Centralia College is hosting a free lecture with award-winning environmental journalist and author Lynda V. Mapes on March 12, according to a news release.
The lecture, titled “The Trees are Speaking,” will be held from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Thursday, March 12, in the TransAlta Commons, Room 122. A meeting with local conservation groups will be held prior, from 6 to 6:30 p.m.
Mapes will discuss how Pacific Northwest forests connect to the hard-logged legacy forests of the northeastern United States. With storytelling supported by science and traditional ecological knowledge, Mapes invites attendees to understand the world where trees are kin, not commodities, according to the release.
The Centralia College Bookstore (first floor TransAlta Commons) will sell copies of “The Trees are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests.” Mapes will be available for book signings.
Mapes is a journalist, nature writer and author based in Seattle. She is the author of six books of natural and cultural history of the Pacific Northwest. She has been awarded the Washington State Book Award, the National Outdoor Book Award and has twice been honored with the international Kavli Gold Award for Science Writing by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s most prestigious science writing awards.
She was in 2025 named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting with a team of journalists at The Seattle Times, where she specialized for 27 years in covering environmental news, nature and Native cultures and governments.
Mapes’ newest book, “The Trees are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests,” is published by the University of Washington Press. Her natural history books include “Orca Shared Waters Shared Home,” published by Braided River, “Witness Tree, Seasons of Change with a Century Old Oak,” published by Bloomsbury, and “Elwha: A River Reborn,” published by the Mountaineers.
This event is co-sponsored by the Chehalis Basin Collaborative for Salmon Habitat. For more information, contact kharma@chehalistribe.org.
