Investigative environmental journalism
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If you're in Yachats this weekend and find yourself in a literary mood, check out a reading from our new book Canopy of Titans. Jessica Applegate and I will share key findings from the book. 2pm Sunday Yachats Lions Club 344 4th St. Hope to see you there!
Jessica Applegate Canopy of Titans is doing pretty well in book awards season. Today we learned that our book has won it's fifth award, taking first place in the National Indie Book Awards in the category of Environment.
We've also been a Finalist in the 2024 OREGON BOOK AWARDS,
Silver Medalist in the Nautilus Book Awards,
Silver Medalist in the IPPY Independent Publisher Book Awards, and
Honorable Mention in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.
Canopy of Titans has won another award -- honorable mention in the Foreword Review of Books INDIES Awards in the category of Ecology/Environment. Jessica Applegate
These are the best of the best, the cream of the crop, the cherries on top a metaphorical ice cream sundae of indie books. The Ecology & Environment winners of the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.
Canopy of Titans also won a Silver Medal in the ENVIRONMENT/ECOLOGY category from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, which honor the year's best independently published titles from around the world. Jessica Applegate
https://ippyawards.com/179/2024-medalists-50-88
The love for Canopy of Titans keeps pouring in! This week we received a Silver Medal in Restorative Earth Practices from the Nautilus Book Awards, whose mission is to celebrate and honor books that support conscious living and green values, wellness, social change, social justice, and spiritual growth. Jessica Applegate
Nautilus Book Awards Winners 2024 for Categories 1-10
Many thanks to Michael Gaskill for featuring our book Canopy of Titans on two episodes of the Coast Range Podcast. Your can access the podcast wherever you get your podcasts as well as at 13 community radio stations in western Oregon and Washington. Click the link for a list of stations. Jessica Applegate
Coast Range Radio At Coast Range Radio, we interview folks who work to build just communities that provide for people and the natural world. We are particularly interested in the connections between Oregon’s forests, social justice, and the climate crisis. Coast Range Radio is on all podcasting se...
We're so grateful to be named a finalist for two INDIES Book of the Year Awards! Foreword Review of Books named Canopy a finalist for best book on Nature and best book on Ecology and the Environment. Winners will be announced in June Jessica Applegate
"Canopy of Titans" is a Foreword INDIES finalist in Ecology & Environment (Adult Nonfiction). The temperate rain forest of the North Pacific coast is so valuable an ecosystem that it has been dubbed “the Amazon of the North.” It holds the world’s tallest trees—“carbon-capturing machines......
Wowza! Our book, Canopy of Titans, is a finalist for the 2024 Oregon Book Awards. Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate are thrilled to be in the company of so many stellar writers. Check it out! Literary Arts OR Books Jessica Applegate Paul Koberstein
Literary Arts is thrilled to announce this year’s Oregon Book Awards finalists. Winners will be announced live on April 8, 2024.
My co-author Paul Koberstein got mysteriously kicked off Facebook, so I can't tag him. Please share this event with those you think would be interested. The event is in partnership with 350 Seattle and Legacy Forest Defense CoalitionLegacy Forest Defense Coalition! Details are in the photo below. The link to our book is: https://orbooks.com/catalog/canopy-of-titans/ and is found in bookstores everywhere. We now offer a Kindle edition and an audiobook option.
Many thanks, comrades!
Allowing the liquidation of old-growth forests could set off another era of conflict between loggers and environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest. An excerpt from Canopy of Titans published today in Earth Island Journal. With Jessica Applegate
Allowing the liquidation of old-growth forests could set off another era of conflict between loggers and environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest.
Why Biden's $50 billion wildfire strategy won't work. Our latest investigation in Undark Magazine. Many thanks to the Fund for Investigative Journalism. By Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate
Opinion | The administration’s plan to thin forests ignores an important way that wildfires spread and set houses aflame.
Tune in to KBOO 8 am on Wednesday morning Nov 15 where I will chat with host Paul Roland about Canopy of Titans, the Pacific Coast Temperate Rainforest and the climate. 90.7 FM in Portland
104.3 FM in Corvallis, and 91.9 FM in Hood River. Paul Alkire Roland Jessica Applegate KBOO 90.7 FM.
Today's guest, Paul Koberstein, co-founded Cascadia Times in 1995 and has been editor since its inception. A journalist for 40 years, Koberstein was a staff writer for The Oregonian and Willamette Week. He and Kathy Durbin were two of the first mainstream journalists to cover the "timber wars" of th...
Here’s your chance to talk all about CANOPY OF TITANS and meet with the authors noon to 4 pm on Nov 19 at Portland Audubon's ! Not only will you get a chance to get a signed book, but you’ll also get a chance to take home the perfect nature-inspired gift ahead of the busy holiday season.
Location: Viking Pavilion on the Portland State University Campus
Shop online at the 40th Wild Arts Festival for art and books that celebrate the natural world.
The Couch Street window at Powell's.
The reviews of Canopy of Titans are coming in!
Read the whole review here: https://undark.org/2023/09/15/book-review-the-rainforest-in-our-backyard/
Our events are starting this weekend for Canopy of Titans.
You can learn more about this weekend's event at Traditions Fair Trade in Olympia, Washington here:
https://newtraditionsfairtrade.com/pages/events
It's here! It's officially out!
Learn more about Canopy of Titans:
"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
Canopy of Titans examines the global importance of the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest that stretches from Northern California to Alaska and catalogs the threats to this vital environmental resource.
The product of years of on-the-ground reporting, this richly illustrated book celebrates the beauty and complexity of one of the world's great forests. It provides readers with easy-to-grasp insights into the science behind carbon sequestration and the value of forests as climate mitigation. The story is organized along two broad narratives: A geographical arc runs from south-to-north beginning with the redwood forest of Northern California and ending in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. A temporal arc starts with wildfires raging across the American West in the summer of 2020 and ends at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in November 2021, with many historical flashbacks in between.
Along the way, Applegate and Koberstein 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, the book 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.
Grab your copy: https://www.amazon.com/Canopy-Titans-American-Temperate-Rainforest/dp/1682193454 #:~:text=Review,intact%20woodlands%20of%20the%20earth.
Thank you so much for having Paul Koberstein on the podcast and spreading the word about Canopy of Titans, Mongabay.com.
Canopy of Titans is officially out next week!
Our podcast interviewed journalist Paul Koberstein last year about Washington State’s unusual climate solution: cutting down forests.
His new book “Canopy of the Titans” is now out and has plenty more to say about this and why the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Coast of North America are unique and important: listen to the discussion and link to the book here: https://news.mongabay.com/2022/11/podcast-forest-conservation-for-climate-defense-cultural-preservation/
Did you know that the writing of our book started with curiosity about the forest along the Pacific Coast, which we could find very little about?
We decided to write a profile of the forest for Cascadia Times. In no time, we had gathered far too much information to fit into a magazine article. We needed to write a book.
And that’s how our book came to be. And it’s officially launch month.
You can grab Canopy of Titans August 28th when it is out or preorder it now: https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/canopy-of-titans/?mc_cid=6d93e8f667&mc_eid=UNIQID
Who is Cascadia Times?
Cascadia Times supports nonfiction books and investigative journalism for the Cascadia bioregion, including the PNW and North Pacific Ocean.
Cascadia Times publishes environmental journalism from the Cascadia Bioregion: Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska, Montana, Idaho and Northern California, as well as marine ecosystems in the North Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea and the Arctic.
Cascadia Times investigates governmental and corporate decisions and actions that affect the environment in the Cascadia Bioregion, with an emphasis on making connections between people, wildlife and habitats. We seek not only to inform citizens but to empower the people and organizations working to protect our environmental resources and heritage.
Scroll to check out some of our archive covers. You can check all of them out on our website. They go back to 1995!
Any OG readers remember when we were mainly in print?
Did you know that in 2016, Paul received the Bruce Baer Award for the best investigative journalism in Oregon for a series of articles published in the Portland Tribune about a local polluter, Precision Castparts?
This problem was later addressed publicly in a massive lawsuit!
Investigative journalism CAN make a difference.
Photo of Paul in Alaska taken by Jessica Applegate
When Paul isn’t writing, he enjoys getting outside. He loves time in the forest hiking or riding his bike.
He also won’t turn down a good book or some time with friends.
What’s your favorite outdoor activity?
Did you know Elizabeth Kolbert reviewed our book?
Who’s Kolbert, you say? She’s an amazing American journalist (for The New Yorker) and author of The Sixth Extinction & Under a White Sky (The Nature of the Future).
CANOPY OF TITANS: The Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest is on presale now:
https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/canopy-of-titans/?mc_cid=6d93e8f667&mc_eid=UNIQID
We might be biased, but resident dog editor Annie, a husky mix, just has to be one of the prettiest dogs we’ve ever seen.
Her dad, Paul, thinks she likes to tell people she is the prettiest dog on the block, and we confess, we think she is probably right about that.
This executive assistant isn’t the most obedient, but she is the sweetest good girl.
Drop the name of your pet (if you have one) in the comments.
Deep Cut
Washington has quietly made logging a part of the state's climate mitigation strategy.
By Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate
“THE FOREST BEHIND Bruce Anderson’s home in the rolling foothills south of Puget Sound in Washington is densely packed with enormous Douglas fir trees, the most commercially harvested tree species in the United States. It is a natural forest, grown from seeds dispersed by a previous generation of conifers around the time of the Civil War. On a bright sunny morning in June 2022, Alexander bushwhacked his way through the thick underbrush, machete in hand. He stopped at a towering 200-foot-tall conifer, pulled a tape measure from his backpack, and stretched it around the thick trunk. Seven feet in diameter, 23 feet in circumference — an extraordinary size for a tree, but not for a Douglas fir.
To get an idea about how big a Douglas fir can grow, consider Queets Fir, a thousand-year-old hulk standing some 50 miles away in Olympic National Park. Measuring 50 feet around the trunk, it is more than twice the size of the tree at Anderson’s feet. Though there’s no guarantee the trees behind his house will ever match the stature of the Queets giant, they clearly have the potential to approach that size someday.
People have long marveled at the Pacific Northwest’s ancient Douglas fir forests for their innate beauty and towering canopies, but ecologists value them as indispensable wildlife habitat. Today, climate scientists see them as massive storehouses of carbon. Trees remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, one of the greenhouse gasses forcing the climate to spin out of control. CO2 is two parts oxygen and one part carbon. Trees keep the carbon and discard the oxygen back into the air, constantly refreshing the atmosphere. Half a tree’s mass is carbon. The bigger the tree, the more carbon it stores. After a tree dies, whether from natural death or logging, it will slowly return carbon back to the air.
Under the protection of the National Park Service, Queets Fir survived the great chainsaw massacre that took out almost every other massive tree in the Pacific Northwest during the last century. Today, the few remaining old-growth trees in the region are protected under various state and federal regulations. An “old-growth” tree is often defined as older than 175 years of age, but the big Douglas fir behind Anderson’s house won’t be considered old-growth for another two decades. The Washington Department of Natural Resources, the state agency that owns the tree along with thousands of acres of “mature” conifers and hardwoods throughout the state, is eager to cash trees like this one out while it still legally can.
To that effect, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed into law legislation that few Washingtonians seem to be aware of. Adopted two years ago, House Bill 2528 declares logging forests to be a “solution” to the climate crisis.”
Read on: https://times.org/deep-cut/
Meet the staff: Paul Koberstein
Paul is the editor in chief of Cascadia Times, which he cofounded in 1995.
Paul, a journalist for 40 years, was a staff writer for The Oregonian and Willamette Week.
In 2016, Paul won the Bruce Baer Award, given annually to an Oregon journalist for excellence in investigative journalism, in recognition of his investigation of Precision Castparts’ toxic 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.
His articles have been published in the Portland Tribune, Grist, Salon, Truthout, The Progressive, and Earth Island Journal.
He’s also the coauthor of an upcoming book, Canopy of Titans, with Jessica Applegate. Stay tuned for more book updates!
Paul is passionate about the environment and traveling as a journalist. Paul loves drinking Breakside IPA, a microbeer brewed in Portland, watching TV like Succession or Game of Thrones, listening to ’90s rock like Foo Fighters, hiking, and biking in his spare time. Paul resides in Portland, Oregon, with his family and dog, Annie. More on Annie later!
The state of Washington has quietly declared logging to be a climate solution. It is not.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and the entire Washington Legislature have been duped by the timber industry. Sad.
The latest from the authors of Canopy of Titans, to be published in February by OR Books. https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/canopy-of-titans/
Oregon Wild
Earth Island Journal
Washington has quietly made logging a part of the state's climate mitigation strategy.
How much old-growth and mature forests still remain in the United States? Not much, according to a new study from Dominick DellaSala and others.
Mature and old-growth forests (MOG) of the conterminous United States collectively support exceptional levels of biodiversity but have declined substantially from logging and development. National-scale proposals to protect 30 and 50% of all lands and waters are useful in assessing MOG conservation....
"Home Depot sources its Sandeply from Ecuadorian manufacturer Endesa-Botrosa that extracts sande trees from high conservation value, primary rainforests in the Chocó region of Ecuador. Endesa-Botrosa removes old-growth sande trees in large numbers from these forests, following no management plan."
Open letter to Home Depot:
https://homedepot-deforestation.org/an-open-letter-to-home-depot/
Home Depot’s Sandeply veneer plywood is sold exclusively at Home Depot, carried by its 2,200-plus stores. The top veneer of Sandeply is made from old-growth tropical hardwood called sande, or Brosimum utile.
Portland, OR
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Flying over Prince of Wales in 2019 where we did foundational work for Canopy of Titans, our new book. Today we fly to Vancouver BC to do a reading at Upstart & Crow with Ian Gill! Finally making it to Canada!
