Born of Fire and Rain: Journey into a Pacific Coastal Forest [Hardcover]

Go beyond the scenery of the Pacific temperate rainforest to witness how complex ecosystems survive in a world of upheavals

Winner, National Outdoor Book Award   Finalist, Oregon Book Award   CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

If you live on a rapidly changing planet, youd 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.

In this engaging book science writer M. L. Herring 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 forest of ancient trees, exploding mountains, disappearing owls, tsunamis, megafires, and ten million people to learn what it means to be a forest in a world of upheavals.

Through Herrings words and pictures, readers drift into the canopy through masses of ferns and lichens, burrow 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 the shifting priorities of a constantly changing society. The book journeys beyond the grid of latitude and longitude and into places only ones imagination can fit, to discover what it means to be human in an ecological world.

Go beyond the scenery of the Pacific temperate rainforest to witness how complex ecosystems survive in a world of upheavalsLovely . . . punctuated with illustrations from Herrings sketchbooks, which she carried on her many forest journeys. The book is passionate, at times poetic, in which natural history, art, and care for the natural environment converge elegantly.National Outdoor Book Awards

“Accessible and engaging.”—Bryony Cottam,Geographical

“A great read forlŸ