They can grow to be the tallest trees on Earth. They can produce lumber, support jobs, safeguard clear waters, and provide refuge for countless forest species. If we let them. Here are two video clips:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/video/player#/?titleID=nichols-redwoods-gatefold
Photograph
by Michael Nichols
On a cutover
"You could hear me yelling from mountaintop to
mountaintop," Fay says. "It was one of the most painful things I've
ever experienced." Which is something coming from a man who was once gored
16 times by an elephant. He taped up the wound, shouldered his pack, and as he
had for the past three months, kept walking.
After three decades of helping save African forests,
Mike Fay, a Wildlife Conservation Society biologist and National Geographic
Society explorer-in-residence, now has redwoods in his blood. His obsession
with the iconic American trees began a few years ago after he completed the
Megatransect—his Livingstone-like exploration of the largest intact jungle
remaining in
"The one that got me was about three inches from
the edge," Fay says. "'Gold Rush, 1849.' And I realized that within
the last few inches of that tree's life, we'd very nearly liquidated a
2,000-year-old forest."
In the fall of 2007 he resolved to see for himself how
Earth's tallest forest had been exploited in the past and is being treated
today. By walking the length of California's mythic range, from Big Sur to just
beyond the Oregon border, he wanted to find out if there was a way to maximize
both timber production and the many ecological and social benefits standing
forests provide. If it could be done in the redwoods, he believed, it could be
done anywhere on the planet where forests are being leveled for short-term
gain. As he'd done on the Megatransect, he and Holm—a self-taught naturalist born
and raised in the redwood country of northern
It was an auspicious year to be walking the redwoods.
After more than two decades battling environmentalists and state and federal
regulators over its aggressive cutting practices, the oft vilified Pacific
Lumber Company was bankrupt and up for grabs. Even with most of the remaining
old growth protected, the emblematic species of the great forests—northern
spotted owls, elusive little seabirds called marbled murrelets, and coho
salmon—continued their dangerous decline, while the reeling economy and housing
bust were shuttering sawmills throughout the redwood range. Fires scorched
hundreds of thousands of acres in the worst fire season in memory. Tourism was
down.
But something else was taking root among the trees
Woody Guthrie lionized in "This Land Is Your Land." The buzz among
environmental groups, consulting foresters, and even a few timber companies and
communities was that the redwoods were at a historic crossroads—a time when
society could move beyond the log/don't log debates of decades past and embrace
a different kind of forestry that could benefit people, wildlife, and perhaps
even the planet. The more Fay walked, the more convinced he became.
"
Fay and Holm started their walk at the southern end of
the forest, where the trees grow in scattered holdings and groves in the
But on a glorious May day, nearly three-quarters of the
way into the transect, they arrived at the southern end of Humboldt Redwoods
State Park, home to the largest contiguous block of old-growth redwood forest
left on the planet—some 10,000 acres. The alluvial flats along its creeks and
rivers are prime redwood habitat, where the mix of rich soils, water, and fog
rolling in from the ocean have produced the planet's tallest forest. Of the
180 known redwoods greater than 350 feet, more than 130 grow right here.
Fording a vein of emerald water known as the South Fork
of the Eel, they climbed the far bank and entered the translucent shade of the
most magnificent grove they'd seen yet. Redwoods the size of Saturn rockets
sprouted from the ground like giant beanstalks, their butts blackened by fire.
Some bore thick, ropy bark that spiraled skyward in candy-cane swirls. Others
had huge cavities known as goose pens—after the use early pioneers put them
to—big enough to hold 20 people. Treetops the size of VW buses lay half-buried
among the sorrel and sword ferns, where they'd plummeted from 30 stories up—the
casualties of titanic wars with the wind, which even now coursed through the
tops with panpipe-like creaks and groans. It's no wonder Steven Spielberg and
George Lucas filmed scenes for the
Redwoods are no less magical for foresters. Because
their bark and heartwood are rich in compounds called polyphenols, bugs and
decay-causing fungi don't like them. And since there's not a lot of resin in
their stringy bark, larger redwoods are highly resistant to fire.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about redwoods is their
ability to produce sprouts whenever the cambium—the living tissue just beneath
the bark—is exposed to light. If the top breaks off or a limb gets sheared or
the tree gets cut by a logger, a new branch will sprout from the wound and grow
like crazy. Throughout the forest you can find tremendous stumps with a cluster
of second-generation trees, often called fairy rings, around their bases. These
trees are all clones of the parent, and their DNA could be thousands of years
old. Redwood cones, oddly enough, are tiny—the size of an olive—and may produce
seeds only sporadically. As a result, stump sprouting has been key to the
survival of the redwoods throughout the logging era.
The trees have another trick foresters love. With their
high tolerance for shade and ability to sprout, some redwoods can sit almost
dormant in the shade of their elders for decades. Yet as soon as a dominant
tree falls or is cut down, breaking the canopy and allowing new light to enter
the forest, the suppressed redwood springs up with new growth—a phenomenon
known as release.
"Redwoods are what's known in biology as a very
plastic species," says Evan Smith, vice president of forestland for the
Conservation Fund. "It's like a machine. Once you get it going, you can't
stop it."
It could be said that the history—and split
personality—of modern America is carved in redwood, with the calls to save the
trees reverberating almost as soon as we began cutting them down. For millennia
the Tolowa, Yurok, and Chilula tribes, among others, lived behind an almost
impenetrable redwood wall more than 300 feet high, eating salmon, elk, and tan
oak acorns and carving long canoes from the logs that fell to the ground.
That way of life ended violently in 1848 when the
The 1906
The felling of the great trees also helped spark the
modern conservation movement. In 1900 concerned citizens formed the
Sempervirens Club, whose advocacy led to the creation of
The last, and most intensive, burst of logging began
after World War II, when the housing boom and a glut of cheap military-surplus
equipment unleashed an army of bulldozers, log trucks, and chain-saw-wielding
loggers onto the steep, unstable soils of the redwood forests. By the early
1950s mills were sawing more than a billion board feet of lumber a year, a
level maintained until the mid-1970s. (A board foot is the equivalent of a slab
of wood one foot square and one inch thick.) Clear-cutting and Cat logging,
named after the yellow Caterpillar tractors that became the workhorses of the
timber industry, unleashed a torrent of soil into streams from a latticework of
logging roads and skid trails. Salmon runs dwindled, and so did other species
that had existed in the redwoods for millennia. Today less than 5 percent of
the roughly two million acres of virgin forest remains, mostly in parks and
reserves throughout the range.
"The battle to save the redwoods has already been
fought, and look, we're left with table scraps," says Steve Sillett, a
forest scientist at
Salmon and spotted owls aren't the only things to have
suffered with the felling of the forest. Harvest rates in the redwoods have
plummeted since the 1990s, when they were already half what they were in the
1970s. Though Fay and Holm spent nearly every night under the stars, every two
weeks they'd hit little logging towns to recharge computer and camera batteries
and download their data on portable hard drives—places like Korbel and Orick
that once boasted several sawmills but are now lucky to have one still limping
along. Rio Dell, a town of 3,200, has been luckier than most. It sits across
the
Last year more than the typical thick, gray clouds were
hovering over Rio Dell's Wildwood Days, the annual street festival replete with
logging contests, boccie tournaments, and bucket brigade races between local
volunteer fire departments. Days earlier, after a protracted fight in federal
bankruptcy court, PL (as the company is known here), employer of generations
of the two towns' mill workers and woodsmen, had been sold. The future was now
in the hands of Mendocino Redwood Company (MRC), owned by the Fisher family of
Down at the logging contest—featuring an event in which
two men see who can cut a log faster with chain saws—Len Nielson of Fortuna
just beat out Chris Hall of Rio Dell, a big man with a shaved head, a neat, red
goatee, and a tattoo that read "HOSS" across his Popeye-like forearm.
All told—grandfather, dad, uncles, and cousins—Hall's family had spent 142
years working for PL. He'd been felling trees, driving Cats, skidding logs since
he was 15. Now he works in the power plant.
"We're definitely glad to see Hurwitz go,"
Hall says, as he puts away his chain saw, with his five-year-old daughter
dancing at his feet.
It's hard to have a conversation about forestry
practices in the redwoods without hearing the name of Charles Hurwitz, CEO of
Houston-based Maxxam, Inc. In 1985 Hurwitz orchestrated the hostile
takeover—underwritten by junk bonds provided by the financier Michael Milken—of
Pacific Lumber, which had been run conservatively by the Murphy family since
1905. By leaving some of their old growth standing, the Murphys, men who
learned the lumber business from the chain saw up, had planned to sustain their
timber harvest and jobs well into the 21st century. "When the Murphys owned
PL, they cared for their employees," Hall says.
With Pacific Lumber, Hurwitz inherited roughly 70
percent of the remaining old redwoods in private hands. In his first meeting
with the employees, the dark-suited businessman told them—in a now famous
quote—that he believed in the golden rule: "He who has the gold,
rules." Hurwitz then proceeded to break up the company and sell its
assets. He sold Pacific Lumber's office building in downtown
Most important for the redwoods, Hurwitz adopted a
business model of clear-cutting, doubling—and some years even tripling—the
annual amount of timber harvested from the company's holdings, which eventually
reached 210,000 acres. His attempts to cut the largest remaining block of old
growth on private land, known as the Headwaters Forest, launched an army of
young protesters into the streets and up the trees and drew increased scrutiny
from state timber regulators and federal wildlife agencies. For forest
defenders, as the protesters call themselves, it was a dangerous time. Tree
sitters were extracted by force from their platforms hundreds of feet in the air.
The late Judi Bari, one of the organizers of a series of protests in 1990, a
time known as "redwood summer," had her pelvis shattered by a pipe
bomb placed in her car. No one was ever charged in the crime.
In 1998 David "Gypsy" Chain and some other protesters
hiked out to a PL tract where they believed loggers were building roads before
the end of the marbled murrelet nesting season, when logging is illegal. One
logger, caught on videotape, cursed them, saying he wished he'd brought his
gun. Then he felled a redwood in their direction. The tree struck Chain in the
head, killing him instantly. The logger was never charged. In 1999 the state
and federal governments purchased part of the
The days of violent confrontations seem to be over now.
A week after MRC's acquisition of Pacific Lumber, Mike Jani, the company's
president and chief forester, asked Fay and Holm to join him and local
activists at the foot of a redwood giant just across the
"Fighting for old growth is easy," Lindsey
Holm told me. "It's a moral issue, black-and-white. Save the old trees—the
endangered species. It's a no-brainer." Trying to rally people around
sound second-growth forestry is more challenging—more about keeping the
ecosystem intact by minimizing erosion and maintaining wildlife while
maximizing timber production. For most Californians, clear-cuts are bad
forestry because they're ugly. That misses the point, said Holm, who isn't
necessarily averse to clear-cuts. "This is about good forestry, not about
what you can see out your kitchen window."
The notion that you can log a forest without leveling
it isn't new. As early as the 1930s Emanuel Fritz, a forestry professor at the
University of California, Berkeley, argued that if timber companies wanted to
be in business in 40 to 50 years—the time he estimated it would take to cut all
the remaining old-growth forest—they'd better start leaving some trees for the
future. In line with this thinking, Albert Stanwood Murphy decreed that Pacific
Lumber would never cut more than 70 percent of a stand of timber or cut more
from its forests than would grow in a year—policies the company held for more
than half a century until Charles Hurwitz tossed them out.
Now Jani promises that the new Humboldt Redwood Company
will bring selective cutting back to the old Pacific Lumber lands. Its parent
company, MRC, has already implemented the approach on 230,000 acres of heavily
logged redwood forest in
Scott Greacen, executive director of a local group
called the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), is watching
closely to see how HRC manages its new holdings. However, when Fay and Holm
visited Greacen at the EPIC office in downtown Arcata, the maps of PL
timber-harvest plans had been replaced by those of another large industrial
landowner: Green Diamond Resource Company.
Green Diamond is now the largest clear-cutter in the
redwoods, with more than 70 percent of its 430,000 acres given over to uniform
stands that are logged roughly every 50 years. When asked if the company was
EPIC's next target, Greacen says, "I think we're going to have something
to say about short-term, even-age forestry."
"Here we love even-age forests," says Greg
Templeton, one of Green Diamond's veteran foresters. "Both redwoods and
Doug fir grow faster in full sunlight." He was standing on a hot, sunny
hillside, watching with pride as a logging crew reduced a 70-year-old stand of
150- to 200-foot redwoods into an organized tangle of slash, limbs, and logs.
In the 1990s
Green Diamond's puzzle-piece forests, with blocks of
tightly packed small trees up to 20 years old separated by slivers of older
trees in the 150-foot buffer zones around fish-bearing streams, will ultimately
provide good wildlife habitat, says Neal Ewald, the company's vice president
and general manager. "Fifty years from now 20 percent of this landscape
will stick up like veins on a maple leaf, with a network of old trees around
the streams," he explains. "We're on target to create the same kind
of trees you see in Redwood National Park in a hundred years," to the
benefit, he says, of salmon and northern spotted owls.
In the early 1990s Green Diamond's senior biologist,
Lowell Diller, was among the first to find high densities of spotted owls in
second-growth forests. His research indicated that the owls can survive in the
smaller forests as long as they have enough old snags and large trees with cavities
and platforms for nesting. And the mix of young forest blocks of various ages
created by clear-cuts provides good habitat for dusky-footed wood rats—the
owls' favorite prey in
Diller's findings helped Green Diamond secure the first
Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) for spotted owls from the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service in 1992, which allowed the company to continue logging in
spotted owl territory as long as they had a plan to maintain a minimum amount
of owl habitat. Yet owls have been declining by about 3 percent a year on
Green Diamond lands since 2001, Diller says, as they have over much of their
range.
Part of the problem is a mysterious drop in the wood
rat population, as well as increased competition from the more aggressive and
adaptable barred owl, which has muscled into the spotted owls' territory from
the east.
Young forests have shown other unintended wildlife
consequences. In spring, before berries and acorns come in, black bears depend
in part on the sap just under the bark of redwoods and other conifers. They
prefer the young, fastest growing trees and have done so much damage to
commercial stands that some foresters call them the biggest "pest" in
the redwoods. But bears became a problem only when companies began growing
trees like a crop.
After walking through every kind of managed forest and
talking to foresters on all sides of the issue, Mike Fay is convinced there's a
better way: Grow bigger trees, which can maximize wood production while
providing good habitat. "You've got to start thinking about this as an
ecosystem," he says. "All these plantations might as well be growing
corn. But if you want clean water, salmon, wildlife, and high-quality lumber,
you've got to have a forest."
Fay is not alone. "My idea is to cut less trees
and make more money per tree," says Jim Able, a former industrial forester
for Louisiana Pacific who now manages small private timberlands, most fewer
than a thousand acres. Wearing his trademark straw hat, Able leads Fay through
the Howe Creek tract, a timber plot he's managed for nearly three decades and
is thinning for the third time.
"What I'm doing is growing old trees and taking
the interest in the interim," he says. "I firmly believe I can keep
doing this over a hundred years."
More landowners are following in Able's footsteps,
growing their redwoods older and cutting them more sparingly. Some call this
ecological forestry, in which the forest is managed to provide wildlife habitat
and clean rivers as well as forestry jobs and wood products. The 2,200-acre van
Eck
Money for carbon stored in living trees could help
landowners make the transition from short-term clear-cuts to long-term rotations
where bigger, higher quality trees could once again dominate the landscape. So
far, based on the amount of carbon the van Eck is estimated to sequester over a
hundred years, the Pacific Forest Trust has sold more than two million dollars'
worth of emissions-reduction credits.
Another group practicing ecological forestry, Evan
Smith's Conservation Fund, bought 40,000 acres of industrial timberlands in the
On a day when the early morning sun is filling the
mist-shrouded canopy of
The mantra of industrial foresters has long been to
grow trees as fast as possible to maximize the return on investment and provide
a steady flow of wood products to market. For them, the most profitable time to
cut redwoods is at 40 to 50 years, even though such young trees contain mostly
soft, low-quality sapwood, with little of the redwoods' legendary resistance to
rot. But after coring and measuring two dozen trees—95 feet to 370 feet tall—from
canopy to base in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Sillett discovered that a
tree's annual rate of wood production increases with age for at least 1,500
years. More important, the older it gets, the more high-quality, rot-resistant
heartwood it puts on. The bottom line: Redwoods produce more wood, and better
wood, as they age. Sillett says this is true for the tallest eucalyptus trees
in
"If it's all about short-term yield, there's not
an effective argument for big trees," Sillett says. "But if it's
about long-term yield, carbon sequestration, and ecosystem services, then
you've got an effective argument for old trees. What do we need to remove and
keep lots of carbon out of the atmosphere? Massive amounts of decay-resistant
wood."
On the last day of their transect, as they hunted for
the northernmost redwood near Oregon's Chetco River, Mike Fay and Lindsey Holm
talked about the characters they'd met in the forest. There were Lud and Bud
McCrary, octogenarian brothers who pioneered uneven-age forestry in the
The young man stopped and looked at the freshly cut
forest, and to the logger's astonishment, he said, "This looks great!
There's so much more light coming in. I really like the way this looks."
Which means that along with high-quality wood, carbon
storage, clean water, and wildlife habitat, ecological forestry can bring back
another benefit for which redwoods are
justly famous: utter awe.
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