Friends of Olympic National Park

Temperate and boreal rainforests because are rapidly becoming the world’s forgotten rainforests. They occur in only 10 regions of the world.  In some regions, like portions of Europe, nearly all rainforests are gone while others are headed in that direction if we don’t act soon.  Logging in boreal rainforests of Russia has contributed to the near demise of tigers and snow leopards. In British Columbia, logging has impacted world-class salmon runs and jeopardizes unique coastal bears and wolves.  And the situation here at home is not much better with less than 4% of the magnificent coastal redwoods and all but the last 15-20% of old-growth rainforests remaining in the Pacific Northwest.  Decades of logging has created a national ecological debt crisis that is being passed on to future generations from which we are borrowing on their biological inheritance.

North America also has some of the most important remaining intact rainforests in the world.  The Tongass rainforest in Alaska, for instance, contains about 1/3 of the world’s remaining old-growth temperate rainforest and some of the largest spruce trees on earth.  And rainforests in the Pacific Northwest are among the most important carbon storing forests on the planet, storing more carbon on an acre-for-acre basis than the world’s tropical rainforests.