How to save giant sequoia trees
Might a venture capitalist have a good suggestion?
Volume 1, Number 42 - Thursday, April 11, 2023
Now twice a week — Monday and Thursday!
Perspective
I RECENTLY CAME across an article published about two years ago on the website of the Columbia Climate School. Kevin Webb, a 2020 graduate of the university’s sustainability science program, wrote about giant sequoias.
“To Save Giant Sequoia Trees, Maybe It’s Time to Plant Backups,” is the headline of Webb’s piece published in March 2021. You can read it HERE.
Writing in response to the recent loss of 15 giant sequoias in a big wind event at Yosemite, Webb shared thoughts about the Big Trees and what they’ve endured through time:
“Wars, plagues, fashion trends: Sequoias have lived through and outlasted them all. To last thousands of years, any sequoia has also endured hungry animals, diseases, fires, snowstorms, El Niño events, and years-long droughts, not to mention the opportunistic loggers of the 19th and 20th centuries.”
Webb wrote that giant sequoias have become a climate change story.
“While sequoias are wonderfully adapted to their narrow range in California’s Western Sierras, this habitat has been unusually sensitive to changing weather patterns, and may be changing faster than sequoias can migrate or adapt.”
Webb discusses various ways people are working to help giant sequoias and a concept called assisted migration: “Even if groves throughout California were lost,” he wrote, “there would then still be living, thriving trees whose seeds could someday repopulate their original territory.
“Extinction for a species as unique as sequoias would be devastating,” he continued. “If sequoias can persist, though, then someday thousands of years from now, their rings will again have a story to tell. This time, it will be the story of us: the story of how quickly we changed the planet, and the story of how we responded to a crisis of our own making.”
As Webb noted, the concept of assisted migration is discussed in this VIDEO by Bill Libby, Professor Emeritus of Forest Genetics at the University of California Berkeley. Libby is highly regarded for his work with giant sequoias and other trees.
At the 2016 Coast Redwood Science Symposium, Libby noted that redwoods — coast redwood and giant sequoias — have been on Earth for over 100 million years.
“They’ve been all over the place in both hemispheres,” he said. “And during that time they’ve had to migrate sometimes long distances. And probably in response to some need to migrate they’ve done so successfully over that 100 million plus years until they’ve landed where they are now — in these fairly restricted ranges pretty much all within California.”
Libby’s talk discusses reasons we might want to ensure that there are giant sequoias growing elsewhere in the world including the possibility that someone makes a mistake with nuclear weapons. Or we get hit by an asteroid. Or… well, you can listen to his interesting talk for more.
He suggests that assisting giant sequoia migration might be a very good idea. And he points to the work of a nonprofit group in Michigan, Archangel Ancient Trees, and a private forestry company — Sierra Pacific Industries — that has planted new giant sequoia groves in California.
Some of the giant sequoia seedlings used by Sierra Pacific — and public agencies replanting giant sequoias — come from CalForest Nurseries, a company in the tiny Siskiyou County town of Etna. In March, the company was acquired by Mast, the newly-formed parent company of DroneSeed. The companies are headquartered in Seattle.
This brings me back to Webb.
I was curious about what he did after finishing Columbia's Sustainability Science program.
What I found makes me wonder if we always just need to follow the money or if venture capitalism may save us all someday.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Webb graduated from Los Gatos High School in 2005, studied human biology at Stanford, then spent more than eight years with Webb Investment Network, a company he co-founded. Simultaneously he worked as an angel investor before earning a master’s degree in sustainability science at Columbia.
His father, Maynard Webb, is an author and investor described as a Silicon Valley legend with more than 350,000 followers on LinkedIn. In other words, Kevin Webb is well-connected.
In January 2022, he co-founded Superorganism, the venture fund for biodiversity.
I can’t tell you exactly what that means except that it seems he’s involved in promoting investment in companies that do things that benefit the environment.
As an angel investor, Webb apparently became involved with DroneSeed. Yes, the same DroneSeed that now operates under its new parent company Mast. The same company that just acquired CalForest Nurseries, the largest independent container reforestation nursery in the Pacific Northwest. (Independent as in not owned by the government).
On March 7, Kevin Webb retweeted a Mast tweet:
“Meet Mast Reforestation, our newly-formed parent company of DroneSeed, Silvaseed, and now, Cal Forest Nurseries too. With our acquisition of Cal Forest, we address a major obstacle to scaling reforestation: an inadequate supply of tree seed and seedlings.”
This brings me back to giant sequoias.
The photo with this article is of giant sequoia seedlings that popped up in the Garfield giant sequoia grove in Sequoia National Park after the 2021 Castle Fire.
As Save the Redwoods League tells us HERE, fire on the forest floor causes giant sequoia cones to dry out. They then open and release their seeds:
“This adaptation ensures that the tree times the release of most of its seeds to coincide with fire, which creates ideal conditions for regeneration success. Fire burns off woody debris and exposes the soil, it creates an ash layer that returns nutrients to the soil and increases sunlight by killing some of the competing pines and firs.”
But, as National Park Service scientists shared in a presentation I covered in THIS NEWSLETTER, natural regeneration may not be successful. Even if a seed sprouts, its chances of growing into a tree are limited.
At Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, the National Park Service has been trying to move forward with a reforestation project since early 2022. A comment period on the latest effort ended on March 18 and we’re waiting to see whether the agency will be able to replant about 1,200 acres of formerly forested areas — and 485-acres of Pacific fisher habitat — that was burned in the 2020 Castle fire.
Some environmental organizations were against the earlier proposal and the expanded proposal currently under consideration drew fire, as well — in particular for its use of helicopters and proposed planting in the John Krebs Wilderness.
One activist who argued against the project called tree-planting a “feel-good effort.”
So — bring the popcorn — apparently, environmentalists are set to meet the new capitalists. Instead of coming to the forest with chainsaws and bulldozers, the new capitalists are growing baby trees!
Here are some more tweets from Mast:
“Along with Cal Forest Nurseries, we acquired seed supplier/processor Siskiyou Seed, making us the largest private seed supplier in the Western US. With these two plus Silvaseed, we’ll use our increased seed supply to expand our geography to support more fire-impacted communities;” and “The one-stop-shop for reforestation. We get projects up & running in months, not years, using proven practices & new-tech to regrow healthy, resilient forests.”
Up and running in months, not years…
Wildfire, water & weather update
While California was exceptionally wet through the winter and into spring, that’s not the case everywhere in the country. I was surprised to learn that in New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the U.S., forests still cover about 40 percent of the land. And according to THIS ARTICLE in Wildfire Today, the state has had a series of recent fires exacerbated by dry and windy conditions. Still, throughout the country, the spring outlook for wildfire is “MOSTLY NORMAL.”
California water-watchers remain wary of that record-breaking snowpack in the Sierra. The weather has cooled off a little this week, but it’s going to warm up soon, and snowmelt is expected to cause flooding.
The DROUGHT REPORT should update today, but honestly, drought is a nonstory right now. Never to be forgotten, though, and likely to return.
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Giant sequoias in the news
• The Guardian provides a close-up look at the situation in Yosemite in an article published April 9: “Snow, floods and wildlife in peril: grueling winter leaves Yosemite scarred.” You can read it HERE, and an excerpt:
“It’s been a winter few in Yosemite Valley will ever forget.
“After wildfires left the national park’s dramatic views shrouded in smoke over the summer, winter brought a series of historic storms that left the region inundated with snow. The deluge buried homes, cars and fire hydrants, chewed into stretches of winding mountain roads and downed trees along the park’s slopes.”
• A giant sequoia that also serves as the community’s Christmas tree has been inducted into the new Heritage Tree Program in Philomath, Oregon. The small community is west of Corvallis.
• Here’s an article about efforts to plant giant sequoias (and coast redwoods) throughout Ireland. An excerpt:
“We don’t want to be the largest redwood forest outside of the United States,” Sean McGinnis said. “We would love it if there were a thousand Giant’s Groves around the world.”
• In the disinformation category, I only mention this opinion piece in The Washington Times because it claims that last year’s Save Our Sequoias Act was passed in the House of Representatives. It was not. The headline is “The revival of the conservative conservation ethos.” Politics aside, this piece is simply inaccurate — at least regarding the SOS Act.
Giant sequoias around the world
An online “Guide to Crimea” has nice photos of a pair of giant sequoias planted there around 1889. Growing on the grounds of Cassandra Palace — a villa built for Russian Emperor Alexander III on the south coast of Crimea — the trees are more than 130 feet tall and dwarf everything else in the formal garden. The elevation there is just under 1,000 feet. You can see them HERE.
Thanks for reading!