A 1,500-year-old redwood tree is a silent citadel, hushed and regal among compatriots in mossy courts of ancient forest. Deep in the green, woolly arbor called Headwaters Grove, rare ancestral
A 1,500-year-old redwood tree is a silent citadel, hushed and regal among compatriots in mossy courts of ancient forest. Deep in the green, woolly arbor called Headwaters Grove, rare ancestral stands of Sequoia sempervirens exhale an emerald light. The grove rises in silence, enshrouded by silence, apparently ignorant of the noisy and protracted human conflict which has raged for more than a decade over its existence.
Will it be the axe or salvation for these trees and the wildlife that depends on them? The California legislature may decide as early as this week.
Environmental groups in California continue to cry foul over the deal Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has been hammering out with the Clinton Administration and logging tycoon Charles Hurwitz for almost two years. At the same time, John Garamendi, who just left his position as deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior and President Clinton’s point man on Headwaters, warns it’s this deal or no deal for Headwaters.
After a stunning loss of green mass which has taken place almost exclusively in the last 50 years of human existence, today less than one-quarter of the world’s ancient forests remain standing. California is no exception; it’s a textbook case. Two million acres of ancient redwood forest once ran the length of Northern California in a lush carpet of 300-foot-tall giants; today only 3 to 4 percent remains. Headwaters Grove and five other ancient redwood groves owned by the Pacific Lumber Company comprise roughly half of what’s left; activists call the area the last unprotected ancient redwood ecosystem in the world. The fate of these precious scraps now looms large as a federal-brokered deal with Charles Hurwitz, CEO of PALCO’s parent company, Maxxam Corp., blunders toward final approval in the California legislature.
While there are plenty of other forests in need of protection, Headwaters has emerged as the crown jewel of the forest protection movement in the West. The greater “Headwaters Forest” under current consideration is 60,000 acres of both old-growth and second-growth forest owned by Pacific Lumber. (PALCO owns roughly 200,000 acres of forest in Northern California, much of it nestled between current redwood preserves.) The 60,000-acre Headwaters area contains six ancient redwood groves harboring millennia-old trees, totaling approximately 6,000 acres, including the famed Headwaters Grove of 2,800 acres.
Because of its unique status as an old-growth forest, and its dense and varied ecosystem—and because of Hurwitz’s notoriety as the man who gobbled up PALCO and before that, oversaw the collapse of a Texas savings and loan—there are now more people working on Headwaters than you can shake an ancient redwood stick at.
The Headwaters struggle involves direct action groups like Earth First!, more mainstream groups like the Sierra Club, and tiny but potent nonprofits in California’s redwood country like the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC)—as well as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision, one disgruntled ex-employee of PALCO, entertainers Woody Harrelson and Bonnie Raitt, former California governor Jerry Brown, a coterie of San Francisco synagogues, the coho salmon, and a small endangered seabird, the marbled murrelet.
Tensions around Headwaters sometimes reach bizarre and disturbing breaking points, as when Humboldt County sheriffs used cotton swabs to dab pepper spray directly into the eyes of immobile protesters on three occasions last fall, one of them caught on videotape in the offices of Rep. Frank Riggs (R-Calif). In 1996 more than 1,000 protestors were arrested at the largest forest demonstration in the history of the environmental movement, estimated at 6,000 (see photo); in 1997 that record was shattered by a peaceful protest of 9,000, with only two arrests. And today, Earth First! activist Julia “Butterfly” Hill [see our interview] is spending her 168th day of a record-breaking tree-sit, living in an ancient redwood 180 feet above the forest floor on Pacific Lumber land and vowing to stay there until she’s done all she can to focus public attention on saving Headwaters.
Deal with the Devil?
How did it come to this? The story begins back in the 1930s, when the Pacific Lumber Company curtailed its logging dramatically, and then ceased clearcutting almost entirely, operating under a forestry plan that seemed somewhat compatible with the venerable nature of its property. It was