The most important books about forests

This book moves me more than any other regarding the climate crisis and the essential need to protect remaining old-growth forests, especially in the Pacific Northwest. Living there myself, I especially appreciate the work of Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate. They make clear that we must address a fundamental need regarding the heating of our planet: to leave intact the forest ecosystem that helps us the most.    

Don’t be dissuaded by the severe title of this compelling and thoroughly readable book. Nor by its publishing date of 1995. Charles Little tells the story of exotic insects and pathogens that have become a pandemic crippling forests all across our country. His message—as timely now as it was then—is so moving and powerful that it inspired me to write a whole book about the plight of our cherished hemlocks and beeches. This volume was a path-breaker in its day and remains so with a message that every forest lover and forest manager needs to hear.  

Esteemed forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has given us the remarkable story of her journey through the working woods, the forest bureaucracy, and the academic jungle to tell us what we need to know about properly caring for our woodlands today. Through her life’s work she illuminates the remarkable ecological connections of trees to fungi and other life all around them, to the interactions among generations of trees, both older and younger, and to the health of organic soil that industrial forest managers have too often regarded simply as a medium for tree trunks that are stuck into the ground. With each walk in the woods, I now appreciate a new sense of complexity and dependency that each life has on the workings of another. 

Another classic, Understanding Forests is the finest all-around narrative explaining the values of forests and the nuts and bolts of their management, their mismanagement, the bureaucracies of forestry and how they function, the needed reforms, and the political strides that must be taken, both twenty-five years ago and now. In one or two sittings a forest advocate can graduate from knowing very little to having an effective grasp of what we need to do for better care of our forests.  

Forester and journalist Wohlleban weaves together an account, not unlike that of Suzanne Simard, power-packed into a gift-sized little book that reveals the remarkable interdependencies and biological communications between trees, and also beyond them and reaching to interdependent fungi and other microbes on which forest health depends. For me, new insights leaped off of every page as I breezed through this wonderful story of trees and forests in our time.