CORTE MADERA EVENT ON JUNE 20 MARKS NATIONWIDE RELEASE:
AUTHOR JOHN BERGER TO READ FROM FORESTS FOREVER

6/10/08

John J. Berger, Ph.D., author of FORESTS FOREVER: Their Ecology, Restoration and Protection will read excerpts from this groundbreaking non-fiction work at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera, at 7 p.m. The book is now appearing nationwide in hardcover and softcover distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

“FORESTS FOREVER is the go-to guide for serious readers seeking to understand the politics of forestry,” writes Colleen Mondor of Booklist. “Berger … provides an in-depth look at the… dangers facing American forests. He makes a point of stating that the nation has ‘neither Democratic nor Republican forests….’”

Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest and The Ecology of Commerce, writes: “In this meticulously researched and magnificent book… Berger has taken the fate of the forests out of the woods and placed it where it squarely belongs, at the heart of civilization.

“Communities of trees are our kith and kin, herein given the voice and grace we have too long ignored.”

FORESTS FOREVER: Their Ecology, Restoration and Protection is a revised edition of Berger’s successful 1998 book Understanding Forests. That first edition was brought out by Sierra Club Books and is now sold out.

FORESTS FOREVER shines a fresh light on current forestry practices and the values underlying them, bringing together ideas from disciplines including ecology, politics, sociology, economics and anthropology.

In concise, clear prose FORESTS FOREVER discusses how we might learn to live with forests without destroying them. It covers principles of sustainable forestry and talks about how the damage done to forests by decades of mismanagement can be reversed.

Berger has updated the book with an examination of recent, mostly destructive, developments in the nation’s forest policies. And he takes a look at more-positive developments such as the Canadian Boreal Initiative, which has proposed the preservation of 50 percent of the vast Canadian subarctic forest zone and the sustainable management of the rest.

Unlike its unillustrated first edition, FORESTS FOREVER boasts three 32-page galleries of color photographs by some of the most respected names in nature photography, such as Gary Braasch, Daniel Dancer, Bob Herger, and Larry Ulrich.

Berger holds advanced degrees in energy and natural resources and in ecology. He is the author of Restoring the Earth: How Americans Are Working to Renew Our Damaged Environment (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985; Doubleday Anchor Books, 1987), Charging Ahead: The Business of Renewable Energy and What It Means for America (Henry Holt and Company, 1997), and Beating the Heat: Why and How We Must Combat Global Warming (Berkeley Hills Books, 2000). He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

FORESTS FOREVER is co-published by the Forests Forever Foundation, San Francisco, and The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago. For more information about FORESTS FOREVER, or to order a copy, log on to www.forestsforever.org/FoFoBook.html