Born of Fire and Rain

Synopsis

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. In this engaging book science writer M. L. Herring takes listeners into the Pacific temperate rainforest at the tumultuous edge of a shifting continent in a precarious moment of time. Listeners 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 Herring's words, listeners 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. Listeners 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 one's imagination can fit, to discover what it means to be human in an ecological world.