LAST CHANCE FOR THE GIANT REDWOODS
Boyer, William H.
last chance for the giant redwoods by WILLIAM A. BOYER Tourists who have experienced the beauty of the giant redwoods on the northern coast of California had better return soon for a last look....
...Huge trees, often soaring 300 feet or higher, reach diameters up to 25 feet at the base...
...Except in a few state preserves, the ancient and apparently immovable giants are challenged each day by the irresistible force of whining chain saws...
...If these old forests continue to be cut into lumber, it will be a national tragedy in the United States comparable to India's grinding up the Taj Mahal for paving material...
...They are the culmination of a long struggle for survival in which they have crowded out the underbrush and the weaker redwoods until the few giant trees remaining stand like retired sentinels, the battle won, dominating the forest...
...Soon there will be souvenir photographs showing how the redwood forests looked before they were cut, and tourists can buy used chain saws as mementos commemorating man's economic triumph over natural beauty...
...Most redwood conservation groups are concerned primarily with economic conservation...
...They have no natural span of life, and if they are not cut or burned are believed to live "forever...
...one is economic and the other aesthetic and recreational...
...He may fail to notice that the redwood forest he thinks he is driving through is not really a forest at all but may be little more than a Hollywood facade, for the trees often extend only a few hundred feet on each side of the road and are cut out in back...
...The floor of the forest consists primarily of ferns and clover-like oxalis, forming a cool, silent, seemingly eternal and unchanging world...
...Young trees that spring from cutover areas have a beauty of their own, similar to young evergreens anywhere...
...The United States Forest Service estimates that most privately owned redwood will be cut by 1980 at the present rate of cutting, and 93 per cent of the old growth is in private hands...
...Public forest acquisition occurs occasionally, sometimes through state funds but often through donations made to the Save The Redwoods League, best known of the groups concerned with the preservation of the old growth trees...
...Their current economy and politics are too interwoven with the lumber industries...
...Logged-over fir and pine, or depleted salmon and trout, can be recovered with sufficient time and money...
...By cutting down the big trees they can achieve more "board feet" of growth per year with the smaller trees...
...Meanwhile, in nearby forests often more vast and more magnificent than any he has seen, the chain saws are leaving stumps and a tangle of slash and debris where majestic trees have stood for many hundreds of years...
...Those who have never seen the giant redwoods find them hard to imagine...
...Few people would permit the present destruction to continue if they were aware that our own and future generations could be forever deprived of some of the world's greatest natural beauty...
...It seems that man can easily use his technology to exploit natural beauty, but it is difficult for him to do the one thing that is most necessary—to preserve the beauty that is already given to him...
...He may wonder briefly where all the lumber trucks are getting their trees, but he is more likely to be concerned with their clogging the highway than with their social implications...
...If we fail to act, or decide now that money is more important than beauty, we will find later that the beauty we have sold can no longer be bought for any price...
...the biggest, most beautiful, and accessible trees are going first...
...Each day seemingly perpetual stands of huge trees are transformed to rubble...
...Residents of the redwood country are unlikely to preserve the old trees...
...But it takes from 500 to thousands of years to create the kind of "old growth" trees that now exist...
...Years ago, when Theodore Roosevelt first saw these ancient trees he expressed his horror at the idea of converting them to shingles and pointed out that "there is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty, than the preservation of anything that appeals to the higher emotions in mankind...
...The destiny of the forest is now in the unpredictable hands of the "market...
...Redwood has been cut since early in the Nineteenth Century, but large scale cutting has developed only recently, since World War II...
...A normal American in a hurry is likely to experience some of the effect of a forest even without one...
...Substitutions could be made for exhausted mineral reserves...
...Most commercial interests are not anxious to deplete the supply of redwood, so they sponsor numerous "conservation" organizations and are developing tree farms, selective cutting, and fire controls...
...The cutting of old growth redwood is possibly the most serious and urgent conservation problem in the United States today...
...But old growth redwood is unique...
...When small redwood trees have room to grow they are, contrary to popular opinion, one of the fastest growing evergreens...
...The big trees grow more slowly and "pay off" only by being made into choice lumber, and so the commercial conservation programs have nothing to do with aesthetic and recreational goals...
...Rationalizations, misinformation, and short-sighted economic interests prevent the economic and larger social implications of current logging practices from becoming public issues...
...Redwood logging would still continue but would be restricted primarily to young trees and tree farms, which would be the source of redwood lumber anyway, if the big trees were cut...
...None of the coastal redwood is in national parks and less than one per cent is in national forests, yet its preservation is unquestionably a matter of national interest...
...rather they constitute a threat to conservation for aesthetic and recreational purposes...
...The final scenes look like shelled beachheads of South Pacific islands after wartime invasions...
...Its present age of hundreds to thousands of years makes it a virtually irreplaceable natural resource, and no substitution can be made for its supreme beauty...
...More of a recreational economy would be likely to prevent some of the instability of the dominantly one-industry economy, which has always been a victim of fluctuations in the lumber market and has never provided much wealth to the area...
...So from a commercial point of view the big trees should be cut to permit the smaller ones to get more light and room and thus grow faster...
...Unless the state of California converts more groves into state parks or federal funds are appropriated to form another national park, most of the giant California redwoods will soon be gone...
...Even though the commercial interests should achieve their present conservation goal, they would contribute nothing to the preservation of the old growth—quite the opposite...
...If all the old growth acreage were converted into park, the area would still be less than half the size of New York's Adirondack Park...
...Though they now cut about two and a half times as much as they grow, they hope to "conserve" the redwood by growing as much as they cut...
...It may be that the few parks that now exist and the roadside groves sometimes left by timber companies for public relations purposes have primarily a soporific effect on the public...
...Conservation is a word that has two different meanings in the redwood area...
...In many former groves only a few snags and spindly seed trees remain...
...For every tree that falls there will be one less for present and future generations— and they are falling fast...
...The increasing commercial use of redwood and the expanding population are likely to shorten this estimate...
Vol. 24 • May 1960 • No. 5
