station in Juneau, where he spotted a rainforest map on a wall. Alaback divided the temperate rainforest into two narrow belts: a western belt tracking the coastline from California to Alaska, extending some fifty miles inland, and another belt one hundred miles further inland tracking the crest of the Cascade Mountains. The two belts merge north of Vancouver, B.C. Alaback further divided the rainforest into four subzones south to north: warm, seasonal, perhumid and subtropical. Ten million people live in the gentle lowlands separating the two belts in Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, and Medford.

The anthology begins with a stunning description of the vast, forested landscape:

“Stretching from the redwoods of California to the vast stands of spruce and hemlock on Kodiak Island, Alaska, the coastal temperate rain forests of North America are characterized by an unparalleled interaction between land and sea. The marine, estuarine, and terrestrial components combine to create some of the most diverse and productive ecosystems in the temperate zone.”

The book said only half of the world’s original coastal temperate rainforests still remain. By comparison, Norwegian ecologists estimate only one-third of the world’s tropical rainforests in existence in 2001 still stand.

It asserted that temperate rainforests play a crucial role in mitigating human-caused climate change, and no forest is more valuable to the climate than this one.

Ecotrust noted the Pacific coastal temperate rainforest’s vast potential to store carbon. It asserted that temperate rainforests play a crucial role in mitigating human-caused climate change, and no forest is more valuable to the climate than this one. They based this statement on a paper written in 1990 by Mark Harmon of Oregon State University and other ecologists. They reported that logging in the rainforest “has been a significant source of carbon in the atmosphere.” Harmon’s team determined that logging twelve million acres of ancient rainforests in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California over the previous century sent up more than one gigaton of carbon into the atmosphere, an enormous amount. The old forests were subsequently replanted with tree farms. Harmon calculated it would take at least 200 years for the tree farms to recapture the lost carbon.