Redwood Trees

Ventura County environmental leaders kicked off a campaign Thursday to win voter approval for Proposition 130, a forest and wildlife protection measure on the November ballot. Environmentalists who back the proposal say it seeks to stop timber companies from cutting down the last 5% of California's ancient redwood trees. "We want to make a strong statement that the environment will be controlled by the people," said Russ Baggerly, a spokesman for the Ventura County Environmental Coalition.

Environmentalists rallied Sunday to block logging in the ancient redwood groves of the Headwaters Forest in an afternoon marked by a heavy law enforcement presence and two arrests. A stream of demonstrators, most in cars and vans but some on bicycles or walking, clogged the narrow, twisting road to the rally site in the tiny community of Stafford off U.S. 101, about 250 miles north of San Francisco.

Pacific Lumber Co.'s plan to log 453 acres of old-growth timber in the north coast Headwaters Forest was rejected Friday by the California Department of Forestry. CDF officials cited concerns for the rare marbled murrelet, a robin-sized bird that nests in the tops of ancient redwood trees near the Pacific Ocean. The decision was the latest obstacle to Pacific Lumber's plans to log the 3,000 acres of virgin timber east of Eureka known as the Headwaters Forest.

In a decision hailed Tuesday by environmentalists, a Humboldt County Superior Court judge has ruled that the state Department of Forestry appeared to have "rubber stamped" plans by the Pacific Lumber Co. to cut 385 acres of old-growth redwood trees and Douglas fir.

John McElroy is a silver-haired scholar who has spent countless hours of the past two years in the grip of a thoroughly improbable idea. It came to him one day out of nowhere and won't let him be. It involves stately redwood trees, visions of world harmony and Christopher Columbus. When the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America was still a few years away, McElroy, an English professor at the University of Arizona, began wondering how it would be celebrated.

A classic struggle is playing out here in the first capital of California, and it's anyone's guess who the victor will be: God or nature. On one side stands San Carlos Borromeo de Monterey, believed to be the oldest continuously functioning church in California, completed in 1794. On the other, a small stand of stately redwood trees, whose roots have made their way through the chapel's foundation and threaten its survival.

House and Senate negotiators completed an agreement Wednesday night overcoming what they said were the major obstacles to legislation intended to protect the core of Humboldt County's Headwaters Forest, the only remaining stand of privately owned ancient redwood trees in the nation, congressional and Clinton administration sources said.

Burly Allan Silliphant took a step backward and craned to see the top of the fragrant sapling thriving alongside the creek. It's a redwood in Glendale--just one of a couple of hundred others that Silliphant hopes will be growing in the vicinity before too long.

An innovative proposal to forgive a logging company's debt in exchange for saving California's largest private forest of old-growth redwoods would set a precedent that could help preserve thousands of environmentally sensitive properties across the nation, state officials said Tuesday. State officials estimate that at least 15% of more than 41,000 properties seized by the federal government from bankrupt savings and loans could be obtained for public use under similar arrangements.

Citing chronic violations of the state's forest protection law, the California Department of Forestry has taken the unusual step of denying a license to cut timber next year to Pacific Lumber Co., owner of the embattled Headwaters Forest along the North Coast. Forestry officials said the agency took the action because the company had committed more than 100 infractions of the Forest Practices Act in the last three years.