The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of the Environmental Reform, 1917–1978

3. Ideology of Reform: A Natural Theology

3 Ideology of Reform: A Natural Theology IN DECIDING to save the redwoods, the league was building upon almost a century of western science. As early as the 1830s, imprints of leaves and cones very similar to California's redwoods had been found in prehistoric sedimentary rocks of Europe and North America.1 Age determinations revealed the genus Sequoia and its immediate ancestors to be millions of years old. Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) gave such discoveries theoretical significance. Speaking before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1872, Asa Gray declared that the longevity of Sequoia refuted Genesis; here was proof of evolution.2 Even as Gray spoke, civilization was threatening America's fossils and California's forest of living relics. Over the next fifty years, the western wilderness vanished with unparalleled speed. Early twentiethcentury efforts to save redwoods stemmed from a desire to preserve artifacts critical to the emerging disciplines of paleontology and paleobotany. Scientists such as John Merriam, Vernon Kellogg, Ralph Chaney, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Willis Jepson envisioned parks as laboratories and classrooms. They also believed them temples to the universal design behind evolution, superlative examples of "the garment of God," Merriam's description of nature.3 If most Americans never read Goethe, whose Faust inspired that phrase, the public was sympathetic to the ancient Sequoia s precarious last stand on the continental margin of North America. When Merriam joined the faculty of the University of California in the 1890s, little was known of the Pacific Basin's remote past. By the time he departed for Washington, D.C., in 1919, he had pioneered the field.' His student Ralph Chaney carried forward the work over 38 IDEOLOGY OF REFORM 39 the next three decades. Berkeley professor, redwood league councilor and president after Merriam's resignation in 1944, Chaney reconstructed the trees' migrations and used them to unlock further the West Coast's geologic sequence. Collectors all over the world sent him finds. He theorized that one hundred million years ago much of England and western Europe as well as portions of present-day Russia, China, and Japan had been covered by a redwoodlike forest-thought at first to be Sequoia but identified in the 1940s as a related genus, Metasequoia.s Dinosaurs and flying reptiles had dwelled in these forests while small, fleet mammals clung to life there. As mammals gained ascendancy, the redwoods' ancestors began to migrate. In 1927 Chaney told the Paleontological Society of America that field studies had shown a close association between the flora of Fushan, Manchuria, and the Sequoia flora of eastern Oregon, indicating the possible interchange of life between continents. The American Museum of Natural History sent an expedition to St. Lawrence Island, midway between North America and Asia.6 In late 1930 Chaney cabled Merriam: "Sequoia flora of Middle Tertiary Age just received from St. Lawrence Island represents first actual record of land bridge between North America and Asia."1 The press announced that the unearthing of this "missing link" indicated that the human race originated in central Asia and spread to America over a land connection.s When the trees crossed this bridge approximately fifty million years ago, the Arctic was not frozen. Western America was warm and humid. Subtropical forests of fig, palm, avocado, and mahogany dominated what is now California, Oregon, and Washington. The Metasequoia remained in cooler Alaska and northern Canada. Some twenty million years later, the earth entered a period of uplift and glaciation. North America chilled, and the sea withdrew from the continental margins. The subtropical forest was impelled southward, and the more temperate Metasequoia forest, now joined by the Sequoia, moved into present British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and even more easterly portions of the continent. They carried with them ferns and flowers found under the redwoods today. Twenty-five million years ago volcanic lava and ash sealed the record of the two redwood species growing side-by-side in Oregon's John Day Basin, allowing Chaney to see this mixed forest as it stood on the eve of climatic and geologic upheavals. Over the next several million years, formation of the Cascade Mountains modified the winds and rains. This change and the continued cooling rendered the North American Metasequoia extinct, a fate the genus also met on the European continent. Dogged by the spreading 40 THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE REDWOODS freezes of...