Last Stands: A Journey Through North America's Vanishing Ancient Rainforests

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

Larry Pynn’s punning title catches the many facets of his subject
along with his own viewpoints. Pynn is a self-taught scientist and
researcher, an adventurer with a cause, and a writer with a poetic
streak and a sense of humor. He cares deeply about North America’s
vanishing temperate rainforests, and writes to enlist others in the
struggle to protect them. The prose of this veteran Vancouver Sun
reporter and award-winning environmental writer makes for easy reading,
but his topic is deeply disturbing.

Temperate rainforests, by definition, are perennially wet. Pynn has
covered more than 300,000 kilometres in such forests over the last 12
years—much of that distance in an old pickup truck on logging roads.
As he notes, old-growth forests are special for their beauty and for the
diversity of life forms they support: “Death has no meaning in these
surroundings. Even seemingly lifeless standing snags support a host of
wildlife ... while fallen timber rots and nurses the next generation of
forest seedlings.”

During his travels, Pynn has sought the views of forestry workers,
hunters, rangers, Natives, and environmentalists. Each is given a voice
here, while Pynn’s trenchant observations give a voice to the forests
themselves. Clearly, as a society we have treated them badly, “taken
too much, understood too little, allowed self-interest to prevail time
and again over caution.”

Pynn’s closing plea is for the currently polarized views of loggers,
logging companies, and environmentalists to find a middle ground, one
that allows for the survival of the rainforests and of all the species
they nurture.