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5EQUOIA VVaTCH: Challacombe: THC GREAT MIRROR 



Our histories tell us little of the major conflict 

 which occurred around the Sequoias in the late 

 1880's. Yet the whole of western consciousness 

 was reshaped by that explosion. My film, Con- 

 quest of Giants, tells how the "unnatural" idea of 

 conservation first penetrated western conscious- 

 ness and secured a beachhead. 



If the Sequoia had been just another very 

 large tree like the sugar pines, Douglas Firs, or 

 even the Coast Redwoods, we might never have 

 had what conservation sensibilities we do. The 

 Sequoias were so unusual and so rare that the 

 people in the nearby valley towns became 

 greatly agitated at the invasion of the southern 

 Sierra by San Francisco lumber barons in the 

 1880's. 



The greatest of these forests at Converse Basin 

 was logged in the steam-powered lumbering 

 spectacle of all time When the nearby Giant 

 Forest was also threatened, the citizens banded 

 together and acted vigorously. The loss of one 

 splendid forest and the imminent loss of another 

 created the necessary heat and pressure which at 

 last penetrated the rockhard consciousness of the 

 desertmaket The Sequoias were the flash point 

 at which the radical idea of reserving vast tracts 

 of commercially valuable resources became for 

 the first time a thinkable and doable option even 

 among frontier boosters. 



Starting with this Sequoia Crisis of the late 

 1880's more forests were later set aside in Na- 

 tional Parks. And then many in National Forests. 

 This further rush to mark out and declare re- 

 serves became a defensive, rear-guard action by 

 politicians. Recall that the 1890's were much like 

 the Great Depression. A populist unrest seized 

 the country. Panics occurred regularly. Coxey's 

 army marched on Washington. The democratic 

 rage over the plunder of wilderness — stolen 

 from the public domain only a decade earlier — 

 had to be placated. 



The only heroes we remember from that 

 period are Theodore Roosevelt and John Muit 

 But a host of others whose vision never faltered 

 drove that movement towards the prize. 

 SEQUOIA CRISIS, REVISITED 



Today we are met — a century after the origi- 

 nal Sequoia Crisis — to consider once again 



the Big Trees of California. What meaning, we 

 ask, have they for us in the 1990's? Are not these 

 furry-barked oversized trees little more than 

 anachronisms — relics of our frontier, akin to that 

 gone world of stereoscopic cards, tiger-skin rugs, 

 cable cars, steam engines. Tiffany lampshades, 

 and Navajo blankets? Our own generation has 

 shot the moon and explores space. We live and 

 think on an invisible electronic superhighway. 

 Beyond a picnic area what significance have 

 these strange old trees for us? 



The Preacher said, There is nothing new 

 under the sun." This is only partially true. Na- 

 ture and all her processes and forces are ongoing 

 and infinitely varied. But our grasp of the 

 greater reality "under the sun" is never perfect 

 What can be new — and what the Preacher failed 

 to grasp — is that an individual now and then 

 does break free of his inherited fixed notions of 

 the world and sees it afresh — as for the first time 

 ever. The age of dis-covery is not over. When we 

 stumble upon the anomaly, the disturbance, the 

 unexplained, we come ahve. Each of us has 

 within him the capacity, when sorely challenged, 

 to turn the accepted "world" on its head and to 

 redefine reality for ourselves and for generations 

 to come. 



Now what of the Sequoias? The Sequoia, 

 precisely like Melville's Moly Dick, represents 

 for us and our time the very essence, mystery, 

 power and danger of wilderness. And what 

 exactly do we mean by wilderness? It is that part 

 of creation lying outside our cocoon of the famil- 

 iar and tangible. The Sequoias, in short, sum up 

 ever)rthing we do not know and throw it in our 

 face. 



We have seen how the great trees held a 

 mirror to frontier man in the 1890's. In that 

 reflection our forefathers saw the big ugly. That 

 image so frightened them they turned on the 

 conventional wisdom of the frontier. And they 

 reinvented man's relationship to the world. 



Here, a century later, we are again challenged 

 by the Sequoias. They hold up the great mirror 

 so that we are forced to gaze on ourselves, undis- 

 guised, warts and all. 



Friends, if s deja vue doubled and redoubled. 



The devastation of the magnificent Kings 



