Lynda Mapes is well known to most environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest for her outstanding journalism with the Seattle Times, and to many Northeastern naturalists for Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak, a book exploring climate change through the history, biology, and human society of one tree in New England. In her latest book, The Trees Are Speaking, Lynda joins these subjects and audiences together in an exploration of the beauty, serenity, despoilation, and future potential of old-growth forests on both coasts. The book, and her reporting, will be featured in September in a keynote talk at the Northeastern Old-Growth Forest Conference at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf campus.

Lynda’s prose is captivating in describing the glory and value of old forests, chronicling their loss and aftermath across the continent, and conveying the value of these forests as remnants and as rewilding goals for conservation. The book itself is a bit of a rollercoaster as it follows the trajectory of ancient forests in their beauty, degradation, recognition, and potential reemergence. It begins with a delightful exploration of the qualities of old forests in their fullest realization in northwestern stands that are dominated by giant living and (equally important) dead trees. Insights are revealed through the ongoing practices of Indigenous hands as well as research—especially by Jerry Franklin, who has led the discovery of the importance of forests that have been allowed to develop unconstrained by human hands for millennia.

“To be in an old-growth forest is to feel cloaked, as if walking in a living terrarium, padding around a soft kingdom of green. Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and cedar interspersed with bigleaf maples garlanded with ferns and swags of moss are the signatures of these forests. Some of the conifers can persist to great age: Douglas fir to five hundred, eight hundred, and even a thousand years, and cedar even longer. These trees can tower as much as 250 feet in height and grow to 60 feet around. These are forests with dead and downed logs everywhere. Communities of mosses, tree seedlings, and fungi thrive in this dead wood, which is more alive than the living trees next to it, for sheer biomass. Small mammals, amphibians, birds, and bears all make homes in the cavities of these dead and decaying trees. For old-growth forests are places where everything is alive, even things that supposedly are not—from the rocks cushioned with lichen and moss to the snags and logs teeming with new life.”

These ancient forests continue to reveal insights, through the eyes, narratives, and practices of the Indigenous people who accompany Lynda on her forays and long-term studies at places like the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, where Franklin’s early work has been expanded on by teams of scholars. The forests, their streams,and their wetlands support a diversity of habitats that are undermined by active management and obliterated through the degradation wrought by clear-cutting in the West and despoilation that continues today in the industrial wasteland that characterizes the vast landscape of northern Maine.

When Lynda explores Maine’s 10 million acres of industrial landscape with foresters, ecologists, and Indigenous leaders, her book reaches a nadir of ecological reality and human emotion. Having accompanied her north on her first trip, I can attest that she paints the picture well. She also conveys the history of changing practices, starting with millennia of coexistence before European arrival, and through the eras of selective logging of white pine witnessed by Henry Thoreau in the mid-nineteenth century; the clear-felling of big spruce and then fir; and on to today’s reality of a herringbone pattern of destruction fueled by investor greed that ravages the forest while leaving indelible scars in the surface of the earth. Although Lynda has witnessed some of the most savage forestry practices imaginable in the steep slopes of the Coast Range and Cascades in the West, she is shocked by the utter despair she feels for the land and people as she walks with forestry expert Mitch Lansky across his backyard in Maine’s unorganized territory and flies north of the industrial Golden Road timber highway:

“Here, from a bird’s-eye view was not Thoreau’s brooding spruce tall and dark as a ‘standing night’ but the rumpled skin of strip cuts that from the air look like the whorls of a fingerprint. Trees were cut as small around as peanut butter jars, to be chipped for pellets or other low-value products. The equipment to do this—mechanically cutting, limbing, and stacking the trees—had carved ruts a foot and more deep in the ground. Blackberry, goldenrod, poplar, and spindly gray birch grew in thickets on the land between and around the ruts. A satellite view from Google Earth suggested this was the condition of the forest for miles around.

I’ve seen plenty of clear-cuts, some covering entire mountainsides. But this strip cutting, with the smallness of it all—the ever-fewer jobs due to mechanization, cutting ever-smaller trees made into eversmaller chips in an industry reduced to shipping the forest away as chips, pulp, or pellets-seemed such a diminishment of a storied and vital industry and of a magnificent expanse of native forest. A still intact wildland of continental significance has been degraded, simplified, cut up, and is haunted by loss—loss of wildlife, loss of jobs, loss of population—loss of forest, converted to thickets of tiny trees clipped, chipped, and shipped from a corduroy land. Just as damaged were the towns whose lifeblood had been the paper mills these forests fed. As the paper industry contracted, these Maine mill towns had suffered too.”

Herringbone or fingerprint pattern of forest destruction surrounding Wytopitlock Stream in north central Maine. The image is approximately a mile across and half a mile from Main Street in Wytopitlock. Photo courtesy of Google Earth. May 2025.

From this painful recognition of loss, the book pivots to find hope in ancient lessons and Indigenous practices, grand visions such as the potential for rewilding and restoration revealed in volumes like Jamie Sayen’s Children of the Northern Forest: Wild New England's History from Glaciers to Global Warming, and the wildland conservation and ecological forestry advanced by the Appalachian Mountain Club in the One Hundred Mile Wilderness. It is in her deep exploration of how people seek to understand, relate to, and support the land, both despoiled and glorious, that Lynda excels. Though she exposes us to the raw reality of human negligence fueled by greed and facilitated through political malfeasance, Lynda’s undying enthusiasm for the restorative power of nature and the ultimate goodness of human nature shines through in nearly every page of this thought-provoking book.

Learn more and purchase the book at University of Washington Press.

Recommended by David Foster

Lynda V. Mapes covers environmental and Indigenous issues for the Seattle Times. She is author of six books, including Orca: Shared Waters, Shared Home, and winner of the 2021 National Outdoor Book Award and the 2021 Washington State Book Award for nonfiction. Her journalism has earned numerous awards, including the international 2019 and 2012 Kavli Gold Award for Science Journalism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is an associate of the Harvard Forest of Harvard University.

The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forest by Lynda Mapes

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben