If handled poorly, a history of the so-called Redwood Wars—especially when told by one of the aging activists who took part in it—could seem a bit narrow, almost quaint. (Our most urgent environmental concerns these days tend to be planetary and structural, rather than local and sylvan.) King brilliantly avoids this pitfall by expanding the scope of his book. The real story he wants to tell is an epic tale of corruption and deception, perpetrated on a mass scale for nearly a century, of which his crusade constitutes only a few chapters. The early history of industrial redwood logging is one of outright theft: Under lax laws such as the Timber and Stone Act, which was intended to encourage new small-scale logging and mining operations, large companies routinely purchased redwood forests at steep discounts by pretending they would be used by individual homesteaders. All told, millions of acres of valuable land were stolen in this fashion.
However, King adds a crucial missing piece to this oft-told history; he explains why that land was so valuable. Before the widespread use of steel, redwood lumber was not just any old wood. It was the very bones of industrial capitalism, at the precise moment in the 19th century when the Golden State was undergoing a growth spurt. Redwood lumber was the principal building material for entire cities, including San Francisco; it provided the most durable ties for the nascent railroad industry; and, perhaps most importantly, it could be fashioned into rot-resistant pipelines and tanks to store and transport water and petroleum. Many of these applications (especially the pipelines) required a specific type of redwood timber—the kind that could be found only in the oldest trees. But strangely, King uncovers, many of the moguls who most needed that rare lumber were the same ones who were supposedly campaigning to “save” the redwoods. The most startling section of King’s book concerns his research into the history of the venerable Save the Redwoods League—a conservation group founded in 1918 by, and for a long time largely managed by, wealthy industrialists and prominent eugenicists (the “racists” of the book’s subtitle). Digging through a newly accessible archive containing the league’s private documents, King reports that throughout their history, rather than attempting to preserve large tracts of wild land, as they purported to do, its early members mainly focused on buying up “beauty strips” of old-growth redwoods alongside roadways and railways, which hid the sight of the other trees being liquidated. They repeatedly brokered deals that paid logging companies exorbitant amounts of money for their land—sometimes as much as four times above the estimated market value—and on at least one occasion arrived just in the nick of time to save a lumber company from bankruptcy. Meanwhile, they actively campaigned against other conservation groups who were pushing to protect larger, more intact pieces of wilderness. In doing so, King argues, the league gave industrialists exactly what they wanted: It mollified public outcry while simultaneously guaranteeing industry’s access to nature’s riches. Readers familiar with Eleanor Catton’s new novel, Birnam Wood; David O. Russell’s film I Heart Huckabees; or, really, any oil-industry ad campaign already know how this feat of corporate sleight of hand works. What’s astonishing, in the league’s case, is its duration and success. King dubs its efforts to be “the first, the largest, and the longest-lasting example” of “greenwashing” in history.