(Reposted from my diary at Daily Kos)
Growing up in the redwoods of Northern California was one of the luckiest things in my life. My early childhood was nature-soaked, set within the steep, narrow redwood canyons of Santa Cruz County, California, along a tributary of the San Lorenzo River. Moss grew on the roof and the deck and me, too, if I stood still long enough.
At 14, we moved 350 miles up the coast to Humboldt County, California. The redwoods here were bigger, grander, towering on hills to receive the high fog off the north Pacific. The country was wilder. The bears were more numerous and cougars chased deer through my backyard. Empty beaches glowed with diatoms at midnight. The towns, Victorian postcards all, were more isolated. To my eyes it was a place of extraordinary natural beauty. I'd started school before I knew I had just moved into a war zone.
The redwood wars preceded me and the redwood wars outlasted my time in Humboldt, but this month I can finally say that the biggest of them - the war with Pacific Lumber, once controlled by Charles Hurwitz, the junk bond king, the man who would have cut them all down at once if he could have - that war is over. And the trees, and the people of Humboldt, won.
The photograph at the top of this LA Times story is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. It shows the president of the newly formed Humboldt Redwoods company meeting personally with treesitters, as they are in the midst of climbing down from their perches on former Pacific Lumber company land for what is hoped will be forever. You've can't imagine how completely impossible this would have been in 1993, when I was in high school, when the war was on.
And it was a war. People got physically hurt. Threats were common. Cars with environmental bumperstickers (one belonging to a friend) were vandalized, or left with nasty notes. Environmental splinter groups were tied - rightly or wrongly - to bombs. My mother, a board member of the Sierra Club at the time, remembered attending a meeting with Pacific Lumber and local citizens in which the possibility of violence hung about the room like smoke.
The community was utterly divided - you were a tree hater or a tree lover, a spotted owl killer or a spotted owl saver, a commie liberal or a flag-waving jingoistic fool.
I was lucky to live in the town of Arcata, the hippie town, the base of the timber resistance. During those years living in Arcata was like living under a bizarre blockade; when you left the town, the "outside" was dingier, greyer, full of republicans, full of armchair lumbermen who, you assumed, hated your guts. You were a foreigner five miles south in Eureka, unwelcome five miles north in McKinleyville. The papers were full of letters to the editor announcing boycotts of "Red" Arcata and its socialist environmentally friendly sewer system.
Coming home, Arcata was a Victorian oasis, colorful shops and a plaza full of colorful people. It was like the Yellow Submarine, when they walk out of the sepia Liverpool and arrive in the land of people wearing fruit on their heads. And they did. And still do.
I don't mean this to be an exposition on how the redwood wars ended, and how this was possible. I'm just in a strange place right now to think that THIS confict, this PALCO war, this thing that drove the sour feeling in the pit of my stomach when we had to go to McKinleyville or Fortuna on some errand, the part that made me afraid to wear my Arcata high sweatshirt outside of town, that made me beg my mother not to put a Sierra Club bumpersticker on our car, despite our family's long history with that organization - this part has ended. And I'm trying to get my head around it.
But some short explanation would help those who weren't there.
Back in the 1980's, the company known as Pacific Lumber, which owns vast redwood reserves including most of the remaining unprotected old growth redwoods left on earth, was taken over by Maxxam corporation, under the direction of Charles Hurwitz. At that time the company left a relatively sustainable model and ramped up production dramatically, engaging in "vast clearcuts" in the words of the afore cited LA Times article. The company went from being a stable employer to being perennially unstable. Environmentalists rightly turned attention on PALCO and its practices and as tensions escalated over time, everyone in the community took sides.
The Headwaters Forest settlement, spearheaded in part by Dianne Feinstein, paid PALCO a king's ransom for one tract of old growth, and provided a fund for Humboldt County to use for retraining and economic development. But the big questions were still unsettled, and the sustainability of PALCO's practices for both the forests and the employees was left in doubt.
The bankruptcy of PALCO could have been predicted by almost anybody who observed the company's reckless practices and the adventerous financial habits of its controlling interests. But with that bankruptcy came a new opportunity.
To make a long story short, for a period of time this year, the fate of the redwoods hung in the balance, with a single judge to make the decision that would change everything. His choices were:
- Sell off PALCO in pieces, to investors who would clear cut or use the area for secluded monster homes with timber cutting rights, and lay off most of the remaining employees.
- Sell to the family that founded The Gap clothing company, who now run Mendocino Redwood Company, and who promise to follow sustainable logging practices that will ensure long-term stability and conservation of several hundred jobs. The track record at Mendocino, though not perfect, was a model of sustainability compared to PALCO.
They won't always behave, of course, and there are other timber companies still, which are less responsible. But this was the big one. And Humboldt has the environmentalist infrastructure in place to keep them honest.
Politics have changed radically in Humboldt over the years; the bright colors of Arcata seem to have leaked throughout the region, whose people have in recent years have run both Wal-Mart and a new gas pipeline out of town before they got started. The art community thrives even more outside of Arcata than in it. The DA is an unabashed liberal. Right wing pockets persist, but this last chapter in Pacific Lumber will take the wind out of their sails, with no PALCO to prop up right wing causes. Only a lone wingnut family, the Arkleys, are left to puff up the dead-tree, no job policies of the previous generation of wingers. Humboldt and Mendocino counties now represent bastions of rural liberalism, much like parts of Northern Minnesota.
Click through to the LA Times story and really look at that picture. The man is speaking to activists with respect, with admiration even, and with an eye toward the future. Read the quotes from respected activists. I can't believe it's happened, but there it is, and though I'm very far away, I feel like this is one of the big victories, one of the things that we should all remember when the news of the day makes us believe the world has gone in the toilet. Sometimes good things happen.
