Introduction
Throughout the last one hundred and fifty years, visual media have played a significant role influencing a cultural understanding of redwood landscapes. Websites such as discovertheredwoods.com or redwoodvisitor.org include travel planners, historic details and travel maps for tourists around the globe to plot their course West. Brochures in motel lobbies along the California coast advertise the Trees of Mystery in Klamath Falls. Printed in spooky letterforms, the brochure titling describes the land as strange and full of bewildering natural circumstances. One hundred years ago, advertisements for similar redwood destinations achieved the same effect. In Edward Visher’s illustration and design for Calaveras Mammoth Tree Grove Hotel from 1862, a pack of camels approach the resort grounds were a forest of ancient redwoods has been transformed into a Victorian garden with warm cottages billowing chimney smoke. Such media has shaped our understanding of the landscape. When visitors arrive at tourist sites, they bring the expectactions marketed to them. At the Trees of Mystery, they expect the natural to feel unusual, and as tourists visited the Calaveras grove in the nineteenth century, they may have imagined their visit as restful and idyllic. While the illustrations and advertisements inform and prepare visitors for an experience on the one hand, they also build a generalized imagination of the landscape, which in turn can shape the landscape itself. Essentially the media that has shaped the consciousness of redwood landscapes functions as advertisements for specific sites, but at the same time negates any other meaning in the landscape, and because only a few singular locations are needed to satisfy the tourist vision, redwood landscapes outside of the few areas developed for economies of tourism have been devalued and logged.
Today, only second and third growth lumber is available on most markets, yet this wood is not valuable because it is harvested between ages of forty and seventy five years—too short a period of time for redwood to take on the hard-wood timber qualities that have made the brand so valuable. So what does the future hold? Can a redwood timber economy continue to survive off an old-growth reputation, when the quality of wood is poor? Will consumers prefer fast growing tropical woods or composite building materials such as Trex—a plastic/wood decking? If so what will be the future of the redwood landscape? Will State and National Parks purchase the land? Or will the publicly traded corporations that own the land begin developing thousands of homes?
One thing that we can be sure of is that the future of the redwood landscape is dependent upon how the public perceives it, and that this perception is influenced through forms of visual communication. For instance, if televised media campaigns by environmentalists show that a large percentage of second and third growth redwood landscapes is being used for toilet paper, and not for backyard decks or enriching the exterior of homes as one would imagine, the identity of the logging industry might suffer. For decades the redwood landscape has been inscribed with significant cultural meanings dependent on the attributes of old-growth lumber, none of which have framed the redwood landscape as the fertile ground for growing America’s finest toilet paper. The power of media to shape the cultural understanding of the redwood landscape is overwhelming. By surveying this relationship through the media of the past a more complete comprehension for the role that it has played provides an alternative narrative to the history of redwood landscapes.
