On a quiet Wednesday morning near Miranda, California, as the fog lifts in the forest, a man approaches a redwood tree. The man is Buck Tallman, 44. He's wearing a shirt with cutoff sleeves and a red dented hard hat over the 32-stitch scar on his forehead, where a redwood limb snapped loose and whacked him a few years ago. Tallman is a faller, as lumberjacks are known in redwood country. He has a holster of wedges on his hip, and swinging nonchalantly from one calloused hand is a 20-pound Stihl chain saw with a 36-inch bar, long enough to slice up a six-foot-diameter tree. This redwood, not that big but far larger and older than Tallman, stands at the clearing's edge with two other, smaller trees. Tallman looks up, inhaling the Christmas-tree fragrance. The redwood's trunk tapers sharply, its soft, matted bark shadowy with dust and spiderwebs. Up high, patches of sun strike its needled branches and then fall to splash over Tallman's boots.
A few feet away, forester Jim Able, stocky and wry, is examining the tree. Able has taken to calling it Luna II, after the famous redwood, visible through his car window on the drive down from Eureka, that activist Julia Butterfly Hill occupied for years to protest old-growth logging. Where Hill would see a tree, Able sees both a tree and a forest product. Scientists say duplicating the environmental conditions that produced old-growth redwood forests may be impossible. Foresters claim that economic pressures make it necessary to choose: If we can't afford to lock up every redwood in parks, then which do we want—managed forests or subdivisions? Or is it already too late to choose? Biologist Ron LeValley, a private consultant, says, "There are no unmanaged lands anymore."
Sunlight peeks through the canopy of a redwood forest in Arcata, California. Forester Jim Able calls redwoods "children of the storm," for their ability to survive disasters that include floods, insects, and fires.
