Will Parrish, THE ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER
Campaigns to save majestic coastal redwood groves have been waged for more than a century, starting with the campaign that created Big Basin State Park in 1902. In 1978, the Sierra Club even dubbed its successful campaign to expand Redwood State and National Park the “last battle” of “the redwood war,” but the battles to protect this globally recognized icon of nature threatened by human greed would only intensify.
In 1985, a junk-bond dealer named Charles Hurwitz engineered a hostile takeover of Humboldt County’s most respected logging company, Pacific Lumber, and folded it into Houston-based investment company Maxxam. Meanwhile, Louisiana-Pacific, a Georgia-Pacific spin-off, was cutting its more than 300,000 acres in Mendocino and Sonoma counties at roughly three times the forest’s rate of growth.
“We need everything that’s out there,” Louisiana-Pacific CEO Harry Merlo told Mike Geniella of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat in 1989 “We log to infinity. Because it’s out there and we need it all, now.”
This unruly phase of the story involves the birth of radical environmentalism on the North Coast, complete with tree sits and road blockades, and culminates in the campaign to save the largest remaining area of unprotected old-growth redwoods in California, and thus the world: the Headwaters forest, located between Fortuna and Eureka. Riding the tide of public opinion, President Bill Clinton made saving Headwaters an election pitch in 1996, and in 1999 the state and federal governments purchased 7,500 acres to establish the Headwaters Forest Reserve.
This year, a new redwood crusade has emerged, this time in northwestern Sonoma County. Gualala Redwoods Timber (GRT), owner of 29,500 acres in northwestern Sonoma and southwestern Mendocino counties, plans to log hundreds of large second-growth redwoods in the Gualala River’s sensitive floodplain. The ”Dogwood” plan encompasses 320 acres, making it the largest Gualala River floodplain logging plan in the modern regulatory era, while the “Apple” plan features 121 acres of adjacent logging and 90 acres of clear-cuts.
Project critic Peter Baye, a coastal ecologist affiliated with Friends of the Gualala River and a former California Department of Fish & Wildlife regulator, says the style of logging GRT has planned is liable to batter the watershed’s badly impaired “off-channel” salmon and steelhead habitat. He also fears it will jeopardize endangered species such as the marbled murrelet and northern spotted owl, and set a dangerous precedent that erodes the intent of modern environmental statutes that are supposed to protect floodplains.“
This is basically the last mature riparian forest refuge in the watershed,” Baye says. “All of the 80- to 100-year-old trees in the watershed are gone, except these. And it’s in the critical part, next to the river and in the floodplain. Nothing else impacts salmon like this does.”
Read lots more at: Battle Heats Up Over Gualala Redwoods | Anderson Valley Advertiser
Author SuzannePosted on Categories Forests, Land Use, Water, Wildlife