The ONCE and FUTURE FOREST California’s Iconic Redwoods

This book, in honor of the centennial of the Save the Redwoods League, is a love story regaling the country’s tallest trees, the coastal redwoods and the giant sequoias farther inland.

But it’s also a call to action, as Sam Hodder, president of the League, notes in his introduction. “… we must now turn our attention to securing the broader resilience and function of the redwood ecosystem,” he writes.

“The world’s last remaining old-growth redwood groves are isolated islands lacking critical connections to surrounding landscapes. The sea of young redwood forest that surrounds these islands is struggling in a downward spiral of perpetual recovery as the cycle of commercial harvest rotations suppresses its natural tendency to thrive, never allowing it to grow into a mature, healthy forest,” Hodder laments.

With that, he introduces five writers—David Harris, Gary Ferguson, Greg Sarris, Meg Loman, and David Rains Wallace—who share their personal connections with these towering trees, examine their biology, and explain how, and why, the League came to be. There are insights into how Redwood National and State Parks was established, along with the stories of logging protests by celebrities such as Bonnie Rait and Don Henley.

Complementing the words are the beautiful, incredible, and breathtaking images of redwoods and giant sequoia. The historic photo of Galen Clark’s log cabin in Yosemite National Park’s Mariposa Grove (c. 1920s) looks as if the cabin could be a miniature, set as it is between the two massive trunks of sequoias that bookend the cabin as they soar into the sky unseen above.

This book, a fundraiser for the League, should also serve as a warning that we are losing many parts of our natural world. Human-driven climate change is killing coral reefs, melting glaciers, and even threatening these sequoias and redwoods. Parks, both national and state, are being turned into biological islands that are struggling to survive in their natural state.

The natural world battles against the human footprint, and this cannot be trivialized.

“… as I read through the stories in this book, I am reminded that our work is just beginning, and that the urgency and relevance of our vision to heal the forest and keep it on a path toward recovery and resilience is our generation’s greatest opportunity to leave the world better than we found it,” Hodder points out.