The redwoods of North America’s Pacific Coast are the tallest trees on the planet, reaching over 300 feet high when fully mature.
They’re also some of the world’s oldest living organisms, with a potential lifespan of multiple millennia.
But even Earth’s strongest and most resilient inhabitants are under threat of extinction from the brute force of human overconsumption.
Over the last 150 years, the coastal redwood ecosystem has lost more than 97% of its original territory to clear-cutting and development.
What once spanned over 2 million acres has been reduced to less than 100,000 acres of scattered remnants today.
These majestic trees only grow in this tiny stretch of land between central California and southern Oregon — nowhere else on Earth.
The redwoods could be among our greatest allies in the fight against climate change. Research indicates that California's coastal redwood ecosystem stores more CO2 per acre than any other forest on Earth. But they need our help now to avoid total collapse.
Beginning with the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s, the vast majority of California's old-growth redwoods were summarily clear-cut for lumber and development.
Though the harvesting of redwood trees is now much more strictly regulated, urban and suburban development continues to encroach upon the redwood's remaining habitat. And the damage that was done in previous generations will take hundreds or thousands of years to heal.
Before the region was colonized by Europeans, indigenous inhabitants routinely engaged in controlled burns of the redwood understory, sometimes as often as every three to five years, mimicking natural wildfire patterns. Redwoods, along with many of the plant species they coexist with, are fire-adapted, meaning they are not only able to survive fire events, but they actually thrive in response. In fact, the seeds of some species native to this region can only germinate after a fire.
Tragically, California's government instituted strict fire suppression policies through the twentieth century. Though well intentioned, these policies have led to a perpetually unmananagble fuel load in the understory: dead debris and overgrown thickets near the forest floor that are especially susceptible to wildfires.
A handful of introduced species to the California coast threaten to severely reduce the overall biodiversity of the region, which could have myriad untold impacts on the redwoods themselves. Species such as English ivy, French broom, Himalayan blackberry and Canadian thistle are displacing native counterparts like the Ceanothus, Madrone, Western black raspberry, evergreen huckleberry, redwood sorrel, Pacific strawberry, trillium, and more.
And the Sudden Oak Death fungus is ravaging all of the oak species that thrive in the Redwood understory, particularly the tanoak. They are disappearing right before our eyes.
It's not just the redwoods at stake -- it's every organism that makes up this unique and diverse ecosystem.
All of the above is exacerbated and accerated by the grim reality of global climate disruption. The coastal redwood ecosystem is uniquely fragile in its need for a careful balance of precipitation: roughly six months of wet, and six months of dry. But "wet" and "dry" come in all shapes and sizes, and climate change is making our wet seasons wetter and our dry seasons drier.
The redwoods absorb nearly half of their total annual water intake from the coastal fogs that move through the region, especially in the summertime when no other precipitation is available.
When -- not if -- these patterns change more dramatically, there's no telling what will happen to the redwoods or their ecosystem. But the potential outcomes look pretty grim.