On January 13, 1899, Charles Sprague Sargent, director of Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, wrote to John Muir:
Redwood and Sugar Pine photographs — how are these to be had for enlargement into transparencies for the Museum in New York where these two friends of yours ought to appear to best advantage? It would be practically impossible to get a photograph of either an isolated Sugar Pine or Redwood that would do justice to those trees. 1
Sargent was summing up the problem of distilling a mere image from the world’s most imposing plants — and by extension speaking to the impossibility of photographing the natural sublime, transmuting the experience of evolutionary majesty to meager film and paper. I assure you that I have not myself succeeded in translating my in-the-moment sensations while standing lens-to-bark with the specimens represented here, any more than I have been successful in photographically representing “California” — for which these trees have come to be shorthand — in all the glory of its considerable environmental beauty. 2 I assure you also that I am well aware of Sargent and Muir’s contributions to the deadly myth of Manifest Destiny, founded as it was in garden-variety White supremacy and misplaced heroic conceptions of nature.
Of course it is impossible to photographically represent ‘California’ — for which these trees have come to be shorthand.
Two entities, for me and for many, fuse to signify Californian landscape grandeur: the Pacific, and the trees. But I am not bothered in this essay with the ocean, only with the trees that have worked in tandem with the vast sea to define the state’s identity as rugged and seemingly boundless. Who among us hasn’t seen one or another 19th-century photograph of two loggers standing on their springboards well above the forest floor preparing to make their back cut, their enormously long “misery whip” (a two-handled felling saw) already worked with mighty effort through the heartwood and waiting to finish the fatal facing cut that would drop the colossus?
These images, too, belong to California’s quintessence, emblems of the state as resource-rich and to-be-exploited. These “resources” were integral to poorly understood ecosystems and inextricable from the Indigenous lands the trees stood on. Yet, cut for lumber, blasted away by hydraulic gold mining, cleared for development, the trees came down. To feed American expansion, they were appropriated from their Indigenous stewards, seized violently and without understanding of the environments to which both the trees and the tribes were fundamental. This taking was antithetical to stories shared across generations by the peoples whose guardianship was usurped — stories describing trees as created by, or born of, ancestral spirits, or even as ordinary humans transformed. Such tales invested trees with powerful familial significance.
Newly arriving Californians told their own stories of trees. They built San Francisco and its northern-Californian neighbors out of mighty redwood forests; named towns for them; took the redwood, sequoia, oak, pine, and sycamore, among other species, as symbols; and from these symbols, forged a new identity of place that for a while must have seemed immutable. Almost as powerful and poetical as the trees themselves, this symbology’s sway grew until it was part of the state’s outsized mythos. Settler and arriviste Californians, from the laborer to the rapacious capitalist, expected that, like the trees, the myth would be everlasting and ever-germinating. Trees entered Californians’ psyches and stuck fast.
What now?
By 2021, tree cover in California’s mountainous region had declined almost seven percent from its density as measured in 1985. 3 A 2015 paper in Nature estimated that California included habitat for 4.5 billion temperate-region conifers. 4 This adds up to hundreds of million trees lost in three-and-a-half decades. Infernos (I must be explicitly honest) visited on forests by massive wildfires are destroying them faster than they can reseed and immolating ancient groves once thought to be impervious, now dying choked with unmanaged flaming underbrush — a fearsome fuel fed on ignorance and misperception.
Massive wildfires are destroying forests faster than they can reseed and immolating ancient groves once thought to be impervious.
Drought and heat are stressing and killing trees. Bark and oak beetles’ ranges are expanding. Such environmental hazards are plentiful enough without factoring in humankind’s more banal threats, visited on forestland by chainsaw. We are repeatedly told in so many words by foresters and scientists that the state’s arboreal emblems will not survive in the majesty we have taken for granted. The plain language of the paper describing the decimation since 1985 is worth repeating: “Post-disturbance recovery has not been able to compensate for recent severe losses of tree cover, and, as a consequence, forest resources are declining across the state.” 5
Sierra junipers are native to the northern Sierra Range and may grow as trees or shrubs, depending on exposure and available water. Host to mistletoe and popular as a bonsai subject, this is an extremely long-lived species. The Scofield juniper, the oldest accurately measured specimen, was still standing in 1998, and was determined to have died in 1165 or shortly thereafter — at which time it was 2,675 years old. Photographed in 2010.
Douglas firs are a native conifer, distributed throughout northern California. They are long-lived and possessed of thick bark able to stand low- to medium-intensity wildfires. Photographed in 2015.
Coast or California redwoods rely on coastal fog, and their range is constrained by this necessity. They can live more than 2,000 years and are some of the longest-lived terrestrial organisms; they can reach over 350 feet tall, and their trunks can be 20 feet in diameter. Thick-barked and adapted to fire, coast redwoods are nevertheless susceptible to the extremely hot wildfires fed in recent years by drought and generations of thick undergrowth. Coast redwoods in the wilderness were red-listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature — although the most recent assessment was performed in 2011, and did not factor in global-warming-related effects that increasingly threaten the population. Photographed in 2011.
Coast or California redwoods are adapted for fire survival, with thick bark and strong tannins; fire thins out competitors like the Douglas fir, and reduces the load of combustible underbrush that, left in place, leads to hotter and more destructive burns. A changing (warming) climate stresses trees and leaves them increasingly vulnerable to fire, as do management protocols that favor fire suppression. Photographed in 2013.
Hikers investigate an old-growth “goose-pen” redwood, so called because settlers allegedly kept flocks in such cavities, which are the result of fire or other physical damage. After a trunk sustains a significant but survivable injury, the injured area may rot and dry; fires will later burn out the dried wood. Redwoods take up moisture and soil nutrients through a relatively thin cambium layer just beneath (and protected by) the tree’s thick bark, and are thus able to live with these large caves — as long as they remain structurally sound enough to stand. The cathedral-like openings may even have protected trees by making them unattractive to loggers. Photographed in 2011.
This fused redwood formed as two trees grew together. Photographed in 2014.
The acorn woodpecker fills the bark of many trees (and the wood of even finished fenceposts) with acorns to supply themselves through the winter. One family unit will stock several granaries, and defend their caches from other birds and squirrels. The thick-barked Jeffery pine is a favored granary site. Related to the Ponderosa, the Jeffery pine prefers high elevations, and ranges as far as Baja California Norte. Photographed in 2013.
Douglas firs were once an important industrial resource in Northern Californian logging and mill towns. The seeds of manzanita are activated by fire, although high-intensity burns will kill both trees and seeds. Photographed in 2011.
Bay laurels are a native California species commonly known as “pepperwood trees” due to the scent of their leaves. Often occurring with redwoods in low-altitude forests, they also grow in river estuaries. Photographed in 2019.
Blue oaks, sometimes called white or mountain oaks, are endemic to California, and found in the Central Valley foothills from north to south. Adapted to drought and poor, shallow soil, they are one of the state’s most common chapparal-zone trees. Younger trees, especially, can withstand low-intensity grass fires. Photographed in 2013.
To lose a totem is destabilizing, individually and culturally, and I have spoken with Californians deeply distressed by the state of the state’s forests. I am not a Californian, but I have seen beetle-wrought devastation in subalpine areas of the Sierras, high enough in elevation that the beetles had not previously been able to survive the winter, and the experience has shaken me. This is an irrefutable view of global warming in process, as powerful as watching glaciers calving at the Arctic Circle. We inhabit a time where the symbols we have built on the charnel grounds of the myths told by the state’s first folklorists are themselves being dispatched — and again at our western hands.
Civilizations are compromised when potent emblems are lost; we have only to look to the diaspora of California’s First Peoples to see that. (There is no need to seek as far as ancient Greece.) It clarifies the mind to find ourselves facing the world of anguish that European-pilgrim culture has methodically visited on others. It inclines me to want to take refuge in the trees, to drink in their wildness, in search of some opportunity for atonement that eludes and now might not exist.
Visit the trees — not as an act of morbid climate tourism, but to touch the sublime that I have failed to photograph and no journal can publish.
In experiencing these pictures, I hope that you don’t see generalized representations of west-coast identity, but appreciate the individuality of each tree as an organism that is part of the still more significant whole. For that is their role; that is the mantle we are stripping from them. I also hope that these pictures inspire you to get out and see California’s trees for yourself, whichever you can find — sequoia and other conifers, oak, yucca (Joshua trees are yuccas): all and more are threatened. Do this, if you can, not as an act of morbid climate tourism, but as a way of touching the sublime that I have failed to photograph and no journal can publish. This experience is vital to the understanding of what it is we are endangering and losing: living organisms whose life cycles we are part of and depend on desperately.
Look at these pictures, go out into the world, become connected. Do justice to those trees. 6
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