A paragraph that caught my attention in John Young’s book Ghost Towns of the Santa Cruz Mountains:
Thirty lumber mills operated for seventy years on the eastern slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains above Los Gatos, changing the landscape from a verdant parkland of giant redwoods to dense, chaparral-covered slopes with rocky gullies carved by erosion in many areas. What the timber crews missed, raging forest fires that swept the mountains at intervals completed in destruction, leaving only a few remnants of what had once been the most heavily timbered redwood region south of Humboldt County.
p. 99, Ghost Towns of the Santa Cruz Mountains
It brings to mind the work of Rick Lanman. From a recent Sierra article by Jeremy Miller, “Blast From the Past”, following Lanman:
“A lot of what we think we know about the Bay Area’s natural history is based on received knowledge,” he says. “And a lot of that knowledge is simply wrong.”
One of the questions that preoccupies him is how extensive the Bay Area’s redwood forest was before European settlement. To find out, he plotted the extent of former redwood forests using maps showing gold rush-era sawmills between Santa Cruz and San Francisco. Since redwoods were too large to be hauled (and there are no rivers big enough to float them), they had to be cut near where they fell. Thus, the locations of sawmills serve as a proxy for where redwoods once thrived.
… “People think the Bay Area never harbored redwoods the size of those found in the northern part of the state,” he says. “Not true. Some of the largest redwoods were right here. Right here.”
Lanman’s vision of the past carries into the present. “If we could just restore redwoods in this area, we could mitigate 2 to 3 percent of California’s total carbon emissions,” he says. If redwoods were replanted in the state’s coastal counties, they could capture as much as 20 percent of its emissions.
“These trees,” Lanman says, “are a gift.”
I’m looking forward to reading the paper: Machine learning model determines optimal coast redwood restoration sites in Santa Clara County, California.
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