“The Wild Trees”

Richard Preston’s 2007 book “The Wild Trees” drew me along, partly through instilling a fear that the next paragraph would reveal a fatal fall. I’m glad to see that the main protagonists still seem to have survived to this day: Stephen Sillett, Marie Antoine, Michael Taylor.

I appreciated the adventure and the science, the personal triumphs, and learning about a new world in the canopy, but the part that I think will stick with me is the scale of what has been lost:

Over the years, the Save-the-Redwoods League bought a total of about 170,000 acres and donated the lands to the California state redwood parks and to Redwood National Park, where the ancient redwoods remain. Most of the rest of the redwood forest ended up being owned by timber companies. As a rule, they carried out clear-cutting operations, in which no tree of any monetary worth was left standing. In all, close to 96 percent of the primeval redwood forest was cut down.

A 2023 article from Sillett and another author gives the figure as 95% citing this 2018 State of Redwoods Conservation Report. Whatever the exact figure, so much has been lost and will never return in our lifetimes, including around the SF Bay Area.

Here’s video of an interview with Stephen Sillett from the Oakland Museum of California; it calls him a modern day John Muir. He mentions reading Muir as a child and continuing to take inspiration from him, something that I think Preston’s book doesn’t cover.

Preston gave a TED talk based on his book where he covers a lot of the highlights of it. The group that taught him to climb trees: https://treeclimbing.com/.