It breaks my heart…again and again. And when I am in Washington or Oregon and see those truck beds filled with trees, I cry. I live in Central Texas where there’s no big old growth forests or commercial forests that I know of so seeing my kin being hauled out of those forests is traumatic—for the trees and for me. Thank you for this article bringing memory of the old forests back to us.
I know exactly how you feel Pamela. The greed of these people seems to rival the height and girth of these elders of the forest. Thanks to you Max for this important story.
I know how you feel, too, Pamela, and I live here in Oregon. The thing is, most of the cut is now coming from private timberlands, and there's basically *nothing* legal that can be done to stop that and allow those lands to recover. So, the whole environmental movement focuses on protecting Federal and State owned lands — which is critically important, but still. It's a defensive battle, and defense can only go in one direction.
Here's a 3-year-old, 10-minute PBS mini-documentary on the struggle to preserve the giants in Fairy Creek: https://youtu.be/mRd8_Tu7YDs Might be a good resource for folks who prefer to view and listen, rather than read (both are great, of course). Thanks, Max, for your dedicated witness. Those photos were tough to look at.
Thanks for the report, Max. Reminded of this from John Trudell: "… the being part of human is being mined through the logic of the human, alright, and the emotions of the human. The being of spirit, the spirit of being is what is being mined through the logics and emotions of the human, in order to run this system, see.
I mean this is the purpose of techno-logic civilization. They call it techno-logic for a very specific reason. This isn’t an accident, okay? You know, it truly isn’t. But the purpose of the civiliz[ation] – and so one of the civilizing processes is to erase memories. Alright?, to erase memories. Because we have ancestral memory. It’s encoded in the DNA – it’s a genetic memory.
You look at how techno-logic civilization – and everywhere that it goes, the longer it’s there, the more isolated the human beings – but they’re not called human beings, they’re workers and citizens, etc., alright? Alright? But the more isolated they feel, they no longer – you know, maybe they remember their grandparents or their great grandparents.
But see, you’ve got all that ancestral knowledge that’s encoded in the DNA, but it’s been cut off. So it can’t activate because if we’re not conscious that it’s there then we can’t – it just makes [things] difficult. See this is the memory that it’s very important for them to erase. Alright, and it’s about who we are – it’s memory of identity and self-reality."
That, and from Buddhist lore, the hungry ghost... which i was re-thinking about recently b/c of noticing the appetite for more and more even as there's less and less e.g. open spaces, and what Tecumseh said, probably early 1800s, attests to that, "...once a happy race, since made miserable by the white people who are never contented but always encroaching."
I live in Marietta, Ohio, and have put out a call for anyone knowing the location of an old growth forest. I have received no replies, even though we are at the border of the Wayne National Forest, notable for its 6,000 abandoned oil and gas wells. It is not too great a leap to call humans a plague upon God's earth. I took my two youngest children out west when they were 7 or 8 yrs. old and have pics of them standing near Redwoods as tall as your description, and recall the drive up the Pacific coast of the Olympic Peninsula being cited for having 6 of the tallest members of a number of species, including a Sitka Spruce we stopped at and watched an elderly man assist his blind wife up to the base of so she could touch it. We have lost track of what's important in life. Many thanks for this painful story and the heart breaking photos, as goofy as that sounds. Your courage and devotion to the truth is much appreciated. Have a blessed evening and hug a tree whenever possible, as I do.
Thank you Greeley. I have a few friends in Ohio, and I think they've mentioned in the past a few remnants patches. But I could be wrong. I'm blessed to live under a pair of 80-year-old white oak trees, and I give thanks to them every day for their shade, oxygen, beauty, soil protection, carbon sequestration, acorns, wildlife habitat, and on and on. We owe a great debt to these beings.
Old Growth Forest Network (founded by Dr. Joan Maloof) is a national organization that has worked to educate, designate, and preserve the precious remaining ancients on our continent. I happily support and highly recommend.
Thanks, again, Max, for sharing this vital ecological history. In 1970, I lived in the Family of the Three Lights commune near Marblemount, WA (about 60 miles east of Bellingham), close to the North Cascades National Park. There were quite a few remnant stumps of the ancient cedar trees on our land that were logged back around 1900 or so. We measured a few of them and they were about 12 to 14 feet in diameter and had been cut at about the height up from the ground that we see in those photos that you shared. The rain that had fallen on them in the decades since they had been killed, along with the work of insects and micro beings, had worn them down quite a bit, so they must have been larger than that before. The rain had also hollowed out the stumps, so one couple who lived with us carved a house out of the remaining cedar stump shell.
Wow, thanks for sharing that, George. As I think you know, I grew up in Seattle and went to school in Bellingham, and like anyone whose done a fair bit of wandering around in the woods of the PNW, it's impossible to not end up seeing these stumps. Remnants of what has been lost.
I forgot to add, I have a post on my WordPress blog, Rephaim23/Pacific Forests, which I started 12 years ago and maintain as an amateur research project, entitled, "Tallest Douglas Fir in America," and it has the over 300 accounts of fir and Redwoods, and another post, "Pinus Strobus Resurrectus" which I started in 2019, has the White Pine accounts in the East. I add several new finds every year to these pages, and I may start a post on the historic felled Red Cedars and Sitka Spruce at some point, as they too were logged to a similar ratio as the great Douglas fir and Redwoods, with some stories and reports of them 250, 300 and up to 400 foot for Spruce and Cedar, and in one case a 23 ft diameter, 407 feet tall Cedar was reportedly felled. The "Ocosta Cedar" cut down in 1894, at 407 ft, which if these measurements are even approximately accurate, would make it almost as massive as the Eel River Redwood! I sense that old news archives, lumber journals, pioneer diaries, county histories, and antique photo collections may yet contain many, possibly even hundreds more lost conifer giants yet to be found both on east and west coast in private and public collections, and or yet to be digitized. Perhaps by unlocking the past, we can have an even greater appreciation for our remnant old growth, and it can inspire further preservation and nourishment of our young and mature forests, so they too can become the giants and ancient ones for coming generations. Thank you again for writing this article, and bringing awareness to these issues, as they are those things that truly matter in this life.
Thanks for this, Max. I am looking at these giants in the context of a recent NYT piece concerning global aridification in which land use (deforestation, industrial ag, urbanization, etc) is hardly acknowledged, with atmospheric carbon treated as the only cause, which in the case of aridification is especially backward. The Lakota remind us, mni wiconi--water is life. As we've scraped the earth of life, we've also scraped it of water. Imagine how much water those giants moved. Would Washington's forests be drying out and burning if such mega-fountains of life and water were still around, still pumping massive amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere? These questions never get asked, and the conventional climate narrative STILL ignores the role of life in climate, pushing ever harder a narrative which will only lead to more ruined land, unable to hydrate itself. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/climate/global-desertification.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
The shifting baseline syndrome is not only heartbreaking, it lies at the bottom of misunderstanding around climate. We simply don't know what are climates are supposed to be like because we've destroyed the climate managers, the long-evolved ecosystems. Our physical destruction of the world has evolved into a climate-science dismissiveness of life. I know I may be a bit obsessed on this, but it's a big deal.
I'm sure you're aware of the "forest health" debate, in which the timber industry claims that forests need more "management" (logging) to maintain their health and prevent wildfire. I'm working on an essay on this, and would be curious what your definition of "forest health" is.
Thank you Rob, totally. Your work on this is so important. I was on the peninsula last summer, and couldn't stop thinking about the desiccation of the land. There's a shocking difference even between young forest out there, and the clearcuts.
Forest health... good question. I'm not an ecologist, so my definition probably won't be very concise or accurate, but perhaps something like: a forest is healthy when it is landscape scale, is naturally evolving in the absence of widespread anthropocentric disturbance, and is able to act as habitat for a full range of native species. That's quite academic, and I'm sure misses pieces, but something like that...
Thanks for your reply, Max. Glad I'm not alone in seeing these things. You're definition fits with what I would imagine: a healthy forest is large enough to be a forest and undisturbed enough to function naturally. Here is the US forest service definition.
"Forest health has been defined by the production of forest conditions which directly satisfy human needs and by resilience, recurrence, persistence, and biophysical processes which lead to sustainable ecological conditions. Our definitions and understanding of forest health are also dependent on spatial scale." Note the first line..."production of forest conditions which directly satisfy human needs." It has nothing to do with actual, ecosystem health. I can't believe this stuff is taken seriously, yet we're already seeing a rash of state and federal "forest health" initiatives. https://naturalresources.house.gov/legislative-priorities/fix-our-forests-act.htm
I wholeheartedly agree with your comment here. Having worked in the British Columbia rainforest on Vancouver Island and can attest to the huge difference in temperature walking under an old growth forest canopy versus a second growth forest vs a plantation. The differences in temperature and humidity are huge.
Thanks, Brent. And, as we are finding out, old, natural forests burn less often and less intensely, yet the forest officials continue to to push for "fuel reduction" policies that are completely backwards. You might like Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Climate, by Chad Hanson.
Excellent article Max! Thank you for writing about this fascinating and sort of forgotten element of our natural history. It is even more pertinent, and crucial than ever before that the remaining 5-10% of our lowland forests are protected in the Northwest, and BC. I was drawn to research the fallen giants, and tallest trees of the past, because I felt their stories were largely untold and forgotten. Since helping the Seattle Times in 2011, after finding the Nooksack Giant in archives, I have found some more accounts of 400 foot trees: A grove of standing 350 and 400 foot firs cruised in 1891 along Nooksack river (15 miles SW of the 1896 Nooksack Giant) reported in the press, an 1886 news report of a 14 ft diameter 405 ft long forest giant at Nehalem River, Oregon, accounts of 380 to 427 feet redwoods cut at the Eel River, Humboldt Co California, 1893 and 1897 - the Eel River Giant I found in archives in 2020, and the tree was sectioned, and measured in 1893 by John H French who told the press he thought its standing height was 417 ft - it was a mammoth of 24.5 ft diameter and 305,000 board feet! I also found an account of a 400 foot fir cut in ~1860 at Yoncalla, as told by Oregon pioneer, Elisha Applegate, who became a Surveyor General of that State - I am searching for more corroborative documents on some of these, but in total I now have over 300 reports of mostly historic Douglas fir 300-400 ft+ tall ( By my count, about 90% of them have been logged or are now snags). A side project I did in 2019-2022, was look for historic accounts of giant Eastern White Pines, (Pinus Strobus), and collected 90+ reports of 200-303 ft tall pines that had been cut in New York, Ontario, the Northeast, Pennsylvania and part of the Mid-west, in the 18ths to 19th centuries, and quite a few were recorded in town and county histories, giving names and dates, method of measurement (rods, chains, tape line), most often felled lengths and board feet given, some were conducted by scientists and foresters. It is sad to think that we once had pines in New York that could have towered as much as 288 ft 9 inches high, or as great as 9 feet in diameter, or 500-600 years old! Back East, they had a nearly 200 year head start on their logging operations vs the West coast, so some estimates are that less than 1% of old growth Pinus Strobus now remains, and so many of those magnificent groves were cut before cameras were invented or commonly being utilized as they were in Darius Kinsey's era, resulting in a dearth of photos.
I feel so robbed. I always tell that tale on my foraging walks, how Doug firs are historically the tallest trees in the world.
I also talk about the Western White Pine, a tree we don't usually see on our walks due to its near-extinction status and how the forests used to be full of currants and gooseberries but due to government efforts to save the white pine, the berry bushes were harvested to obliteration for about 30 years. Of course, exterminating all the currants and gooseberries didn't save the white pine.
Betty MacDonald (a famous author from the 40's) moved to Vashon Island and at the time she said it was an island famous for its gooseberries and currants. I assumed it was farms, but maybe the forests on Vashon were some of the last to have their gooseberries and currants removed.
I learned about the government mandate to remove these berry bushes to save the Western White Pine from this book.
(It's the best beginner's and kid's PNW foraging book I've found).
Anyways, I feel so robbed that I don't know how to identify a western white pine, or that I haven't seen groves and groves of ancient Doug firs or cedars, and that I've never feasted on wild gooseberries.
Thanks for sharing this story, Alissa, and for sharing the book recommendation. I'm going to get a copy for the environmental ed. work I do sometimes. Where are you based? Assuming you're in Washington, I'd be happy to share a couple locations of small but stunning remnant groves of enormous old growth fir, cedar, and hemlock (on the condition, of course, you treat them right and don't blow them up on social media/websites/etc).
This story has had a huge impact on my life. I grew up in a big city but became aware of our declining environment at the age of 13. In high school I went through a career search process and settled on Forestry. At that time I had no real idea, being a city kid that forestry meant the "management" of forests for industrial purposes. My career started in the boreal forests of northern Alberta (I live in Canada) doing regeneration surveys after forests were clearcut and managing tree planting projects. At 26 I landed a job on Vancouver Island in the reforestation section of the Ministry of Forests. The forestry profession somehow still sees clearcutting and tree planting with seeds from a very narrow gene pool as stewardship. The attitude from Foresters (called RPF's or Registered "Professional" Foresters) working for large forest companies is even more profound. Even though we have liquidated most of these large trees they still see liquidation and replacement with seedlings as Stewardship.
One of my last projects before retirement was to inspect the Klanawa River Watershed and assess compliance with the companies "Forest Stewardship Plan". This watershed directly connects to the Pacific Ocean and contains only small stands of old growth forest remaining mostly on the mountain tops. There are landslide scars everywhere on the hillsides. In my research I found an old fisheries report where the river used to carry sockeye, coho and chinook salmon as well as sea run and steelhead trout. In the 1950's the Hemlock Trees had an outbreak of the hemlock looper insect. In order to "manage" the outbreak MacMillan Blooded clearcut the valley bottom right to the edge of the river and every connected spawning stream. Since then the fish returns have been almost wiped out. The chinook and sockeye are gone, a few stragglers of coho, cutthroat and steelhead remain.
The entire industry suffers from having blinders on when it comes to what "Stewardship" means. The written plans are full of fluffy phrases that are not enforceable. The real reason they are written is to help sell the companies lumber products as "FSC Certified" (Stands for Forest Stewardship Council). Timber harvesting continues now on 50-60 year old trees that are a fraction of the size while the public is sold on the products they buy as "green".
These original old growth forests maintained the flow of rivers during floods and droughts, with their size absorbing huge amounts of water. They filtered sediment from entering streams. They provided a natural ecosystem service of supporting large fish runs that provided food supply to indigenous populations. That is all gone now with fish runs being supported by hatcheries just like lumber for trees is supported by tree nurseries. Ecosystem abundance and diversity is in serious decline. That trend mirrors how what remains of large old growth is getting much smaller.. Our perspective is warped. Unfortunately, the younger generation is even more blinded. They experience these changes to the environment by reading on the internet, not by hiking the forests, paddling the streams or fishing the rivers.
Max - thanks for this and all your other work. The photos are stunning in themselves. Trees as big as locomotives!
The logging story intersects with the infamous 1955 Supreme Court decision Tee-Hit-Ton v US. I write about it in my book. The court relied on ‘Christian discovery doctrine’ to say the Tlingit could not get compensation for trees taken from their land by the US (to make pulp for newsprint!) because the trees and the land were actually owned by the US.
I’ll send you a note about it and see if you have info about the trees in that location. Perhaps I will post an excerpt from the book to link to your post here.
A voiceover has now been added to this piece, for those who prefer listening rather than reading. It's also available on The Green Flame anywhere you get your podcasts.
It breaks my heart…again and again. And when I am in Washington or Oregon and see those truck beds filled with trees, I cry. I live in Central Texas where there’s no big old growth forests or commercial forests that I know of so seeing my kin being hauled out of those forests is traumatic—for the trees and for me. Thank you for this article bringing memory of the old forests back to us.
I know exactly how you feel Pamela. The greed of these people seems to rival the height and girth of these elders of the forest. Thanks to you Max for this important story.
I know how you feel, too, Pamela, and I live here in Oregon. The thing is, most of the cut is now coming from private timberlands, and there's basically *nothing* legal that can be done to stop that and allow those lands to recover. So, the whole environmental movement focuses on protecting Federal and State owned lands — which is critically important, but still. It's a defensive battle, and defense can only go in one direction.
Here's a 3-year-old, 10-minute PBS mini-documentary on the struggle to preserve the giants in Fairy Creek: https://youtu.be/mRd8_Tu7YDs Might be a good resource for folks who prefer to view and listen, rather than read (both are great, of course). Thanks, Max, for your dedicated witness. Those photos were tough to look at.
Thank you for sharing, Janet. Yes, they are tough to look at.
Thanks for the report, Max. Reminded of this from John Trudell: "… the being part of human is being mined through the logic of the human, alright, and the emotions of the human. The being of spirit, the spirit of being is what is being mined through the logics and emotions of the human, in order to run this system, see.
I mean this is the purpose of techno-logic civilization. They call it techno-logic for a very specific reason. This isn’t an accident, okay? You know, it truly isn’t. But the purpose of the civiliz[ation] – and so one of the civilizing processes is to erase memories. Alright?, to erase memories. Because we have ancestral memory. It’s encoded in the DNA – it’s a genetic memory.
You look at how techno-logic civilization – and everywhere that it goes, the longer it’s there, the more isolated the human beings – but they’re not called human beings, they’re workers and citizens, etc., alright? Alright? But the more isolated they feel, they no longer – you know, maybe they remember their grandparents or their great grandparents.
But see, you’ve got all that ancestral knowledge that’s encoded in the DNA, but it’s been cut off. So it can’t activate because if we’re not conscious that it’s there then we can’t – it just makes [things] difficult. See this is the memory that it’s very important for them to erase. Alright, and it’s about who we are – it’s memory of identity and self-reality."
https://hiddenhistorycenter.org/john-trudell-what-it-means-to-be-a-human-being/
Tech-no-logic indeed. That's still one of the most concise terms I've ever heard for this culture.
That, and from Buddhist lore, the hungry ghost... which i was re-thinking about recently b/c of noticing the appetite for more and more even as there's less and less e.g. open spaces, and what Tecumseh said, probably early 1800s, attests to that, "...once a happy race, since made miserable by the white people who are never contented but always encroaching."
That sounds like the insatiable, always-consuming wetiko or wendigo spirit described in many Indigenous American stories.
Yeah, George, good observation; similar yet for many Asian traditions. Btw my new poem "the hungry ghost"
https://musingsbetweenlines.substack.com/p/the-hungry-ghost
I live in Marietta, Ohio, and have put out a call for anyone knowing the location of an old growth forest. I have received no replies, even though we are at the border of the Wayne National Forest, notable for its 6,000 abandoned oil and gas wells. It is not too great a leap to call humans a plague upon God's earth. I took my two youngest children out west when they were 7 or 8 yrs. old and have pics of them standing near Redwoods as tall as your description, and recall the drive up the Pacific coast of the Olympic Peninsula being cited for having 6 of the tallest members of a number of species, including a Sitka Spruce we stopped at and watched an elderly man assist his blind wife up to the base of so she could touch it. We have lost track of what's important in life. Many thanks for this painful story and the heart breaking photos, as goofy as that sounds. Your courage and devotion to the truth is much appreciated. Have a blessed evening and hug a tree whenever possible, as I do.
Thank you Greeley. I have a few friends in Ohio, and I think they've mentioned in the past a few remnants patches. But I could be wrong. I'm blessed to live under a pair of 80-year-old white oak trees, and I give thanks to them every day for their shade, oxygen, beauty, soil protection, carbon sequestration, acorns, wildlife habitat, and on and on. We owe a great debt to these beings.
Old Growth Forest Network (founded by Dr. Joan Maloof) is a national organization that has worked to educate, designate, and preserve the precious remaining ancients on our continent. I happily support and highly recommend.
Thanks, again, Max, for sharing this vital ecological history. In 1970, I lived in the Family of the Three Lights commune near Marblemount, WA (about 60 miles east of Bellingham), close to the North Cascades National Park. There were quite a few remnant stumps of the ancient cedar trees on our land that were logged back around 1900 or so. We measured a few of them and they were about 12 to 14 feet in diameter and had been cut at about the height up from the ground that we see in those photos that you shared. The rain that had fallen on them in the decades since they had been killed, along with the work of insects and micro beings, had worn them down quite a bit, so they must have been larger than that before. The rain had also hollowed out the stumps, so one couple who lived with us carved a house out of the remaining cedar stump shell.
Wow, thanks for sharing that, George. As I think you know, I grew up in Seattle and went to school in Bellingham, and like anyone whose done a fair bit of wandering around in the woods of the PNW, it's impossible to not end up seeing these stumps. Remnants of what has been lost.
I forgot to add, I have a post on my WordPress blog, Rephaim23/Pacific Forests, which I started 12 years ago and maintain as an amateur research project, entitled, "Tallest Douglas Fir in America," and it has the over 300 accounts of fir and Redwoods, and another post, "Pinus Strobus Resurrectus" which I started in 2019, has the White Pine accounts in the East. I add several new finds every year to these pages, and I may start a post on the historic felled Red Cedars and Sitka Spruce at some point, as they too were logged to a similar ratio as the great Douglas fir and Redwoods, with some stories and reports of them 250, 300 and up to 400 foot for Spruce and Cedar, and in one case a 23 ft diameter, 407 feet tall Cedar was reportedly felled. The "Ocosta Cedar" cut down in 1894, at 407 ft, which if these measurements are even approximately accurate, would make it almost as massive as the Eel River Redwood! I sense that old news archives, lumber journals, pioneer diaries, county histories, and antique photo collections may yet contain many, possibly even hundreds more lost conifer giants yet to be found both on east and west coast in private and public collections, and or yet to be digitized. Perhaps by unlocking the past, we can have an even greater appreciation for our remnant old growth, and it can inspire further preservation and nourishment of our young and mature forests, so they too can become the giants and ancient ones for coming generations. Thank you again for writing this article, and bringing awareness to these issues, as they are those things that truly matter in this life.
Thank you so much for sharing this, Micah! I love your passion for these trees and this history. It means a lot to have you share it here.
For readers: here's Micah's blog: https://rephaim23.wordpress.com
You bet. Thanks Max!
Thanks for this, Max. I am looking at these giants in the context of a recent NYT piece concerning global aridification in which land use (deforestation, industrial ag, urbanization, etc) is hardly acknowledged, with atmospheric carbon treated as the only cause, which in the case of aridification is especially backward. The Lakota remind us, mni wiconi--water is life. As we've scraped the earth of life, we've also scraped it of water. Imagine how much water those giants moved. Would Washington's forests be drying out and burning if such mega-fountains of life and water were still around, still pumping massive amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere? These questions never get asked, and the conventional climate narrative STILL ignores the role of life in climate, pushing ever harder a narrative which will only lead to more ruined land, unable to hydrate itself. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/climate/global-desertification.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
The shifting baseline syndrome is not only heartbreaking, it lies at the bottom of misunderstanding around climate. We simply don't know what are climates are supposed to be like because we've destroyed the climate managers, the long-evolved ecosystems. Our physical destruction of the world has evolved into a climate-science dismissiveness of life. I know I may be a bit obsessed on this, but it's a big deal.
I'm sure you're aware of the "forest health" debate, in which the timber industry claims that forests need more "management" (logging) to maintain their health and prevent wildfire. I'm working on an essay on this, and would be curious what your definition of "forest health" is.
Thank you Rob, totally. Your work on this is so important. I was on the peninsula last summer, and couldn't stop thinking about the desiccation of the land. There's a shocking difference even between young forest out there, and the clearcuts.
Forest health... good question. I'm not an ecologist, so my definition probably won't be very concise or accurate, but perhaps something like: a forest is healthy when it is landscape scale, is naturally evolving in the absence of widespread anthropocentric disturbance, and is able to act as habitat for a full range of native species. That's quite academic, and I'm sure misses pieces, but something like that...
Thanks for your reply, Max. Glad I'm not alone in seeing these things. You're definition fits with what I would imagine: a healthy forest is large enough to be a forest and undisturbed enough to function naturally. Here is the US forest service definition.
"Forest health has been defined by the production of forest conditions which directly satisfy human needs and by resilience, recurrence, persistence, and biophysical processes which lead to sustainable ecological conditions. Our definitions and understanding of forest health are also dependent on spatial scale." Note the first line..."production of forest conditions which directly satisfy human needs." It has nothing to do with actual, ecosystem health. I can't believe this stuff is taken seriously, yet we're already seeing a rash of state and federal "forest health" initiatives. https://naturalresources.house.gov/legislative-priorities/fix-our-forests-act.htm
Wow. That's some heavy duty bullshit right there. Government-grade.
I wholeheartedly agree with your comment here. Having worked in the British Columbia rainforest on Vancouver Island and can attest to the huge difference in temperature walking under an old growth forest canopy versus a second growth forest vs a plantation. The differences in temperature and humidity are huge.
Thanks, Brent. And, as we are finding out, old, natural forests burn less often and less intensely, yet the forest officials continue to to push for "fuel reduction" policies that are completely backwards. You might like Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Climate, by Chad Hanson.
Excellent article Max! Thank you for writing about this fascinating and sort of forgotten element of our natural history. It is even more pertinent, and crucial than ever before that the remaining 5-10% of our lowland forests are protected in the Northwest, and BC. I was drawn to research the fallen giants, and tallest trees of the past, because I felt their stories were largely untold and forgotten. Since helping the Seattle Times in 2011, after finding the Nooksack Giant in archives, I have found some more accounts of 400 foot trees: A grove of standing 350 and 400 foot firs cruised in 1891 along Nooksack river (15 miles SW of the 1896 Nooksack Giant) reported in the press, an 1886 news report of a 14 ft diameter 405 ft long forest giant at Nehalem River, Oregon, accounts of 380 to 427 feet redwoods cut at the Eel River, Humboldt Co California, 1893 and 1897 - the Eel River Giant I found in archives in 2020, and the tree was sectioned, and measured in 1893 by John H French who told the press he thought its standing height was 417 ft - it was a mammoth of 24.5 ft diameter and 305,000 board feet! I also found an account of a 400 foot fir cut in ~1860 at Yoncalla, as told by Oregon pioneer, Elisha Applegate, who became a Surveyor General of that State - I am searching for more corroborative documents on some of these, but in total I now have over 300 reports of mostly historic Douglas fir 300-400 ft+ tall ( By my count, about 90% of them have been logged or are now snags). A side project I did in 2019-2022, was look for historic accounts of giant Eastern White Pines, (Pinus Strobus), and collected 90+ reports of 200-303 ft tall pines that had been cut in New York, Ontario, the Northeast, Pennsylvania and part of the Mid-west, in the 18ths to 19th centuries, and quite a few were recorded in town and county histories, giving names and dates, method of measurement (rods, chains, tape line), most often felled lengths and board feet given, some were conducted by scientists and foresters. It is sad to think that we once had pines in New York that could have towered as much as 288 ft 9 inches high, or as great as 9 feet in diameter, or 500-600 years old! Back East, they had a nearly 200 year head start on their logging operations vs the West coast, so some estimates are that less than 1% of old growth Pinus Strobus now remains, and so many of those magnificent groves were cut before cameras were invented or commonly being utilized as they were in Darius Kinsey's era, resulting in a dearth of photos.
I feel so robbed. I always tell that tale on my foraging walks, how Doug firs are historically the tallest trees in the world.
I also talk about the Western White Pine, a tree we don't usually see on our walks due to its near-extinction status and how the forests used to be full of currants and gooseberries but due to government efforts to save the white pine, the berry bushes were harvested to obliteration for about 30 years. Of course, exterminating all the currants and gooseberries didn't save the white pine.
Betty MacDonald (a famous author from the 40's) moved to Vashon Island and at the time she said it was an island famous for its gooseberries and currants. I assumed it was farms, but maybe the forests on Vashon were some of the last to have their gooseberries and currants removed.
I learned about the government mandate to remove these berry bushes to save the Western White Pine from this book.
https://www.chatwinbooks.com/shop/p/plant-teachings-book-cards-pacific-northwest-edition-2021
(It's the best beginner's and kid's PNW foraging book I've found).
Anyways, I feel so robbed that I don't know how to identify a western white pine, or that I haven't seen groves and groves of ancient Doug firs or cedars, and that I've never feasted on wild gooseberries.
Thanks for sharing this story, Alissa, and for sharing the book recommendation. I'm going to get a copy for the environmental ed. work I do sometimes. Where are you based? Assuming you're in Washington, I'd be happy to share a couple locations of small but stunning remnant groves of enormous old growth fir, cedar, and hemlock (on the condition, of course, you treat them right and don't blow them up on social media/websites/etc).
This story has had a huge impact on my life. I grew up in a big city but became aware of our declining environment at the age of 13. In high school I went through a career search process and settled on Forestry. At that time I had no real idea, being a city kid that forestry meant the "management" of forests for industrial purposes. My career started in the boreal forests of northern Alberta (I live in Canada) doing regeneration surveys after forests were clearcut and managing tree planting projects. At 26 I landed a job on Vancouver Island in the reforestation section of the Ministry of Forests. The forestry profession somehow still sees clearcutting and tree planting with seeds from a very narrow gene pool as stewardship. The attitude from Foresters (called RPF's or Registered "Professional" Foresters) working for large forest companies is even more profound. Even though we have liquidated most of these large trees they still see liquidation and replacement with seedlings as Stewardship.
One of my last projects before retirement was to inspect the Klanawa River Watershed and assess compliance with the companies "Forest Stewardship Plan". This watershed directly connects to the Pacific Ocean and contains only small stands of old growth forest remaining mostly on the mountain tops. There are landslide scars everywhere on the hillsides. In my research I found an old fisheries report where the river used to carry sockeye, coho and chinook salmon as well as sea run and steelhead trout. In the 1950's the Hemlock Trees had an outbreak of the hemlock looper insect. In order to "manage" the outbreak MacMillan Blooded clearcut the valley bottom right to the edge of the river and every connected spawning stream. Since then the fish returns have been almost wiped out. The chinook and sockeye are gone, a few stragglers of coho, cutthroat and steelhead remain.
The entire industry suffers from having blinders on when it comes to what "Stewardship" means. The written plans are full of fluffy phrases that are not enforceable. The real reason they are written is to help sell the companies lumber products as "FSC Certified" (Stands for Forest Stewardship Council). Timber harvesting continues now on 50-60 year old trees that are a fraction of the size while the public is sold on the products they buy as "green".
These original old growth forests maintained the flow of rivers during floods and droughts, with their size absorbing huge amounts of water. They filtered sediment from entering streams. They provided a natural ecosystem service of supporting large fish runs that provided food supply to indigenous populations. That is all gone now with fish runs being supported by hatcheries just like lumber for trees is supported by tree nurseries. Ecosystem abundance and diversity is in serious decline. That trend mirrors how what remains of large old growth is getting much smaller.. Our perspective is warped. Unfortunately, the younger generation is even more blinded. They experience these changes to the environment by reading on the internet, not by hiking the forests, paddling the streams or fishing the rivers.
Exactly shifting baseline syndrome..
Thank you for sharing this, Brent. Do you mind if I share your story in the post?
Go ahead I don't mind at all.
Tough article, even tougher photos, heartbreaking. Thank you, Max.
Thanks for reading, Geoffrey, and for your work.
Max - thanks for this and all your other work. The photos are stunning in themselves. Trees as big as locomotives!
The logging story intersects with the infamous 1955 Supreme Court decision Tee-Hit-Ton v US. I write about it in my book. The court relied on ‘Christian discovery doctrine’ to say the Tlingit could not get compensation for trees taken from their land by the US (to make pulp for newsprint!) because the trees and the land were actually owned by the US.
I’ll send you a note about it and see if you have info about the trees in that location. Perhaps I will post an excerpt from the book to link to your post here.
Thank you for that, Peter. Let me know if you post this to your Substack, I'd like to link to it.
Will do.
A voiceover has now been added to this piece, for those who prefer listening rather than reading. It's also available on The Green Flame anywhere you get your podcasts.