One of the world’s most magnificent forests, the California Redwood belt was a two-million-acre ecosystem containing many of the world’s largest and tallest trees. Much of it was old growth, stands thick with mature trees hundreds and even thousands of years old. Entire ecosystems lived hundreds of feet up in the canopies of cathedral-like groves.
In the mid-19th century, nearly all of this forest was United States public land, but the government intended to transfer much of the public domain to private ownership and passed laws like the Homestead and Timber and Stone acts to accomplish this transfer. The entire redwood forest was, through illegal aquisition and consolidation of land grants, privatized over several decades late in the century, the result of which was corporate ownership of nearly all redwoods. Those corporations began logging them until only 4 percent of the original coastal redwood forest remains.
Greg King grew up in the 1960s-80s in redwood country where he could experience remnant stands, acres of stumps, and second growth. Some of his ancestors had been part of the corporate late-19th century redwood logging spree. In Part One of this book, King explains how he came to love the redwood forest and became aware of what had happened to it. He was so outraged by the logging of what remained of the forest that in the mid-1980s he became an activist to help save what little was left. Tracking down a redwood activist named Darryl Cherney, he joined him to form an Earth First! group in the north coast forests to do what they could.
King was also a young journalist who not only took to the woods to find out what was happening but learned his way around the California timber bureaucracy. He kept a detailed journal of what he learned, and armed with knowledge gathered with his reportorial and research skills, challenged the forces, including the California Department of Forestry (CDF), that seemed intent on logging remaining unprotected redwoods. He and his Earth First! companions focused especially on the Maxxam Corporation, which had purchased Pacific Lumber (PL), one of the few relatively responsible timber companies in the history of redwood logging.
Maxxam was intent on logging all of PL’s holdings. Maxxam’s CEO, Charles Hurwitz, was like some of his predecessors in the redwood story, a specialist “in taking over companies built by others, spiking them with investment dollars not his own, and liquidating their assets to accrue great personal wealth.”
King describes his many exploits in sometimes futile efforts to protect remaining spectacular stands of redwoods from Maxxam’s saws, including tree sits and other protests. As a writer, he called out the timber rascals in the media and peppered the culprits, especially the CDF, with well-informed protests. His personal redwood protection efforts culminated in the famous campaign to save the Headwaters Forest, a three-thousand-acre stand at Salmon Creek and Little South Fork Elk River. King gave this redwood grove its name early in the fight to save it.
Part Two of The Ghost Forest, titled “Empire,” develops background essential to understanding how the redwood forest became so vulnerable, a sordid story of greed and fraud. King explains that since California became a state in 1850 its government had abetted commercial redwood logging and how it did so, even up to the time he started learning that history in the 1980s. Fraud was rampant and King names the fraudsters, “national icons such as Frederick Weyerhauser, James Hill, Thomas B. Walker, C.A. Smith, A.B. Hammond, and, in Humboldt Country, Joseph Russ, David Evans, Charles King, John Vance, and four brothers by the name of Hooper” who “took their plunder straight to the bank.” He goes into great detail about how some of these tycoons contributed to the demise of the grand redwood forests.
Following this is Part Three, “A League of Their Own,” which over its 150-plus pages tells a story that is disillusioning and infuriating to those of us who care about saving ecosystems, about the national parks, the conservation movement, and integrity in government.
The Ghost Forest is an exposé of the Save the Redwoods League. King writes that in 2018 the League threw a big party to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and part of the program was a 3-minute video narrated by Peter Coyote. A line in the script was, “Those dedicated to protecting the coast redwoods worked tirelessly to launch the world’s only conservation group dedicated to the permanent protection of redwoods throughout their natural range. As the League’s founders developed the tools of land conservation, they sparked a cultural shift in the country.”
Grandiose claims indeed and, to King’s surprise when he dipped into their voluminus archive at UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, far from the truth. He had, in 2010, begun a study of redwood history “gathering the stories of aging activists who had spent years in the trenches of the previous redwood battle — the movement to create a Redwood National Park during the 1960s and 1970s.”
By “happy coincidence,” he writes, the library “began organizing a revealing trove of hundreds of thousands of pages of primary documents . . . generated by an organization launched in 1917, when three prominent ‘men of science’ met with titans of American commerce . . . and created a new organization that would dedicate itself, on paper, to ‘saving the redwoods.’ The collection unveiled an authentic yet unreported history of redwood liquidation.”
What King uncovered in this collection was a massive fraud perpetrated on the American people to steal one of the nation’s great treasures, and the Save the Redwood League was the key to its ultimate success. While claiming to be working to protect the redwoods — and they did protect some — they were working even more diligently to protect California’s redwood lumber industry.
That industry, as King goes to great length to explain, was critical to a flourishing California economy after WWI, so critical that prominent men in government and academe were willing to compromise their integrity to see that it prospered. He explains at length how important the industry was, what its products were, and how it nurtured an interlocking tangle of government, industrial, educational, and even conservation leaders to assure its prosperity.
After the Great War, people were starting to object to what the timber industry was doing to the redwoods, and industry leaders realizing they needed to find a way to counter a growing public outcry over their timber practices, did so with what today we call “greenwashing,” public relations to make the miscreants look good. Key to the industry campaign would be the Save the Redwoods League. They would convince a gullible public that they were, in fact, saving the redwoods (when they really were not), and eventually claim that had saved them, (which they had not) so there was nothing to worry about. They were indeed in “league” with the industry.
Though this may seem unlikely, King has the evidence. For instance, he quotes the first brochure published by the League in 1920 that noted that, “The California State Highway system through Humboldt County has made the magnificent redwood forests of the northern coast easily accessible to the lover of nature, to the tourist, and to the important industries dependent upon forest products.”
Later it assured readers, “The Save the Redwood League does not ask for any unreasonable hampering of the Redwood Industry.”
Internal League documents reveal that they were behind what came to be called “beauty strips,” trees along the highways spreading through the California redwoods that were undoubtedly impressive and beautiful, but which screened massive clearcuts from motoring tourists. King quotes historian Susan Schrepfer who studied the League and wrote, “The men of the league intended that no more than a small percentage of the total redwood belt should be preserved.” From its founding, the League claimed to be working for a redwoods national park, but King reveals how, time after time, the League opposed initiatives to establish a park that would protect significant stands of trees coveted by the timber industry.
It is important to note that this conservation story is not about public lands. The timber tracts at issue throughout the story were privately owned. As mentioned earlier, timber barons had used and abused the public land laws to acquire what some called California’s “green gold” and held title, if dubiously acquired, to the land on which the trees were living.
The long and fraught story of the effort to create a Redwoods National Park is one of men bent upon building wealth and empire out of their holdings, a concerned public be damned. The reader of The Ghost Forest should not be suprised at this. Most national parks have been established from public land, with exceptions when philanthropists like the Rockefellers purchased private lands and gifted the land to the National Park System. What is disheartening in this case is that men baldly claiming to be for the park and working in the public interest, were not doing so. They were, in fact, working against the public interest. King describes how many large tracts of redwoods remained in the 1920s, and proposals were put forth to protect them in a park, and how the league responded.
A powerful California congressman was proposing a Redwood National Park, and a federal forester had recommended preservation of the entirety of the largest single stand of primeval redwood remaining — a forest that covered the lowermost reach of one of the nation’s most beautiful and dramatic rivers. An organization controlled by some of the world’s richest and most powerful men had formed to save “representative areas” of this paradise. Newspapers in every American market covered the League’s efforts in glowing terms. League membership grew by the thousands. Praise and donations poured in from around the globe. Americans were willing to sacrifice to protect their greatest living treasures. Here was hope. Yet, throughout the 1920s, League officials would, in the modern day parlance of dubious publishing outlets, capture and kill this momentum.
This is shocking, but the story gets worse. Newton B. Drury, who was as secretary a League leader, was deeply involved in machinations involving National Park Service founding director Stephen Mather and two Interior Department secretaries. They declined to support the recommendations of the congressman and federal forester who had surveyed large intact stands of ancient redwoods and to back the legislation for the proposed park. King observes that, “[E]xamined in sum, and as machinations in service of unstated objectives, the League’s actions were not schizophrenic but rather exemplify the organization’s overall objective, which was to solidify industry’s control of redwood inventories and markets even in the face of growing public pressure to save the trees.”
Logging continued and the opportunities to save ecologically significant redwood forests steadily declined.
According to the well-documented story King tells, Newton B. Drury would, under the guise of the Save the Redwood League, thwart important Redwood National Park proposals for 50 years, doing the bidding of the timber industry in clandistine ways. This is the same guy who was director of the National Park Service from 1940 – 1951, remaining “Secretary” of the League throughout his federal tenure while his brother Aubrey took over the work he had been doing with the League. King writes that even as NPS director, Drury never attempted to establish a Redwood National Park. He went on to lead California State Parks after his tenure with the Park Service and continued to exert his considerable influence in matters concerning redwood protection or lack thereof.
As a student of national park history, I am floored by the revelations about Drury and the League, but King has done his homework and lays out a strong case that they badly fooled many of us.
Greg King is an excellent writer, and his telling of how he participated in efforts to block harvest of remaining redwoods in the late 1980s makes for riveting reading.
Part Four of the book is titled “The Empire Strikes Back,” and in it King recounts how he and others fought to save what they could and how they were largely thwarted, though the Headwaters Forest was ultimately protected at great and unnecessary cost to American taxpayers. He writes thoughout the book in the first person, especially in Parts One and Four, and the stories he tells are revealing of the forces at work against activists. Near the end he powerfully tells the story of what happened to Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in 1990 when a bomb exploded under the seat of Judi’s car. The FBI accused them of carrying a bomb they made, arrested a seriously injured Judi, and successfully stopped a campaign called “Redwood Summer” that Judi and Darryl and others, like Greg King, were planning.
Reading this story about the FBI at this fraught moment in American history is especially troubling. The agency never admitted, of course, to having anything to do with the bombing, but their claims about Bari and Cherney making a bomb were thoroughly debunked and ultimately the two won compensatory and punitive damages in a lawsuit they filed against the FBI and Oakland police (though Judi had since died of cancer). The whole business is a chilling affair.
Though King doesn’t go much into it, the FBI had only a few months earlier arrested Earth First! leader Dave Foreman in a sting — part of an effort to thwart what they called “eco-terrorism,” though Redwood Summer, like all Earth First! actions protesting redwood logging, was planned as a nonviolent action. Foreman too was ultimately exonerated. This whole business is very personal for Greg King, and after decades of thinking about what happened, he undertook the herculean task of telling the story of “The Ghost Forest” in all its disgusting and discouraging detail.
This is a big book, and an important one. Greg King was, of course, uniquely positioned to write it. He did the research, and he participated in part of the story. He goes into great detail, supporting his analyses with prodigious information and citing primary source material throughout.
One wonders what motivated him to undertake both his activism and this monumental research and writing task. A brief Part Five includes a letter to him from his mother that explains his convictions and his ethics. His parents inculcated their children to care and to act. The reader must be patient, because what might seem extraneous detail at times is necessary to understanding and context. I read The Ghost Forest today as a cautionary tale. Just as in the late 19th century “Gilded Age” unregulated logging doomed the redwoods, rich and powerful tycoons today tied to industries different from timber but no less threatening to the land, like oil and gas and lithium mining, are bent on exerting the same sort of influence on public policy as those in this story.
And here’s a final parallel with today — many of these tycoons were racist white supremacists. That is another shocking part of the story — white men who supported the debunked “science” of eugenics and claimed to be conservationists. This was another discouraging aspect of the redwood story that King unearthed. We think we have made progress in many ways today, that we value nature’s wonders more than we once did, and are not so affected by racism, but this book raises many questions about such hopeful thinking. Occasionally a book comes along that significantly revises what I thought I knew and understood, in this case about conservation history.
The Ghost Forest is such a book.
