Coastal Rainforest Presentation

Seeing our familiar coastal landscape with new eyes is the goal of the next speaker in the north coast's  Listening to the Land  lecture series.

Naturalist Neal Maine offers a presentation in words and images about our native forests titled How to See a Rainforest  on Wednesday, March 16, 6 p.m., at the Seaside Public Library (1131 Broadway St.). Admission is free; refreshments are served.

Now a naturalist and photographer with PacificLight Images, Maine was an innovative and award-winning biology teacher at Seaside High School, and one of Oregon Shores’ early board members in the 1970s. He later became the first executive director of the North Coast Land Conservancy, a position from which he retired in 2010.

While a rainforest might be thought of simply as a place where forests meet rain, Maine will explain that the complex interactions among air and water and leaf and soil and microorganisms and all the other elements required to create a functioning temperate rainforest. To begin to understand our rainforest—past, present, and future—you need to do more than follow the rain as it splashes on a tree’s needles, runs down the bark, and reaches the roots in the soil. For instance, Maine notes, “They look like a bunch of individual trees, but in fact they are literally all communicating with one another.” Maine will take us below the surface of things, to reveal how a rainforest really works and what scientists still don’t understand about the rainforest biome.

Listening to the Land is an annual winter speaker series presented monthly by North Coast Land Conservancy and the Necanicum Watershed Council in partnership with the Seaside Public Library. Water is the theme of this year’s series.