Sequoia Grove Preservation: Natural or Humanistic?1
William Croft2
Abstract: Management of giant sequoias in the National Parks and on the
National Forests has changed over the years, with a recent emphasis on
"naturalness," including natural processes such as fire. Some difficulties in
implementing this goal of a "natural" ecosystem, include the current
incomplete knowledge of the sequoia grove ecosystem before Europeans
arrived and the permanently altered and fragmented character of the
contemporary Sierra Nevada ecosystem. Nevertheless, the goals of
sequoia preservation are ultimately ethical choices made by modern human
society, and those choices are formed through the interaction of
government, nongovernmental organizations, and concerned individuals.
The Death of a Great Tree
I will begin with a story about the other redwoods, the
coast redwoods of Northern California. It's a sad story, but it
will be familiar to any of you who have gotten to know the
giant sequoias well, or any other great tree. I've tramped
through almost every old-growth coast redwood grove and
without a doubt my favorite tree was the Dyerville Giant,
which stood in a grove that is deemed sacred by most
redwood lovers: a tree so tall, so huge and so healthy it was
simply stunning. But the Dyerville Giant leaned, and early in
the morning of March 25, 1991, it fell in a tremendous
storm. On my annual return to California in May 1991, my
wife and I traveled up to Humboldt Redwoods State Park to
pay our last respects to the fallen Giant. It was a cool, drizzly
May day, peaceful and still; the mist damped the sounds of
the forest and our footsteps (as well as the freeway). We
walked on the loop trail towards the Giant. The first thing we
saw was the hole in the sky where the Giant once stood. That
really drove home to us that the Giant was gone. The trail
turned, and we saw the crater in the ground and the Giant's
body. It really looked like a body, especially since we had so
recently seen the Giant alive. My wife said, "I'm sorry that
he had to fall in our lifetimes." I replied, "Yes, especially as
we'd only just gotten to know him."
Fortunately, I haven't yet experienced the loss of any of
the giant sequoias I've come to know and love in my
wanderings around the groves of Sequoia National Forest
and Sequoia National Park. I'm sure that I'd feel some of the
same emotions. But these emotions are uniquely human. The
other trees in the forest don't mourn the fall of the Dyerville
Giant, or of an ancient giant sequoia. For them, the hole in
the sky is a new source of light, for new seedlings and new
growth on their branches. The animals of the forest also
view the fall of the Giant in the same way-just something
that happened, an opportunity perhaps.
1
An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the Symposium
on Giant Sequoias: Their Place in the Ecosystem and Society, June 23-25,
1992, Visalia, California.
2
Assistant Professor, Program in Linguistics, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285.
8
Human Response or
‘Nature-Minus-People’
Only people see the loss of a tree like the Dyerville
Giant or the Wawona tree as something tragic. It's not a
"natural" response, in the sense of nature-minus-people. The
response of nature is to satisfy basic needs, not to preserve
natural beauty just for the sake of its beauty. Natural
processes include for instance the boom-and-bust cycles of
the caterpillars that feed on the oak trees of the Coast Range,
or the moose and wolves of the Boundary Waters region of
Minnesota. The predators (caterpillars, wolves) overkill
the prey (oak leaves, moose), and then their populations
"collapse"-in other words, they starve-after which the
prey overexpands until the predator population rises again.
This is entirely natural, and these cycles are a demonstration
that ecosystems aren't in a static, perfect balance. But notice
that the oak moth caterpillars do not pass laws regulating the
consumption of oak leaves in order to prevent the exhaustion
of the natural resource, nor do they designate certain oak
trees, or even branches of trees, as being of such outstanding
value that they should be preserved for future generations.
They simply eat them all until they run out. This is an
example of how humans are different from caterpillars.
Of course, people do also have the same sort of
response. After clearing the forests of New England, they
moved to Michigan; after they cleared the forests of Michigan, they moved to California and the Pacific Northwest;
now that those forests are nearly cleared, they are talking of
moving on to Siberia (not to mention the tropical rainforests).
When we run out of forests and a few other things, the
population will collapse. This has already happened twice in
history, once at the end of the Classical era in the 5th century
A.D. and again at the end of the Medieval era in the 14th
century, when population growth exceeded the resources
available by the technology of the time (McEvedy and Jones
1978). And this "natural" response is not just a consequence
of advanced technological societies; the Maoris of Polynesia
finished off the moa and other native species of New Zealand,
and some believe that the large mammals of Ice Age North
America were hunted to extinction by the prehistoric people
of that time. And of course we saw it in the sequoia groves
as well. One-third of the sequoia groves were clearcut,
including Converse Basin, one of the very finest groves. In
many other sequoia groves, all of the whitewoods, including
the sugar pines, the noblest trees of the Sierra Nevada after
the sequoias, were clearcut, as recently as five years ago.
Free-for-all economic behavior-exploitation to the extent
allowed by technological ability and dictated by human
need-is the human equivalent of a "natural" response: people
USDA Forest Service Gen. Tech. Rep.PSW-151. 1994.
acting "naturally," similar to plants, animals and other living
things in the ecosystem.
This definition of "natural" isn't, of course, the use of
the word "natural" among those who are concerned with
preservation of the giant sequoia groves, in both the national
parks and the national forests. Their concern is one of
nature-minus-people (more accurately, nature-minus-Europeans), that is, the attempt to restore the "natural" ecosystem
as it was. Specifically, the Leopold Committee report on
Wildlife Management in the National Parks (1963) states
that `the goal of managing the national parks and monuments
should be to preserve, or where necessary to recreate, the
ecologic scene as viewed by the first European visitors’
(Bonnicksen 1988). This has meant not just recreating the
state of the giant sequoia groves in 1833 when Zenas Leonard
became the first European to see them (Engbeck 1973). It
has also meant recreating the dynamics of the ecosystem
at that time, and in particular the re-creation of sequoia
regeneration must be recreated. In fact, some of the groves
do not seem to be regenerating, and may die out in a couple
thousand years (quite a long-range management point of
view, I might add; consider the Roman Empire 2000 years
later). Thus, to ‘preserve the ecologic scene’ of the sequoia
groves, the emphasis in management has been to encourage
giant sequoia regeneration. The primary way to do this in the
National Parks has been through fire-both prescribed burns
and naturally-ignited burns. This has led to a lot of fire in the
forest (too much according to some), which has started
public debate and also professional debate focused on fire
management implementation.
The Ethics of Sequoia Management
The Forest Service's solution to the problem of sequoia
regeneration was more drastic: instead of using fire to thin
the trees that have allegedly choked off sequoia reproduction,
it opted to log them and sell the timber. In fact, a clearcutting
policy was instituted, which removed the last 50 years of
sequoia regeneration as well. Now, I think that
there is no natural process that would lead to the complete
removal of all vegetation except for adolescent and mature
giant sequoias, which is what happened in Sequoia National
Forest between 1982 and 1987 (except perhaps the Mountain
Home fire of 1297); but that's not the point. Clearly, the
management policies followed by the Forest Service during
that period were not "natural"; they were not intended to
be, since the Forest Service wants to sell timber, not just
preserve forests. But there really is only a difference of
degree between the management policies of the Forest
Service and the National Park Service.
If I take off my Save-the-Redwoods League hat and put
on my linguistics hat for a moment, I can state that the verbs
‘preserve’ and ‘recreate’ both require a volitional agent to
carry out the action described. The decision not to let the
allegedly moribund giant sequoia groves become extinct in a
USDA Forest Service Gen. Tech. Rep.PSW-151. 1994.
couple thousand years or so is a human choice. One could
argue that it might be more "natural" to let them die out.
After all, they barely survived the ice ages, and fossils tell us
that other members of the redwood family simply didn't
make it. But that's the wrong argument too: it is a human
choice to let the groves die out (if that's what might really
happen), or to let fuel loads increase, as they did during the
period of fire suppression, or to let naturally-ignited fires
burn. We can tell it's a conscious human decision; it is a
policy that was formulated after much effort, and is now
implemented and regulated.
This example shows the real problem with the "natural"
argument. For better or worse, people are now part of the
Sierra Nevada ecosystem. The Sierra Nevada ecosystem
consists not only of the mixed-conifer forest with its giant
sequoia groves, but also vast acres of cutover land (not all of
which is coming back as second-growth forest), paved roads,
Giant Forest Lodge, Fresno, air pollution, hundreds of
thousands of RV's, millions of human feet, and all of the
other components of the modern Sierra Nevada. And while
we can still try to recreate the image of a giant sequoia grove
of 1833 (including prescribed fire), as if it were an island
in time surrounded by the modern human ecosystem, we
cannot really separate the two. This is true at the ecological
level, of course-we can't put a bubble around the groves
to keep out the pollution from the Central Valley, for
example-but it's also true at the human level. I for one
cannot think about how to manage Giant Forest without first
thinking that it's the last reasonably pristine major sequoia
grove, since Converse Basin has been clearcut and Mountain
Home has been logged of many of its whitewoods. Nor can I
think of the management of the mixed-conifer forest in and
around it without thinking that it is part of only a tiny
fraction of the original old-growth mixed-conifer belt
remaining, with much of the rest probably to be logged.
These thoughts all pertain to ethical values. If I say,
for example, that we shouldn't let a prescribed burn or a
permitted natural burn kill a mature giant sequoia because
there just aren't that many of them left, I'm making an
ethical judgement. It is equally an ethical judgement to let
such a burn kill a mature sequoia. It may look natural in the
narrow view of what is happening on those few acres of
land, but not in the larger context of what has happened to
the Sierra Nevada in the last 150 years. Human agency is the
dominant force over nature today, and determines how the
sequoias are to live: as timber (as in Converse Basin Grove
in the 1890s, and also in the 1990s); as relics in a tree
plantation (as in Long Meadow Grove in Sequoia National
Forest); as part of a summer home community (as in the
private Alder Creek Grove, and parts of McIntyre Grove in
Sequoia National Forest); as commercial tourist attractions
(how Mariposa Grove was formerly managed, and how parts
of Giant Forest still are); or as fragments of America's wild
past, as the Leopold Commission recommended-or as some
combination of all of these.
9
A ‘Land Ethic’ for the Future
Giant sequoia management is an ethical act, a decision
based on human values. People are not simply part of
the Sierra Nevada ecosystem; the surviving fragments of
the Sierra Nevada ecosystem are part of modern American
society, a part that American society chose to keep. Enough
people valued the preservation of the sequoias, and the
Sierra Nevada forests in general, that forest reserves and
national parks were established at the end of the nineteenth
century. Enough people valued the preservation of the
sequoia groves in their 1833 state that the National Park
Service's management policy was established. Enough people
valued the sequoia groves that the National Park Service's
fire policy has been challenged and questioned in public
forums, and there was legal action against the Forest Service
that led to the mediated settlement agreement for Sequoia
National Forest. For many of those people, this expressed
what Aldo Leopold called the "land ethic" in which we treat
sequoias and other living things as we do people: belonging
to the world in their own right. The land ethic is, as the name
implies, an ethic: it is part of our humanistic heritage. This is
not the only ethical value that has led to the preservation of
the giant sequoias and other natural treasures, however. For
example, the ethic that our children's lives should be as rich
as ours also values the preservation of the sequoias, as does
also the ethic described forcefully by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
in The Brothers Karamazov: ‘Mankind can live without
learning, without bread; only beauty is indispensable.’
10
Of course, ethical goals can only be accomplished through
scientific means. Our choices as to what characteristics
and natural processes of the sequoia forest to preserve
or recreate are only the first step; how those choices are
achieved owes a great deal to the scientific study of forest
ecosystems, the role of fire, etc. But the scientific knowledge
is a means to an end which is dictated by society. The
Leopold Commission report is a public policy statement, not a
scientific research paper. Public policy and the ethical values
that lead to its adoption are choices that a society makes. Our
society must choose whether to preserve the giant sequoias
and other aspects of the Sierra Nevada forests, how much of
them to preserve, and how to go about preserving them. In a
democratic society such as ours, all voices can and should
be heard. Society is not just the government agencies and
legislators charged with carrying out the wishes of society,
but nongovernmental organizations and concerned citizens
who voice ethical values that are not always expressed through
government officials. Only in this way can we be assured of
choosing the best policy for managing the giant sequoias.
References
Bonnicksen, Thomas M. 1988. Restoration ecology: philosophy, goals and
ethics. The Environmental Professional 10: 25-35.
Engbeck, Joseph H., Jr. 1973. The enduring giants. 3rd ed. Sacramento:
California Department of Parks and Recreation.
Leopold, A.S.; Cain, A.S.; Cottam, C.M.; Gabrielson, I.N.; Kimball, T.L.
1963. Wildlife management in the national parks. America Forests 69:
32-35 and 61-63.
McEvedy, Colin; Jones, Richard. 1978. Atlas of world population history.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books; 361 p.
USDA Forest Service Gen. Tech. Rep.PSW-151. 1994.