Erin Kelly is a Forestry & Wildland Resources professor and expert in forest policy, economics, and administration. She recently shared her concern at the Redwood Science Symposium in Eureka, a gathering of scientists, agencies, industry members, and enthusiasts of the tree.
Kelly says that _Sequoia sempervirens_ is listed as an endangered species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a highly regarded British conservation authority. That ranking appears on the species’ Wikipedia page, among other places.
The IUCN rankings don’t dictate legal protections, and the federal agencies that administer the Endangered Species Act don’t consider the redwood a candidate for endangered or threatened listing.
But the IUCN listing could misdirect attention from real problems, Kelly says. “It’s a flawed way to think about the conservation needs of redwoods.”
She suspects that redwoods’ needs don’t fit neatly on the IUCN scale, thus the endangered listing. But she says there’s not enough evidence to say that redwoods face an existential threat.
“There are probably more individual redwood trees now before Euro-American settlement,” Kelly says. “But that’s not necessarily a good thing. There’s a need to restore the function of redwood ecosystems, to restore fire and other characteristics of the complex structure of the redwood forest. Conservation becomes not about protecting those individual trees but about restoring function to second growth forests.”
This need becomes perhaps more pronounced considering redwood forests are home to species that are on Endangered Species Act threatened and endangered lists.
Redwoods are a storied species—it’s hard to name a plant that is more rooted in the general public’s mind, that is more representative of the conservation ethic and environmental movements that have arisen around the globe in the last century. The Save the Redwoods League formed nearly 100 years ago, and, since then, benefactors have paid to save groves in their names and activists have chained themselves to the giants. It’s why Kelly calls the redwood a “charismatic megaflora.”
In recent years, with 95 percent of old growth redwood cut and the most of the rest protected, the conservation needs of redwoods have changed and the social drama has largely subsided, Kelly says.
It is the big, ancient redwoods—the ones that make up the famous California postcard landscapes—that have meaning and mobilize people. The younger forests are less galvanizing. Tending to them is a less sexy brand of environmentalism, and the North Coast has shifted focus to other issues, like marijuana farming. “It’s hard to get excited about the need to thin second-growth, or to reintroduce fire to the redwood landscape,” Kelly says.
Kelly’s research shows that, today, the northern part of California’s “redwood region” has a small but vibrant forestry industry that uses more sustainable methods. It’s important to maintain “working lands”—those owned by the timber industry or other private landowners—in order to connect the public lands, where most of the restoration is taking place, Kelly says.