Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books. By Darren Frederick Speece

The tallest species in the world, the redwood tree (sequoia sempervirens) is found in a narrow range in northern California. In the late 1800s redwoods attracted lumbermen for their resistance to rot and fire and preservationists for their majestic groves and awe-inspiring appearance. At more than 350 feet tall, their height had been such an obstacle to studying the crowns that it was not until the late twentieth century that ecologists and other scientists climbed into the canopy and discovered a separate ecosystem far more complex than previously known. They found trunks growing out of the main trunk, and then trunks off of those trunks, all intertwining to form a loose web that enable other plants and rare fauna to thrive. That researchers knew so little about this species until recently is analogous to what environmental historians understood about the late-twentieth-century fights, known as the Redwood Wars, to preserve them. The wars began in 1955, when a Pacific Lumber Company clearcut caused downstream flooding that triggered soil erosion problems and toppled thousand-year-old redwoods. The incident also opened a schism in the conservation movement. Until then, the accepted process for preserving tracts of redwoods had worked thusly: the Save the Redwoods League would appeal to the State of California and badger Pacific Lumber to protect tracts containing exceptional specimens; the company would protest a bit; and then the league would use private funds to purchase the land, which then became a state park. After the 1955 floods, though, this arrangement starting breaking down when the Sierra Club began demanding laws that would stop ecologically unsound logging practices on both public and private land.