THE GOOD RAIN: Across Time and Terrain...

THE GOOD RAIN: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan (Vintage: $10). The Seattle correspondent for the New York Times, Timothy Egan, explores the beauties of the northwestern United States--and reveals how its extraordinary resources have been senselessly squandered. A large Amerindian population lived in the Puget Sound region for at least 10,000 years and scarcely left a mark on the terrain. In fewer than two centuries, Americans and Europeans have reduced some of the biologically richest acreage on the planet to an almost lunar barrenness. In crisp, incisive prose, Egan excoriates the timber companies for their ruthless--and ongoing--destruction of the forests and the concomitant environmental degradation. He also demonstrates that this ecological rape was accomplished with the connivance of the Army Corps of Engineers and, ironically, the Forest Service, which spends taxpayers’ money to help destroy the woodlands that the agency is charged with preserving. Chief Sealth (for whom Seattle was named) offered a distressingly appropriate warning to President Pierce in 1854, when he wrote, “The whites, too, shall pass, perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in waste.”