The redwood wars

The latest American Historical Review has a review by Neil Maher of Darren Speece's Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (U. Washington Press, 2017). Some excerpts:

Speece begins with the conflict’s prehistory, describing the rise in the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of a “corporatist” logging industry that was permitted, with encouragement from the California Board of Forestry, to self-regulate cutting practices on privately owned land. Redwood preservation during this period most often involved elite groups, such as San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, purchasing groves from timber companies. The next four chapters, which jump to the late twentieth century and the “Redwood Wars” themselves, follow local activists and their two-pronged strategy—involving lawsuits and direct action campaigns—that all but halted old-growth logging on the North Coast and, in doing so, weakened the corporatist reign over redwoods. The legal stalemate that resulted, Speece concludes, fostered “the Deal” orchestrated by President Bill Clinton, which not only protected the old-growth redwoods of the North Coast’s Headwaters Forest but also laid the groundwork for additional protection of endangered landscapes nationwide.

Defending Giants is about more than environmentalists, however, and in order to give voice to the lumber executives, loggers, and lawyers who also serve as foot soldiers in this conflict, Speece embraces a diverse set of historical methodologies. To understand the grassroots beneath his tall trees, he scours local newspapers, digs into unprocessed archival material from North Coast environmental groups, and, perhaps most importantly, conducts dozens of oral interviews with activists, timber workers, lumber company managers, and forest policy bureaucrats. Speece also skillfully navigates a torrent of legal cases initiated by environmentalists to halt redwood logging, and tracks a wide range of timber policy proposals through the hallways of capitols in both Sacramento and Washington, D.C. Finally, he carefully balances his narrative by analyzing the annual reports of the Pacific Lumber Company, which owned these redwood forests, of its successor, the Maxxam Corporation, and of several other timber businesses from the Pacific Northwest. The result, which successfully blends social, political, legal, and business history, will interest more than environmental historians. 

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