REDWOOD NEEDLES Presented by the Sierra Club Redwood Chapter Newsletter, The REDWOOD NEEDLES Return to Article Menu Redwood Needles April 1999   From the Chair... Let's celebrate! Thousand year old trees saved from the chain saw!   But, there's more to it than that.   Dear folks, A lot of astounding land and the creatures it harbors got preserved for all time on midnight of March 1st, 1999. Namely, we taxpayers paid a bunch of money to a rich man and made him a little richer in order to save the Headwaters forest from his threats to destroy it. Your little Redwood Chapter was very deeply involved in the whole process of the citizens getting the ownership of this forest. We even got ourselves in a bit of hot water with our own big Sierra Club by telling them that other Pacific Lumber/Maxxam lands needed more protection than they were getting in the "deal." Maybe our nagging had some effect. Let me tell you about the land we've bought-a personal story, not as dramatic as the ones you can read in some of the books about Headwaters.   I live on the road that eventually leads into that forest, Elk River Road. I'm an old lady that doesn't go backpacking or usually go on long hikes. Getting in to Headwaters is five miles in and five miles out. At the third mile in, it started to rain, but we persisted. We got to a steep, muddy clearcut and turned past a bulldozed slimy mud hill and came upon those trees.   Wild. There. The way they have aways been. There.   You can't walk into this forest. The duff is thousands of years of duff. There is no bottom to the duff. And it is made up of thousands of years of fallen leaves and branches and trees. The forest floor astounded me almost more than the trees. There is no floor to this forest. And no top to these trees. I almost cried. We took shelter in a burned out hole in a giant tree and were amazed-and then felt very wet and very cold. We gave up, and trudged the five miles home through mud and pouring rain. My fifteen minutes on the very edge of the Headwaters forest.   This is a place in which you do not want to have paths or roads or bathrooms for the tourist. This is a place that has to be left the way it is. Forest before humanity came.   So. We own it. But we paid a big price.   A lot of money. And almost carte blanche for fifty years, on this timber company's forest lands. That's what the Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) is. Fifty years of a timber company doing what their HCP says, with no rights for anyone to interfere. Every environmentalist involved in this matter worked to the point of breakdown to get stern wildlife and stream protections into the Pacific Lumber HCP. Because this one sets precedents for other HCPs and the money paid for other land acquisitions. But-lots of politics. Our Governor Davis and our Senator Byron Sher did yeoman last minute work on keeping some of the better rules in the plan. And as of this writing on March 3rd, we don't even know what was given up by the Feds in order to get this to go through. But we know that we have a lot more work before us. Our major concern is the many coho salmon streams that this company is logging on and has already decimated. My own Elk River, for one. So-we can rejoice to have saved a wild and ancient forest. Now we need to get to work to see if we can improve the logging practices to be used in the rest of the forests that Pacific Lumber owns. Whatever we can do here can set precedents for other private forests in California and maybe even the whole country.   So, be ready-we're going to be hitting you up for money shortly !   But take care meanwhile, and rejoice that an original piece of the planet will stay with us. Doing its job to try to keep us sane.   -Marianne de Sobrino, Chair, Redwood Chapter Return to Article Menu Last updated on 3/02/99 Comments or suggestions? Drop us a line at heyneedles@aol.com