In this edition of Forthright Radio our guest is journalist, author, environmentalist, Greg King. I first became aware of Greg’s work back in the late 1980s, when we who lived in the remnants of the once great redwood biome organized to protect what remained of that ecosystem from voracious predatory capitalists, who proudly vowed to “log to infinity.”
Greg is the fifth generation of his family to live in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties of northern CA, – his ancestors having arrived in the 1860s and owned what was then one of the largest redwood mills, the King-Starrett mill in Monte Rio. The The King Range Mountains were named for his great-great uncle, John King, who lived north of Westport in Mendocino County, due to his hospitality to the government surveyor before his mapping that steep coastal range in the Lost Coast. Long before Greg was born, the last of the great redwood forests in Sonoma County were cut, but there were second growth stands and massive stumps of 20’ or greater diameter which served as his childhood playground. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 1985, he joined the staff of the West Sonoma County Paper, now called the Bohemian, where he won his first of two Lincoln Steffens Investigative Journalism Award.
Investigating Louisiana-Pacific’s “logging to infinity” in his neighborhood led him to the Maxxam Corporation’s hostile takeover, financed by junk bonds, of Humboldt County’s Pacific Lumber Company and the ensuing accelerated destruction of the last intact, ancient redwood groves in private hands to pay off the debt. Exploring these untouched forests with the largest, oldest trees on the planet inspired a reverence and awe unlike anything he had ever experienced. The rest, as they say, is history.
In his book, THE GHOST FOREST: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods, he describes how he left his home and promising career to devote his life to identifying and protecting those few remaining giants and the biome centered on them. He is credited with mapping the remaining groves, including The Headwaters Forest, as well as pioneering tree sitting to prevent logging of redwoods in Humboldt County.
What might have been merely a memoir became a shocking exposé of the all too successful efforts of financiers and industrialists via their creation of the Save the Redwoods League in 1917, to subvert the growing desire of the public to protect and preserve the remaining redwoods, by promoting instead small “beauty strips” along roadways to hide devastating clearcuts. As one of the first to delve into The League’s archives at U. C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Greg followed the history back to the federal acts of the 19th century, that allowed well organized land fraud syndicates to place what had been 2 million acres of undisturbed ancient forests into private corporate hands. His research led him to the connections between the Save the Redwood League creators and the so-called “scientific racism” eugenics movement, which was so helpful to the Nazis in Germany, and which still plagues our nation even today.
We spoke with Greg King on October 18, 2023 via Skype.
Articles pertinent to this interview:
America’s oldest example of greenwashing sacrificed California redwoods (Excerpt from THE GHOST FOREST) https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/09/greenwashing-sacrificed-california-redwoods/
There Has Never Been A ‘Timber War’ https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1070&context=hjsr
A Car Bomb Nearly Kiilled Eco-Activist Judi Bari – and Yet the Feds Blamed Her (Excerpt from THE GHOST FOREST) https://www.thedailybeast.com/judi-bari-was-nearly-murdered-by-a-car-bomb-and-yet-the-feds-blamed-her
California’s Collusion with a Texas Timber Company Let Ancient Redwoods be Clearcut (Excerpt from THE GHOST FOREST) http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/185783
Can We Save the Redwoods by Helping Them Move? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/magazine/redwoods-assisted-migration.html
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