Today's guest, Paul Koberstein, co-founded Cascadia Times in 1995 and has been editor since its inception. A journalist for 40 years, Koberstein was a staff writer for The Oregonian and Willamette Week. He and Kathy Durbin were two of the first mainstream journalists to cover the "timber wars" of the 1980's, for The Oregonian.In 2016, Paul won the Bruce Baer Award, given annually to an Oregon journalist for excellence in investigative journalism in recognition of his investigation of Precision Castpart’s toxic pollution. In 2004, he won the John B. Oakes Award for the most distinguished environmental journalism in the United States for a series of articles on wildlife poaching in the North Pacific Ocean. Recent work resulted in award-winning articles exposing fraud in California’s carbon offsets program.
In the recently published Canopy of Titans, Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate examine the global importance of the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest that stretches from Northern California to Alaska. Their urgent and authoritative account sets out the threats facing a vital environmental resource, and celebrates the beauty and complexity of one of the world’s great forests.
Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting, Koberstein and Applegate pull back the curtain on policies of governmental bodies that have seriously diminished the rainforest’s capacity to store carbon, and uncover industry practices that have led to the destruction of swaths of a major ecological resource. Additionally, using an environmental justice perspective, Canopy of Titans shines a light on the Indigenous communities that have lived in the rainforest for millennia, and the impact forest policies have had on their lives.
- KBOO