The Shadowy History Behind the Fight to Save the Redwoods
A new chronicle of redwood logging exposes how a cadre of wealthy industrialists reaped a fortune in the name of environmentalism. I n 1934, an industrialist and obsessive book collector named A. Edward Newton wrote an article for The Atlantic recounting a trip he had recently taken to see the ancient redwoods of Northern California. He had traveled by night train to the timber town of Scotia, then by motor car up into the quiet, fog-draped forest. When he finally arrived, Newton did what most writers do when faced with some of the tallest trees on Earth: He experienced a wave of awe, his brain short-circuited, and then he resorted to cliche. In the article, he likens the massive trees to stone columns in a cathedral. Then he quotes a line of verse from William Cullen Bryant (who was cribbing, in turn, from Pliny the Elder): The groves were Gods first temples. Very large and very old trees tend to have this effect on usthey deepen our souls but impoverish our wits. We cant quite make sense of them. The owner of that ancient forest, the Pacific Lumber Company, had recently battled with conservationists over the right to cut down a nearby swath of old-growth redwoods called Bull Creek Flat. Newton, briefly outlining this conflict in the article, seems torn between his newfound love of the redwoods, which he now regarded as personal friends, and his friends of the Pacific Lumber Company, who had a duty toward their stockholders. Naturally, he was relieved that a compromise had recently been struck: A cadre of wealthy individuals, most notably John D. Rockefeller Jr., had donated millions of dollars to purchase 9,000 acres of old-growth land and fold it into an existing state park. It was a long pull and a strong pull and a pull all together, but the thing after ten years was done, Newton writes. The redwoods were saved and the world is the richer therefor. The author was, it probably goes without saying, wrong: The old-growth redwoods were not saved, at least not in the sense that most people today would interpret that phrase. Yes, some exemplary antique redwoods were protected in museumlike groves, but elsewhere, the majority of the old-growth-redwood ecosystem was rapidly vanishing. More worrying still, it turned out that the trees were not truly protected even in protected areas. This fact came thundering home in the winter of 1955, when a flood washed away a clear-cut hillside above Bull Creek Flatthe very forest Newton had deemed savedkilling hundreds of giant trees. The notion that we could preserve a few old redwoods without also safeguarding their ecosystem was revealed to be a cruel fantasy. As Greg King demonstrates in his groundbreaking new book, The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods , the history of redwood conservationand, perhaps, the history of environmentalism itselfis a never-ending series of tempting illusions and hard-won revelations. For more than a century, as loggers continued to raze entire groves that predated the birth of Christopher Columbus (and some that predated the birth of Christ), the public was continually reassured that the trees were in the process of being, or had already been, saved. I n the mid-1980s, while working as a young newspaper reporter, King stumbled across timber companies plans to cut down the nations largest unprotected stands of old-growth redwoods. (One of those forests just happened to be a short walk from his house.) After talking with state regulatorswho struck him as apathetic and ecologically misinformedand visiting the horror show of fresh clear-cuts, he decided to quit his job, hop across the thin inky line between journalism and activism, and join the fight to save the redwoods. In the five years that followed, King climbed high into the branches of trees that were slated to be felled; he organized rallies where he was repeatedly attacked by loggers (King hit back); and, once, he was arrested for scaling the Golden Gate Bridge in order to hang a banner reading SAVE THIS PLANET . (His friends faced even graver risks: One of his fellow organizers, Judi Bari, was the victim of both a bombing and an attempt by the FBI to frame her for transporting that very bomb .) If handled poorly, a history of the so-called Redwood Warsespecially when told by one of the aging activists who took part in itcould seem a bit narrow, almost quaint. (Our most urgent environmental concerns these days tend to be planetary and structural, rather than local and sylvan.) King brilliantly avoids this pitfall by expanding the scope of his book. The real story he wants to tell is an epic tale of corruption and deception, perpetrated on a mass scale for nearly a century, of which his crusade constitutes only a few chapters. The early history of industrial redwood logging is one of outright theft: Under lax laws such as the Timber and Stone Act, which was intended to encourage new small-scale logging and mining operations, large companies routinely purchased redwood forests at steep discounts by pretending they would be used by individual homesteaders. All told, millions of acres of valuable land were stolen in this fashion. Read: Hunting big redwoods However, King adds a crucial missing piece to this oft-told history; he explains why that land was so valuable. Before the widespread use of steel, redwood lumber was not just any old wood. It was the very bones of industrial capitalism, at the precise moment in the 19th century when the Golden State was undergoing a growth spurt. Redwood lumber was the principal building material for entire cities, including San Francisco; it provided the most durable ties for the nascent railroad industry; and, perhaps most importantly, it could be fashioned into rot-resistant pipelines and tanks to store and transport water and petroleum. Many of these applications (especially the pipelines) required a specific type of redwood timberthe kind that could be found only in the oldest trees. But strangely, King uncovers, many of the moguls who most needed that rare lumber were the same ones who were supposedly campaigning to save the redwoods. The most startling section of Kings book concerns his research into the history of the venerable Save the Redwoods Leaguea conservation group founded in 1918 by, and for a long time largely managed by, wealthy industrialists and prominent eugenicists (the racists of the books subtitle). Digging through a newly accessible archive containing the leagues private documents, King reports that throughout their history, rather than attempting to preserve large tracts of wild land, as they purported to do, its early members mainly focused on buying up beauty strips of old-growth redwoods alongside roadways and railways, which hid the sight of the other trees being liquidated. They repeatedly brokered deals that paid logging companies exorbitant amounts of money for their landsometimes as much as four times above the estimated market valueand on at least one occasion arrived just in the nick of time to save a lumber company from bankruptcy. Meanwhile, they actively campaigned against other conservation groups who were pushing to protect larger, more intact pieces of wilderness. In doing so, King argues, the league gave industrialists exactly what they wanted: It mollified public outcry while simultaneously guaranteeing industrys access to natures riches. Readers familiar with Eleanor Cattons new novel, Birnam Wood ; David O. Russells film I Heart Huckabees ; or, really, any oil-industry ad campaign already know how this feat of corporate sleight of hand works. Whats astonishing, in the leagues case, is its duration and success. King dubs its efforts to be the first, the largest, and the longest-lasting example of greenwashing in history. O f course, as an activist-historian, King has learned to deftly wield illusion to his own ends as well. He elides important shifts in paradigms, such as that from classic conservationism to biocentric preservation and ecological restoration (the difference, in other words, between saving redwoods for their lumber and beauty and saving them for their own sake). He is quick to brand the league with the neat stamp of corruption, when a murkier desire for what seemed like win-win compromises was likely often at play, and he undersells its biggest accomplishments, such as the truly Herculean effort to save Bull Creek Flat. The book is also markedly light on self-examination; there is scant mention of any missteps by King and his fellow North Coast activists, nor any exploration of their (by most accounts, refreshingly labor-friendly and nuanced) environmental philosophy. For a more scholarly and evenhanded account of this same history, Darren Frederick Speeces book, Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics , is worth reading. However, I suspect that most readers will prefer Kings rendition, which, though slanted, glints with a cold, sharp light. Near its end, the tone of the book shifts to one of bittersweet ambivalence. In 1999, in a deal brokered in part by Save the Redwoods League, which was still wielding power nearly a century after its founding, the federal government paid almost half a billion dollars to the Pacific Lumber Company in exchange for just 3,000 acres of old-growth forest, which was set aside in the newly designated Headwaters Forest Reserve , as well as an additional 4,000 acres of previously logged land to act as a buffer. Though nominally a victory for King and his allies, the deal was a mere fraction of the 60,000 acres they felt were needed to protect the ecosystem. The combination of new federal and state regulations, court rulings, and public pressure over the past two decades has made the clear-cutting of ancient redwoods (mostly) a thing of the past. But the great dream of preservationistsa complete, protected watershed of ancient redwood giantswas never achieved, anywhere, and now never will be. Meanwhile, climate change has begun threatening the old-growth redwoods, which rely on now-inconsistent amounts of fog and rain. (Ironically enough, King writes, some of the best research into the effects of climate change on the redwoods in recent years has been funded by none other than Save the Redwoods Leaguea last-minute grace note for an organization that he has just finished carving apart at the joints.) In the end, after reading more than 400 pages of detailed history, fierce commentary, and taut storytelling, I came away from The Ghost Forest oddly, butgiven the books spectral title, fittinglymystified. Are the redwoods safe at last? Or, I wondered, are they merely apparitions, remnants of the past, soon to vanish in the new, harsh light of tomorrow? When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. 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