Born of Fire and Rain

If you live on a rapidly changing planet, you’d be wise to learn how it works. The giant, old forests on a skinny stretch of land on the far west coast of North America have a lot to say about living in a twitchy world.  Born of Fire and Rain takes readers into the Pacific temperate rainforest at the tumultuous edge of a shifting continent in a precarious moment of time. Readers peek behind the magnificent scenery into a lively place of exploding mountains, ancient trees, disappearing owls, tsunamis, mega-fires, and ten million people, to learn what it means to be a forest in a world of upheavals. Through words and pictures, readers drift into the canopy through masses of ferns and lichens, burrow down into soil through hair-thin threads of fungi, and plunge headlong through a watershed flushed with rain and snowmelt. Readers experience the temperate rainforest through science and art as it faces a shifting climate and shifting priorities of a constantly changing society. The book journeys beyond the grid of latitude and longitude, into places only your imagination can fit, to discover what it means to be human in an ecological world.