I regret how many times I looked at The Final Forest sitting on the shelf and thought I could hold off on another book about trees. This book is decidedly about people and the evolving ideas about and conflicting attitudes towards humans' relationship to the natural world, and it knocked my boots off. To contextualize the context of the effect of efforts to protect old-growth forests on the exemplary community devoted to logging them, the town of Forks, Washington, William Dietrich allows gives voice to so many actual peoples' voices the seemingly polarized political debate becomes a patchwork of real human experience. An incredible document, this helped me understand the stakes and the contours of the changing pacific northwest, and the Olympic Peninsula in particular.