California's Thousand-Year-Old Sequoias in Danger

The trees are under attack from poachers who wish to fuel the growth of a very lucrative furniture and ornament business. Some of them are 2000 years old and are “the planet’s lungs.”

Redwood trees, which Spanish people refer to as “Palo Alto” and “Palo Colorado” when they arrive in California — because of their slender trunks, which rise up into the sky, reaching up to 115 meters (380 feet) — are in danger. Unscrupulous poachers are going after the valuable wood of the trees at all costs and they are destroying them with no consideration whatsoever.

This February alone, four Sequoias were destroyed and during the last year, 18 trees have suffered damage at the hands of the “midnight burlers.” Burls are protrusions on the tree which act as “a storage compartment for the genetic code of the parent tree.” Destroying the burl involves hacking apart the tree, preventing it from reproducing and also making it more vulnerable to attacks from insects and diseases, which, if it were intact, the tree would be able to fight off easily.

Officials from the Redwood National and State Parks are well aware of the importance of these burls. On the park’s website, visitors are warned of the growing demand in the black market and are asked to report the illegal activity and not to buy products from people who do not know from where the wood has come.

Attacks by the poachers have escalated to the point where park officials have closed the 12-kilometer (7.5-mile) Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway route at night, an area which is the habitat of some very old redwood trees. The aim is to close the net on the criminals and arrest them. They are planning to close more parts of this 53,000-hectare (205-square mile) park soon.

Inflicting damage on the sequoias is considered an illegal activity, which may lead to years in prison and fines. “This crime is just like killing elephants in Africa to sell the ivory,” said officials. These trees, which are up to 2000 years old — the oldest living beings on the planet and “the planet’s lungs” — were declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, but now only 5 percent of the trees that were originally on the Pacific Coast between Oregon and Big Sur (California) remain.

“What motivates the poachers to commit these crimes is earning a living away from a local economy which is not creating jobs and funding expensive habits like taking methamphetamine,”* said officials from the park. They also noted that the poachers are using increasingly aggressive tactics, even going as far as cutting down a whole tree simply to be able to get to the part that contains the burl.

Some burls are small and end up being made into souvenirs, such as salt and pepper shakers, but others are worth thousands of dollars on the black market. On eBay, coffee tables made out of sequoia wood are being sold for up to $13,000. In Orick, a community of little more than 350 people in Humboldt County, located near the southern entrance of the park, there is a rapidly increasing number of shops selling furniture, watches and ornaments made from sequoia wood. It is a lucrative market that shifts hundreds of thousands of dollars at the cost of plundering the planet’s ecological heritage.

Jeff Denny, the sequoia parks’ supervisor in the coastal area stated:

“These titans have survived storms, lightning, fires, high winds and other natural disasters, but surviving poachers with chainsaws is something else entirely. Consumers need to be aware before buying an object made from this wood and ask where it comes from and then decide.”

*Editor’s note: Quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.