leaf, forest defender
Guest Contributor
The view on your drive to work might seem somehow different. Somehow lesser.
In late November/early December, Green Diamond Resource Company brought loggers and a slew of heavy machinery into the eastern hillside of the Tsurai village, removing one tree sit, cutting the tree and clear cutting the surrounding canopy, leaving just a few select trees in and around a pile of devastated second-growth redwood stand.
If you know where to look, you can see it from the road. Gouges in the forest, stripped to the soil, left to roast as you drive by on the 101. But maybe you like to hike the area surrounding Strawberry Rock, and you pull over to get a closer look at a place you know and love so well.
Walking through what was once a vibrant community of flora and fauna, the taste of sap is thick in the air.
Had you been here just a week before the cut, the hike up to the ridge would have been more winding, yet far easier with the humidity to keep you cool and shade to rest under.
Instead, your small break from everyday civilization is halted by the sunlight blazing through a new break in the trees—illuminating and silencing a place once dark and full of life.
All for profit. Nothing for salamanders, birds, or small rodents. Nothing for those parts of ourselves that we come to forest to nourish and refill.
You stand amongst a wasteland of sawdust. The heat of the sun bakes the dust, sucking what could have been fog drizzle right out of the sky.
Green Diamond has the audacity to call themselves a “forest stewardship company,” but those who live in and defend the village confront these lies on a regular basis. Cutting along the hillside further destabilizes the ground on which the occupied tree sits stand, and this latest attack on the forest destroyed the vibrant ecosystem that called that hillside home. Almost everyday tree sitters would be visited by flying squirrels, voles, birds, and owls. Now it’s quiet there.
The forest stand where the tree village is located is the largest stand of old-second growth and residual old-growth redwoods in the Tsurai area outside of local parks. These remaining areas of high-quality habitat represent a fraction of the former expanse of ancient redwoods that once stood on these slopes. Logging here led to two catastrophic forest fires in the mid-1900’s. The widespread clear cutting of this land continues to this day and is no less a threat to the well-being of the wildlife and people of this area and beyond.
While the phrase “second-growth” may not carry the same emotional weight as “old growth,” it is important to remember that second growth describes something desperately needed in an area ravaged by logging: forest recovery, habitat, a place for life to return, resurface, and renew. These sites of renewal are vital to a recovering global biosphere—especially when we all hear much talk of biodiversity and carbon sequestration.
Yet in our own backyards, Green Diamond can undo years and decades of healing in one day of greed.
We’ve provided EcoNews staff with some photos of the damage done and some of our own expressions of fury and grief. Forest defenders here and beyond will continue to defend what we love and what loves us.
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