Eight years ago this past July, a 17-year-old balanced with a noose around her neck in the canopy of a tree, 60 feet above the ground in Oregon’s Mt. Hood National Forest. Supported only by a net anchored by five small ropes, she drew a knife as a cherry-picker approached. Terrified, yet willing to sacrifice her life for the sake of the forest around her, she cut each line until only one remained. And then, suddenly...silence. The vehicle stopped. After hours of questioning by the U.S. Forest Service and the FBI, the exhausted teen—known as Usnea—finally descended from her perch, bidding farewell to the forest she had called home for two years. Her near suicide was just one in a series of nonviolent protests staged by impassioned environmentalists struggling to protect some of the nation’s oldest forests from logging in a flashback to tactics used by the notorious Earth First!ers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In his new book, Forest Defenders (powerHouse Books...