Sebastopol author John Reid joins us to discuss Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Earth (W.W. Norton & Co.) with Jonathan C. Slaght, author of Owls of the Eastern Ice (Picador).
"Nothing could be more important than saving the world’s last remaining forests, and no one could make a more eloquent case for this than John Reid and Thomas Lovejoy. Ever Green is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of life." — Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky and The Sixth Extinction
"Five giant forests—Amazon, Congo, New Guinea, and two taigas—holding carbon, diverse life, and the fate of the planet. This is a profoundly important, fresh-minded, deftly written, and constructive book. Therefore it’s also thrilling." — David Quammen, author of The Tangled Tree and Spillover
This event will be streamed on Crowdcast.
About Ever Green
Clear, provocative, and persuasive, Ever Green is an inspiring call to action to conserve Earth’s irreplaceable wild woods, counteract climate change, and save the planet.
Five stunningly large forests remain on Earth: the Taiga, extending from the Pacific Ocean across all of Russia and far-northern Europe; the North American boreal, ranging from Alaska’s Bering seacoast to Canada’s Atlantic shore; the Amazon, covering almost the entirety of South America’s bulge; the Congo, occupying parts of six nations in Africa’s wet equatorial middle; and the island forest of New Guinea, twice the size of California.
These megaforests are vital to preserving global biodiversity, thousands of cultures, and a stable climate, as economist John W. Reid and celebrated biologist Thomas E. Lovejoy argue convincingly in Ever Green. Megaforests serve an essential role in decarbonizing the atmosphere—the boreal alone holds 1.8 trillion metric tons of carbon in its deep soils and peat layers, 190 years’ worth of global emissions at 2019 levels—and saving them is the most immediate and affordable large-scale solution to our planet’s most formidable ongoing crisis.
Reid and Lovejoy offer practical solutions to address the biggest challenges these forests face, from vastly expanding protected areas, to supporting Indigenous forest stewards, to planning smarter road networks. In gorgeous prose that evokes the majesty of these ancient forests along with the people and animals who inhabit them, Reid and Lovejoy take us on an exhilarating global journey.
About the authors
John W. Reid is a conservationist and economist whose writing has appeared in outlets including The New York Times and Scientific American. He lives in Sebastopol, California.
Thomas E. Lovejoy (1941—2021) was a pioneering biologist who is credited with founding the field of climate change biology.
Jonathan C. Slaght is the Russia and Northeast Asia coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society, where he manages research projects on endangered species and coordinates avian conservation activities along the East Asia–Australasian Flyway from the Arctic to the tropics. His annotated translation of Across the Ussuri Kray, by Vladimir Arsenyev, was published in 2016, and his work has been featured by The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC World Service, NPR, Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, and Audubon magazine, among others. His new book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award as well as the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. He lives in Minneapolis.
