Redwoods Great And Small. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Dense Northern California redwood forest containing both old-growth and young trees

I’ve lived on the fringes of California’s coastal redwoods ever since my family moved to the state when I was four-years-old. For years we did weekend trips to places like Big Basin Redwoods State Park, often hiking through the trees and beyond. So I have always been familiar with these extraordinarily tall trees and with the special forests they inhabit. However, it wasn’t until much later that I understood how truly rare the original old-growth forests are. I recently read that only 5% of the original forest was left mostly untouched — meaning that 95% of the trees (19 out of 20!) were cut down during a fairly short period, mostly in the 20th century. This was an astounding example of where greed can push humankind, and we can reasonably imagine that without intervention all of the old-growth forests would have been lost forever. If that greed had gotten its way, you would have to reimagine scenes like this one with only the slender trees on the right, because certain parties would have cut up every accessible tree like the one on the left.

Today it seems bizarre to recall the strong objections to saving these remnants back when the Redwood National Park was first proposed. Even conserving parts of the last 5% of the ancient forests seemed to be a bridge to far for interests blinded by their long-term investments in a nearly depleted natural resource, and they fought bitterly against that parks. There are several lessons in this. This was not isolated resistance to conservation — it has been the pattern with the creation of essentially all of our great American parks and other efforts to protect wilderness and natural areas. There are [i]always[/i] a few very loud voices shrieking that the protection of a few last remnants of America’s great landscape will ruin their economy. (Witness the Utah minority today working to undo national monuments.) However, now that our park system is well over a century old, it is plainly obvious that virtually every single protected area is regarded as a treasure and virtually no sane person would argue that we did the wrong thing by protecting them.

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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