The shadowy history behind the fight to save the redwoods
In 1934, an industrialist and obsessive book collector named A. Edward Newton wrote an article for The Atlantic recounting a trip he had recently taken to see the ancient redwoods of Northern California. … [S]ome exemplary antique redwoods were protected in museumlike groves, but elsewhere, the majority of the old-growth-redwood ecosystem was rapidly vanishing. More worrying still, it turned out that the trees were not truly protected even in “protected” areas. This fact came thundering home in the winter of 1955, when a flood washed away a clear-cut hillside above Bull Creek Flat—the very forest Newton had deemed “saved”—killing hundreds of giant trees. The notion that we could preserve a few old redwoods without also safeguarding their ecosystem was revealed to be a cruel fantasy.
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