All of the summaries of the books we have read include (many) links. Links evaporate. I check them when I post the summary and randomly go back in over time to check. If you find a broken link, please let me know via a comment or a direct email. Let me know which link was broken and I will fix it, replace it, or remove it.
Julia Butterfly Hill has a strong online presence. Her website is here.
Her homepage has a heartfelt message on what it has meant to her to be available to help others grappling with environmental issues and is a statement from about 2015 (I think) that she is no longer available for that work. You should read it because it speaks to what happens to those who become public figures. In fact, she is speaking again and there are some videos of her that are fairly recent.
We began by watching a short video (2 min 27 sec) she took of someone coming to visit her in Luna during the time she was there. (Thank you to Kim for providing the link!) The effort it took the man to make the ascent to her lower platform makes the descriptions in the book quite real. Also mentioned in the book was the damage being done to the tree in terms of wear and tear on the trunk and branches. The smoothness and lack of rough bark that can be seen in the video suggest some of the damage described in the book.
We didn’t watch it, however, there’s a 5-minute clip called Julia in the Storm where she describes going through the big storm, which is featured in the book as well. In both places, she describes the experience as life changing. It looks also like there’s some video from what it was like as the storm blew in. Scary comes to mind as a one-word description.
Julia has, of course, done a number of interviews over the years. We watched this 3 min 22 sec interview she did with James Baraz in December 2021.
An earlier interview we did not watch is this 10-minute clip that Kim had sent to me (but that I believe I forgot to send on to the group). Julia Butterfly Hill opens the 2013 interview by discussing how she got the middle name of butterfly….
Kim also sent three links of about 10 minutes each called Adventures in Treesitting: part 1, part 2, and part 3.
In contrast to some of the less fortunate outcomes of tree sits, Julia and her colleagues were able to negotiate an agreement with the Pacific Lumber Company to protect Luna. The Sanctuary Forest is a non-profit organization that cares for the tree and the easement that was negotiated. There’s a bit about them on Julia’s website. We watched a 3 min 36 sec video about Luna from their website. Scroll partway down the page to find the video trailer.
As for what’s going on today, we watched this 5 min 19 sec CBS newsclip from April 2021. The short answer is that the trees are still being logged.
Topics that came up during our discussion were about redwoods themselves, the redwood whose bark was cut off in the late 1800s, when the understanding of mycorrhizae became common, and whatever became of the Pacific Lumber Company.
Regarding the redwoods themselves, there are three genera. According to Wikipedia: “The three redwood subfamily genera are Sequoia from coastal California and Oregon, Sequoiadendron from California’s Sierra Nevada, and Metasequoia in China. The redwood species contains the largest and tallest trees in the world. These trees can live for thousands of years. Threats include logging, fire suppression, climate change, illegal marijuana cultivation, and burl poaching.
Only two of the genera, Sequoia and Sequoiadendron, are known for massive trees. Trees of Metasequoia, from the single living species Metasequoia glyptostroboides, are much smaller.”
The Metasequoia are the dawn redwoods – there are three on UNM’s Albuquerque campus.
The National Park Service (NPS) has an online book called the Giant Sequoias of California for those who want to learn more.
The NPS has another online book called the Giant Sequoia of the Sierra Nevada which includes the story of the tree whose bark was removed and shipped around the world, most especially to the Crystal Place in London in the 1850s, where people still didn’t believe it was from a single tree. The story is in Chapter 1.
At one point in her book, Julia discusses mycorrhiza and tree communication underground. One person was surprised, thinking that these relationships were not known at that time. I’ve looked into it a bit more. Wikipedia has a three-sentence section on “history” that indicates that knowledge of the fungi dates back to the mid-19th century. Simard’s famous article on tree networking underground was the cover article of Nature in August 1997, so the information would have been known while Julia was in Luna. Julia also mentions using her time to engage in a crash course on learning everything she would need to know to protect the tree from logging.
Finally, we talked about what became of Pacific Lumber Company. Referring once again to Wikipedia, it seems the company declared bankruptcy in 2008. The assets were transferred to Mendocino Redwood Company, however, and the logging continues, although it is possibly managed more sustainably. Charles Hurwitz continues to run his businesses and Maxxam, Inc.