The fight for the redwoods of northern California is a fifteen-year guerrilla war pitting a ragged band of direct-action activists against the combined might of Pacific Lumber Company, the sheriff’s department and the FBI.

The conflict claimed its first life on a remote hillside during a heated confrontation between protesters and loggers on a September morning in 1998.

It was a routine confrontation, a cat-and-mouse game, in which activists hike into a timber-falling operation, announce their presence and hope that fallers stop work to prevent someone from being hit by a tree. The tactic’s success hinges on loggers’ conscientious observance of the written and unwritten rules of conduct in an extremely hazardous workplace.

The first person the protesters encountered, an experienced feller named A. E. Emmons, unleashed a torrent of bizarre obscenities and violent threats, including a promise to “knock your f...king head off with the next one if you’re around here.” Shortly after, he felled a 130-foot-tall redwood into a shallow draw. The tree struck David “Gypsy” Chain in the head, killing him instantly.

So begins A Good Forest for Dying: The Tragic Death of a Young Man on the Front Lines of the Environmental Wars (Doubleday 2003), an ambitious attempt by author Patrick Beach not only to tell the story of that day and its tortured aftermath, but also to immortalize the grand passions and sweeping drama of the fight for the redwoods of the Headwaters Forest.

Anyone familiar with the history of the radical environmental movement, or the by now well-known story of how corporate raider Charles Hurwitz turned a progressive local timber company in Scotia, California, into a wholesale liquidator of vast tracts of ancient redwoods, can skip several chapters of A Good Forest for Dying. The last part of the book, a complicated and tedious account of the Chain family’s wrongful death lawsuit against Pacific Lumber, will be uninteresting for most.

Beach calls Chain and his friends Earth First!ers, although it’s doubtful that any of that generation of activists would claim allegiance to anything as old-school as Earth First! If there are any Earth First!ers still around, Beach’s affected prose would get him laughed out of base camp. His descriptions are by turns groovy (“the buzzing of the saw shredded the morning”) and grotesque (“Gypsy’s skull gaping in a silent howl”). Old-timers will be pleased that at least Beach remembered the exclamation point.

A Good Forest for Dying is worth a read mostly for the poignant biographical sketches of characters whose lives collide in the misty mountain valleys of northern California. Chain was raised by divorced, working-class parents in Pasadena, Texas. One of five children, he had a typical upbringing: little league, weekends at the lake and working on cars. He was bright and a hard worker, but uninterested in school or a job.

Bored with Texas, he followed a girlfriend to northern California in 1997, but didn’t find anything in the organic farms and bohemian lifestyle of Humboldt County to hold his interest. And then he met the redwoods and the protesters who’d come from all over the country to stop Pacific Lumber.

Chain was not, in Beach’s words, “born out in the woods to some dreadlocked Earth Mother.” He was not a lost soul or a refugee from a Dead tour or a confused kid with nothing better to do. Like so many others of his generation, Chain wasn’t lacking maturity, intelligence or energy, just a purpose worthy of his life.

A Good Forest for Dying isn’t the most informative or readable book about the timber wars, but it’s a better story than most because we get to know one of the warriors.