I don’t have time to wax poetically about how the redwoods are beautiful and majestic (they are both), or to elaborate on the history of the region, from the First Nations who lived within this rich ecosystem to the clear-cutting loggers who devastated it—or even the first-round conservationists who worked to protect what remains. Wikipedia can help us though: In 1850, old-growth redwood forest covered more than 2,000,000 acres (8,100 km2) of the California coast. The northern portion of that area, originally inhabited by Native Americans, attracted many lumbermen and others turned gold miners when a minor gold rush brought them to the region. Failing in efforts to strike it rich in gold, these men turned toward harvesting the giant trees[4] for booming development in San Francisco and other places on the West Coast. After many decades of unobstructed clear-cut logging, serious efforts toward conservation began. By the 1920s the work of the Save-the-Redwoods League, founded in 1918 to preserve remaining old-growth…Continue Reading