Definitely a must-read for all concerned with forest conservation and sustainable forest management, this book has value for environmentalists, scientists, forest managers, policy makers, lawyers and judges, students and practitioners alike. While it describes the conflicts over ‘old growth’ (OG) forests in Washington, Oregon and northern California (PNW), there are important lessons to be learned for forest policy and practice, conservation strategies and forest science in other areas.

OG is now as much a political and social as a biophysical concept. People with different world views and values reach different conclusions about OG, and this diversity is part of what the book is about. The senior editor is one of the major champions of the description and communication of the ecology and environmental values of these OG forests, and for a credible science basis for conservation and management of this forest condition.

Part I presents a review of the values and conservation policies in these forests, and their evolution over the last two decades. Part II explores ideas about OG and our relationship to it, and how these have evolved from biophysical beginnings to a dominantly social and philosophical issue. Included are: the science of OG, fish and wildlife habitat issues, biodiversity of OG and managed forests, economic values and the elevation of OG to sacred status. Part III documents how people relate to OG and how these relationships have affected current policy, a classic example of clashing ideas about human interactions with the ‘natural’ world. Papers are presented from two local environmentalists, a private forest owner and state policy advisor, a forest industry representative, a nature writer and philosopher, and an academic dealing with conflict resolution. Part IV provides a history of conservation initiatives gone wrong, and how it is increasingly difficult to manage these OG forests to achieve conservation and economic objectives; it provides a history of unforeseen and undesirable outcomes of conservation efforts. Other chapters examine barriers to the application of adaptive management and problems posed by uncertainty.

Part V considers the application of biophysical and social sciences, and how management at the stand level, a major focus of the OG debate, needs to be melded with landscape management. Chapters consider economically-viable biodiversity strategies for forest owners; management of reserves in both wet west-side forest and dry-eastside PNW forests; stand-level silvicultural techniques to promote OG conditions; landscape mosaics of different management objectives; and the unfortunate bifurcation of forest management into intensive fibre-producing plantations versus OG reserves, rather than a mosaic of stand development and seal stages. The need to manage landscapes for timber and a diversity of tradable environmental services and non-timber products emphasizes the need for ecosystem management (all values managed in a dynamic interacting ecosystem) rather than ecosystem-based management in which each value is managed based on its known ecology without adequate consideration of the whole ecosystem and value tradeoffs.

Part VI provides a synthesis of the themes that emerge from the individual chapters and asks if there is any convergence amongst those from different disciplines, and with different philosophies and worldviews. Is it possible to extract from the diversity of opinions some new ways of thinking about conservation of older forests that could lead to more effective policy and management?

Ecological scientists in the PNW have witnessed the transition of their science from an important ecological sub-discipline to the subject of litigation, political process and public protest. A major characteristic of the ecology of forests is their complexity in time and space. In contrast, society and its legal and political processes are poorly equipped to deal with such complexity; simplification is generally the rule. The OG debate is simplified to contrasts between short rotation monoculture timber plantations and some ‘ideal’ concept of OG; in reality there is a continuum of variation. Science is similarly poorly equipped, and ‘jigsaw-puzzle’ science has contributed to the ‘jigsaw puzzle’ policy that is described in the book as ‘broken’. If this book does nothing else, it demonstrates that the initial overly-simplified approach to OG conservation in the PNW has been unsuccessful, that this issue, like most others, is inevitably evolving to reflect our steadily improving understanding of the OG stage of dynamic, disturbance-driven forests in this part of the world, and that to be successful in the long run conservation policy and practice must reflect a balance between biophysical realities and changing social values. It must recognize temporal as well as spatial diversity; all forests, even OG, are continually undergoing change.