California: The Redwoods Weep

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A bitter environmental battle over logging in redwood groves turned deadly last week when Earth First activists challenged Pacific Lumber Co. loggers at work above Grizzly Creek in California's Humboldt County. Cat-and-mouse taunting between protesters and timber crews had gone on for years, but recent confrontations had turned sour. Earlier this year an activist took refuge in a 40-ft. redwood sapling, and loggers felled the tree. Somehow the climber tumbled out unharmed. Last week's skirmish ended differently: with shouts, the whine of a chain saw and a falling redwood hitting another tree. As the confusion of dust and noise subsided, activist David ("Gypsy") Chain, 24, of Austin, Texas, lay with a crushed skull, dying.

By week's end no charges had been filed. Chain's death was both an accident and the darkest of ironies, because this environmental war was supposed to be over. Lawyers and legislators had stepped in to settle the dispute, but Pacific Lumber did not see fit to stop felling trees, and the activists, who charged that the cutting destroyed the habitat of endangered seabirds, did not stop trying to block the loggers.

The bill that the California legislature passed this month to handle the controversy, referred to glumly by environmentalists as "the Deal," sounds good. Some 300-ft.-tall old-growth giants along the northern part of the state's coast are saved, along with scraps of wildlife habitat, and if a financier named Charles Hurwitz gets nearly half a billion dollars in federal and state money, who cares? The stock market creates or vaporizes that much wealth in the time it takes Alan Greenspan to clear his throat.

At closer inspection, however, the Deal is a textbook example of the wreckage that occurs when political imbalance--weakness on the part of federal and state environmental agencies, blustering strength among enemies of land-use regulation--allows owners of private property to hold the environment at ransom.

This ransom is a big one--and likely to be the benchmark for future environmental payoffs involving private timberland. In return for 3,500 acres of ancient redwoods in Humboldt County's Headwaters Grove, the largest old-growth tract still in private hands, and 4,000 acres of additional land, most of it heavily logged, Maxxam Corp. of Houston, Pacific Lumber's owner, will get $250 million from the Federal Government and $210 million from California. At week's end there seemed little doubt that Governor Pete Wilson would sign the payment bill. Maxxam, controlled by Hurwitz, was a major contributor to his most recent election campaign.

To anyone who has spent a night in Headwaters Grove, awakening at dawn to hear the cries of marbled murrelets, the endangered seabirds that nest in the huge trees, and to watch the great trunks take form in the lightening mist, the idea of owning such a place is daft. But, yes, if the Deal goes through, Maxxam won't own Headwaters. Won't cut it. And California will have a beautiful new tree museum.