BOOK REVIEW : ‘Final Forest’: Vivid Tale About Logging : THE FINAL FOREST: The Battle for the Last Great Trees of the Pacific Northwest, <i> by William Dietrich,</i> Simon and Shuster, $21; 304 pages

Americans want cheap lumber, but they object loudly to cutting trees. Not surprisingly, then, the question of what to do with the world’s disappearing virgin forests was hotly debated at the Earth Summit in Rio earlier this month.

Representatives of the Bush Administration made sanctimonious noises about saving the tropical rain forests, but they managed to fend off international attempts to interfere with U.S. logging practices by arguing that the bitter 20-year-old struggle over logging the Pacific Northwest old-growth forests is a domestic dispute.

That dispute is vividly described in William Dietrich’s fast-moving chronicle of the battle for the last old-growth forest of Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula. With billions of dollars at stake, not to mention an entire ecosystem, the timber harvesters have been slugging it out with the environmentalists since 1973, when a graduate student discovered a rare owl in the 400-foot-tall trees.

The early rounds went to the timber companies, but lately the environmentalists have landed some devastating blows.

Much of the fight has taken place in courtrooms. But far from describing dry legal maneuvering, “The Final Forest” is a vivid story about people--good, honest, hard-working people with strong beliefs, families to raise and livings to earn. In a generous-spirited, even-handed account, Dietrich depicts the Byzantine scientific, economic and political feuding in affecting, memorable human terms.

For the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dietrich, who has reported on the condition of the world’s forests as chief science correspondent for the Seattle Times, the symbolic eye of the storm over the old-growth trees is Forks, a scruffy little logging town on the Olympic Peninsula. There, the reader meets the front-line troops of the forest products industry--the tough, candid people who cut the trees down, haul them out of the forest and truck them to the mills.

The reader also meets the loggers’ most ardent opponents: Earth First! activists who tried to stop the loggers by living on tiny platforms in treetops or burying themselves to the neck in front of tractors.

Arrayed between these implacable foes are wildlife biologists, U.S. Forest Service officials, a local politician, an ex-hippie college dropout turned sawmill entrepreneur, a wholesaler of Olympic Peninsula native flora and, among a welter of other fascinating characters, a Sierra Club lawyer actually named Tod True.

The northern spotted owl makes its obligatory appearance. About the size of a pigeon, but fluffier, the reclusive bird is almost unique in showing no fear of humans--a trait that allowed it to become, to the timber companies’ regret, one of the best-studied birds in history.

“The spotted owl,” writes Dietrich, “comes across a bit as a trusting pet, blinking its soulfully large eyes, as if assuring visitors of its confidence that humans will ultimately do the right thing.” The birds aren’t exactly riveting to observe, though. “It’s like watching paint dry,” says a biologist who authored the definitive report on the spotted owl’s natural history and range.

Scientists still argue over what, specifically, old-growth forests offer the spotted owl that can’t be provided by the new tree farms that have replaced the centuries-old trees. They agree, however, that flying squirrels and other prey are much scarcer in new growth and that the tree farms are biological deserts compared to the old-growth forests.

Even the loggers concede that they see little wildlife in the uniform stands of brilliant green, vigorous young Douglas firs. Farming the forest produces up to four times as much lumber as leaving it alone, Dietrich says, but the effect of converting the Olympic Peninsula forests to tree farms would rob the region’s gene pool as irreparably as replacing the Midwest’s tall-grass prairie with cornfields has done.

But Dietrich doesn’t preach, and he doesn’t judge. He shows, for example, that loggers, too, are a vulnerable and fast-disappearing species. A woman log truck driver, noting how science had ambushed her industry, ruefully articulated the feelings of the citizens of Forks when she said, “Somebody ate the dinner when we were out to lunch.”

Dietrich’s storytelling style resembles John McPhee’s in its attention to detail, fidelity to each character’s personal as well as public life and deep appreciation of what it is to do things, to make things--in short, to work. “The Final Forest” will delight anyone interested in the fate of our woods--even those who never dreamed they could read a whole book about logging.