National Geographic
October 2009
Redwoods: The Super Trees
by Joel K. Bourne, Jr.

I loved this comprehensive, thoughtful, long (35 pages!) feature on a fascinating and amazing plant–the redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). These trees can live 2,000 years and grow to 379 feet in height.

The story chronicles the trek that Mike Fay, a Wildlife Conservation Society biologist and National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, took in 2007 when he walked the length of the redwood's range. It details the history of the redwood forestry industry and its key players: Pacific Lumber Company, Humboldt Redwood Company, Mendocino Redwood Company and Green Diamond Resource Company. And it presents several innovative ideas.

They can grow to be the tallest trees on Earth. They can produce lumber, support jobs, safeguard clear waters, and provide refuge for countless forest species.

If we let them.

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Perhaps the most amazing thing about redwoods is their ability to produce sprouts whenever the cambium–the living tissue just beneath the bark–is exposed to light. If the top breaks off or a limb gets sheared or the tree gets cut by a logger, a new branch will sprout from the wound and grow like crazy. Throughout the forest you can find tremendous stumps with cluster of second-generation trees, often called fairy rings, around their bases. These trees are all clones of the parent, and their DNA could be thousands of years old.

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…a tree's annual rate of wood production increases with age for at least 1,500 years. More important, the older it gets, the more high-quality, rot-resistant heartwood it puts on.

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After walking through every kind of managed forest and talking to foresters on all sides of the issue, Mike Fay is convinced there's a better way: Grow bigger trees, which can maximize wood production while providing good habitat. "You've got to start thinking about this as an ecosystem," he says. "All these plantations might as well be growing corn. But if you want clean water, salmon, wildlife, and high-quality lumber, you've got to have a forest."

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Some call this ecological forestry, in which the forest is managed to provided wildlife habitat and clean rivers as well as forestry jobs and wood products.

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Which means that along with high-quality wood, carbon storage, clean water, and wildlife habitat, ecological forestry can bring back another benefit for which redwoods are justly famous: utter awe.