A hike through a California forest reveals a plain truth about America’s past—and her future.
I don’t notice it at first. The trail is a carpet of clover-like sorrel, trillium, fairy bells, and redwood orchids. The burbling of the creek, the shadows of forest and ravine, cool and inviting, fill my senses. But every hundred feet or so I experience an unsettling sensation, a gentle pull from the forest, like the gravitational tug of a great mass. Giants lurk in the shadows, hiding behind the dense scrub of undergrowth. Every so often through the leafy shade I glimpse a cliff of gray—large, much too large for my Eastern sensibilities. Something is out of scale. That can’t be a tree. Even here in the American West, where everything is big, trees don’t grow as big as mountainsides.
Shaggy trunks three to five feet in diameter line the trail, much larger than all but a handful of virgin poplars and white pines back home in North Carolina. But the gray shadows hiding deeper in this forest are bigger. Much bigger. I don’t realize exactly how much bigger until I turn a corner and am confronted by the carcass of a giant. The magnitude of the ruin takes my breath away. The trees along the trailside are nothing—nothing—compared to this ghost-giant from the past.
The tallest known California Redwood (and not coincidentally, the tallest tree in the world) is here in Humboldt County, not too far from the trail I’m hiking. It’s called Hyperion and its discovery is chronicled in the book The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. It’s a 380-foot-tall monster, taller than the Saturn V moon rocket, as tall as a 40-story building, with a circumference of over 50 feet at its base. It weighs almost 4,000 tons. It’s one of the largest living organisms to have ever existed on planet Earth, and one of the oldest still living. Its location remains a secret to protect it from trampling tourists and souvenir-seekers.
The diameter of the sawn trunk in front of me is at least as big, if not bigger, than the base of Hyperion. Even as a remnant stump it’s the size of a three-story building. How high had it grown? Had it once been a champion greater even than the mighty Hyperion?
Quite possibly. Scientists say that the tallest redwoods once soared to 425 feet or taller. Imagine a single tree reaching a third the way up the side of the Empire State Building. There are lumber company records from the early twentieth century that, if accurate, describe redwoods that by volume are far larger than any single non-fungal organism currently existing, including the famous General Sherman sequoia, currently the record-holder. But we will never know for sure. The tree in front of me, like millions of its brethren, was felled by the timber industry in one of the greatest frenzies of environmental destruction in human history. In a little less than a century, 96% of all redwoods were killed. Forests that had swelled through the valleys of the Coastal Range for millions of years vanished almost overnight. Colossal living beings, some older than Western civilization, were felled and dragged away to sawmills to make houses and decks and hot tubs and patio furniture. Over two million acres of primeval redwood forest were annihilated. Imagine clear-cutting an area the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
I knew this fact before I started today’s hike. Knowing the facts is one thing, but to actually walk through this graveyard of rotting, titanic tombstones is another thing entirely. As I go deeper into the forest the scrubby new growth can’t conceal the ugly evidence of indiscriminate destruction. The gray ghost-giants grow more frequent the farther I walk. Most of the tombstones rise to twenty or thirty feet. A trailside sign informs me that the widening flares at the base of the trunks were simply too big to be cut, and that the lumbermen had to build platforms high up the trunk, called springboards, where the tree tapered to a more manageable diameter. I can still see the hewn notches in the trunks where they fastened the necessary scaffolding. It sometimes took a crew of men several weeks to cut a single tree.
A mature redwood forest contains more biomass per square foot than any other area on earth. Even the deepest Amazonian rainforest don’t come close to the sheer mass of aliveness. The purposeful destruction of the coastal redwood forests was one of the greatest massacres of life this planet has ever experienced.
For me, even though the trail still has great natural beauty, it is a trail of sadness, a trail of what was and what might have been, had we as a society understood the staggering effect of our exploitation of the New World. I don’t feel anger or ill will toward the men who did this to the redwood forest, because they were trapped in an irrational worldview, consumed by the reckless exuberance of taming a continent. Influential newspaperman John O’Sullivan said in 1845 that it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” With the ideal of manifest destiny as their rally cry, Americans swept across the continent, eradicating indigenous populations, conquering nature, cultivating, cutting, drilling, digging, burning and mining, until at the beginning of the Twentieth Century our society reached the Pacific Coastal Range and the Redwood forests.
To them, the forests were endless resources, the redwoods in infinite supply forever stretching into the future. They didn’t have the foresight (or hindsight) that we do now; to know that even a continent is finite, and that when we reach the end of those finite resources, we have destroyed the very source of our riches.
From our perspective in the 21st Century we can look at our continent-spanning nation and say, “Okay, Mr. Sullivan, mission accomplished.” We’ve realized our Manifest Destiny and conquered the continent. But our millions are still multiplying, and consuming resources at a rate far greater than nature can replenish. In our frenzy of expansion, we have destroyed much of what made America grand and wondrous, we have squandered much of the New World’s resources with uncontrolled and unsustainable growth. Now what? What is our new rallying cry? What is our new manifest destiny?
Stewardship and sustainability. There are no other viable options. The wealth of a nation, of a society, of a globe-spanning race, is fundamentally bound to its natural resources. No one can argue the fact that our resources are supplied by nature. Therefore, if we destroy nature, we destroy the basis of our wealth. Period. Without a thriving natural ecosystem able to supply our needs, we will perish.
The natural world seeks balance. Equilibrium between supply and demand. Most of the world has already come to the consensus that our modern technology and ravenous lifestyles have thrown the natural system far, far out of balance. To date, however, we have not come to a consensus about what to do about it.
The problem will eventually be solved, of course. The question is, will we solve it ourselves, or will nature solve it for us? Nature will find a new balance, that much is certain, and it doesn’t give one whit if that new balance includes humanity. For now, the ball is still in humanity’s court. We can control the process of restoring equilibrium, or we can sit back until nature does it for us. Nature is good at restoring balance. She has powerful, purpose built tools designed specifically for the job. Tools like plague, pestilence, global warming, ice ages, earthquakes, floods, and famine. George Stewart, in his seminal 1949 novel Earth Abides, says it best when he paraphrases the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes: “Man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens… Men go and come, but Earth abides.”
The good news is that humanity isn’t helpless. Our scientists understand the problem, and our politicians are becomingly dimly aware. We have earth-shaking tools of our own, including planning, policy, education, awareness, adaptability, and most importantly, determination. We can use these tools to build a new equilibrium, one in which we can thrive alongside and as a part of the natural world. Unfortunately, until we come together and devise a global strategy for their use, most of them will remain unused at the bottom of our toolbox.
The culture of the industrial age has left us with places like this forest, a ruin of a once-thriving ecosystem. Places of sadness, of frustration and anger. Places of death. Places of scars. But the past is behind us and we can’t do anything about it. Anger, blame, retribution, none of these will resolve the problem. Perhaps a clue to our future lies here on this trail I’m hiking. For in almost every one of the house-sized trunks sprout new redwoods, some of them already 100 feet tall, exact genetic clones of their parents. It is a gasping search for life as the forest tries to recover. I wonder if the root systems of this new growth, already hundreds or thousands of years old, can survive long enough for the new shoots to reach the former grandeur of their progenitors. I wonder if humanity will give these new trees the opportunity to grow and thrive again.
This is a test case for our survival as a civilized species. We suckle at the breast of Mother Nature at the same time we smother her breath and poison her blood and hack her flesh. If we can’t find a way to preserve the complex life system that gives us clean air, clean water, and resources upon which our civilization is built, then we are doomed. Changing the worldview of a society is a long and difficult process. Leadership, policy, education, and awareness are the tools. But we know it can be done, and in fact is being done. Civil rights, gender equality, marriage rights, all of these problems required a shift of our shared cultural paradigms. We can do it, but it’s a race to see if we can come to our senses before we too become ghosts of the past.
Patrick Cumby
Asheville, NC
