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8. The Redwood National Park: 1965-1968
- University of Wisconsin Press
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8 The Redwood National Park: 1965-1968 THERE WERE three stages in what became one of the major conservation battles of the 1960s-the fight to establish the Redwood National Park. The first was from the National Park Service's 1964 report until January, 1966, when it became obvious the club had failed to prevent the Johnson Administration from abandoning the service's Redwood Creek proposal in favor of the league's more modest plan. In the second phase California's Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel sponsored the administration's redwood park bill in opposition to legislation introduced by club supporters in the liberal and pro-labor wing of the Democratic Party. The third stage opened in late 1967 as Senators Kuchel and Henry Jackson advanced a compromise and ended in October, 1968, when President Johnson signed a seriously weakened park act, the result of industrial opposition and the division among the citizen groups. For the first year and a half after the Park Service's September, 1964, report recommending a large Redwood Creek park, the club's position had appeared stronger than that of the league. The White House received twenty petitions and some two thousand individual responses to the Park Service's report-all in favor of a park and two to one in favor of the largest proposal. Through summer and into early fall of 1965, Secretary Udall personally advocated a large reserve that would include at least a significant portion of Redwood Creek. National enthusiasm for conservation was quickening, and the redwoods were rapidly becoming symbolic of environmental deterioration in general. In a fall, 1965, CBS special entitled "Bulldozed America," Charles Kuralt changed Woodie Guthrie's song to read: "From the redwood forests, to the Gulf Stream waters, the bulldozers do their work, and the land is changed forever." 130 THE REDWOOD NATIONAL PARK 131 That same year Raymond Dasmann's The Destruction of California appeared in print with a photograph of the redwoods on the cover. Club leaders took heart as the Eighty-eighth Congress closed after authorizing ten new national parks.I Still, they knew that precedents for federal land purchases were new, that the cost of earlier projects was insignificant compared to thatof a redwood park, and that the league was still pressing for Mill Creek.2 The state of California was also undermining the Department of the Interior's commitment to Redwood Creek. In April, 1965, Hugo Fisher, Governor Edmund Brown's administrator of Resources, told Udall, "We recommend against the Redwood National Park proposal on lower Redwood Creek." Echoing the league, Fisher argued that the southern basin could not provide complete watershed protection. In fact, the state opposed all plans for a redwood national park. According to Fisher, there was "inadequate continuous acreage of primeval redwood forest in any area of northern California, including the Redwood Creek, to constitute a National Redwood Park of proper scale and quality." Instead, Governor Brown proposed a national parkway to run from Muir Woods, up the Avenue of the Giants, and on to Grants Pass.3 When Udall ignored the proposal, Fisher called the National Park Service to offer "another idea for a possible national park." This was to include Humboldt Redwoods State Park and the King Range to the west, the latter a checkerboard of private and federal lands. The plan saved no new redwoods, which may be why it appealed to the Brown Administration. Fisher had personally denounced the scheme months before when the American Forestry Association had proposed it. It appears that Brown was responding to pressure from the industry and the North Coast.4 Having faced depression through the 1930s and 1940s, a flood in the winter of 1954-55, as well as another flood and a tidal wave in 1964, most Humboldt and Del Norte county residents now resented federal encroachments on their precarious economic recovery.5 The timber industry relied upon this animosity and Brown to kill the park proposal. The various companies stirred up opposition among employees and local governing bodies, bluntly reminding Interior of the state's position .6 Their strategy was sound; Congress traditionally grants its members broad autonomy in their own district. The club decided to enlist local residents who favored the park. These individuals found that voicing their sentiments brought personal and economic harassment. Many "silent supporters" were afraid to arouse the ire of what one resident called the "sleeping giant" and of the unions whose members feared the loss of jobs.' In December, 1964...