Two unusually stubborn men from Texas -- one rich, the other never quite sure of having gas money or whether his truck's head gasket will last till the next interstate exit -- are locked in a battle over the last of California's privately owned ancient redwoods. Doug Thron, 24, a nature photographer, became an environmentalist after he saw the wild land in Richardson, Texas, he had hiked as a boy paved with malls and condos. Charles Hurwitz, 54, raided and leveraged his way to an '80s-style fortune, acquiring a random bag of companies, including Kaiser Aluminum and the Pacific Lumber Co. From his Houston headquarters, Hurwitz seems puzzled that other people care about some big trees Pacific owns in Humboldt County, California.
Humboldt is a region of hardscrabble logging towns along Highway 101 on the foggy coast of northern California. Here it is still possible to see a big truck grinding toward the Pacific Lumber mill at Scotia with a single, monstrous redwood log, 15 ft. in diameter. A tree that can produce logs this size is worth upwards of $150,000.
Take your pick, dreamer or dealmaker. Here is Thron, a sturdy, straightforward fellow who looks like one of those happy, hey-no-prob guys in the beer commercials. But he's an activist who gave up his senior year at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, to rumble around the country in a beat-up truck, presenting some 80 slide shows of his logging photos to environmental groups. It's all in support of a bill now in Congress, the Headwaters Forest Act, that would preserve most of the remaining old-growth redwood groves, which contain trees that have survived uncut, some of them, since before Rome fell. The bill, introduced by Congressman Dan Hamburg, a Democrat from Humboldt County, has 123 co-sponsors and the support of the Clinton Administration.
Most of the 5,000 to 6,000 acres of privately owned old growth that remain can be seen in five minutes from a small plane circling inland near Humboldt Bay. Thron and pilot Lew Nash, a volunteer for the environmental flying service Lighthawk, point out fragments of what was an enormous woodland. There is one intact 3,000-acre forest called Headwaters -- the largest uncut stand anywhere still in private hands -- and smaller clusters surviving around Owl Creek, Allen Creek and Shaw Creek. All are listed for cutting. "They want to turn all that into lawn furniture and hot-tub decking," Thron yells over the Cessna's intercom. A much larger area of nearly 40,000 acres is scarred and scraped by bulldozers, its salmon-spawning streams choked with silt. Some of this is healthy second growth (redwoods reach marketable size in 50 to 80 years), but the recently logged areas look as if they had been fought over by an armored division. This is a tree farm, not a forest; viable commercially but useless to creatures who had lived here. Congressman Hamburg wants the government to buy the combined 44,000-acre tract, old growth and new, from Pacific Lumber.