Portrayals of Destruction: Logging Industry Images from 1940-1970
In the early 1960’s Gordon Robinson took this image of a clear-cut landscape on the road to Gold Bluffs beach in Northern California for the Sierra Club book, The Last Redwoods. The landscape looks apocalyptic yet pleasant as the blue California sky and green spring weeds sandwich a ruinous hillside. The stumps and wood fragments that scar it are brown and dried out, and the rich soil is yellow, sandy, and smoothed as water runoff gravitates down the mountain fragmenting the mounds where ancient trees once grew. In the foreground is a large roadside sign titled by the words OVERMATURE TIMBER HARVESTED HERE.
Throughout the history of California redwood landscapes, images and signage such as this one have tried to explain the ugliness of logging. It is unsettling, cutting down trees is loud, violent, and dangerous but depending on how an image of destruction is presented to the public it can be beautiful, primal, and a necessary ugliness. In the image by Gordon Robinson, both the necessity of logging and destructive realities of logging have been presented to the viewer. The logging company responsible for the clear-cut landscape justifies the destruction of the landscape through text that dissuades us from viewing the landscape solely for what it is, a ruined landscape. Instead it is the site of OVERMATURE TIMBER, the landscape becomes necessary—overdue for cutting. As the scene appears in The Last Redwoods the Sierra Club takes on a critical viewpoint of the first to messages in an attempt to unveil truth and reality. Although the hillside has probably recovered, its appearance as it exists in the image is unforgiving.
The power of images to affect the public comprehension of logging in the redwood landscapes began during the late nineteenth century as adventurous photographers took photos of loggers. The images of the “champion faller, ” portraits of loggers posed beneath the cut of trees nearly ready to fall over, was celebrated. The human strength instilled in the figure of the logger and the economic value of the tree as lumber legitimized the destruction of redwood landscapes. Although, as the twentieth century progressed, and clear-cut redwood landscapes became increasingly visible to drive-by tourists, public relation campaigns were used to down-play industrial impact on the forest. In the 1920’s The Redwood Reforester, produced by the Redwood Reforestation Association described the clear cut redwood landscapes as “crops of valuable lumber from which to build the homes of nation,” and reforesting as a perpetual cycle in which “the redwoods will live on through countless ages.”
Images have always helped us understand the destruction of redwood landscapes whether positively and negatively. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the discourse surrounding the role of redwood landscape became increasingly polarized. As a greater ecological comprehension of the role redwood trees play in the stability of their landscape, a heightened demand for the trees as lumber developed following World War II. At service to this was the 1946 film Redwood Saga (1946), a pro-logging film. During the 1950s the logging industry cleared out massive amounts of trees, an era highly criticized by the 1963 Sierra Club publication The Last Redwoods. Separated by less than twenty years, the messages could not be more different. The destruction of the landscape portrayed as heroic in Redwood Saga, is deemed socially and ecologically depressing in The Last Redwoods. And as each image attempts to persuade the public that their message is best, the landscape itself looked as neither suggested it did. It wasn’t completely treeless and brown as Gordon Robinson’s image portrayed it nor was it as plentiful as the Redwood Saga would have you believe, but rather it was a fragmented mess.
By the mid 20th century, the Forestry Service within the U.S Department of Agriculture, had made substantial progress toward understanding the ecology of redwood landscapes. This is shown in their production of “miscellaneous publications” such as, “Some Plain Facts About The Forests,” and “Forests And National Prosperity.” Each of these reports—produced in the 1940’s—were reappraisals of previous timber resource analysis, and made clear that the health of the Americas forests was in danger. “If we heard that some great scourge was threatening to destroy the productive capacity of millions of acres of our land, we would be greatly alarmed. Yet something very much like that is actually happening. The destructive agent in this case is our own carelessness and neglect, and it is jeopardizing the productive capacity of many of the Nation’s forests.” Despite the growing data linking the practices of logging to the depletion of sustainable natural resources, logging industry continued and increased the production of timber goods made from virgin redwood forests. The publications, produced by academics, and the illustrations within them, depicting ravaged landscape and waste, had little effect on the California logging industry, which owned at the time, roughly seventy five million acres of old-growth redwood land. Intensifying the effect of logging practices on the environment was the growing demand for timber following World War II.
Redwood Saga is a ten-minute film that highlights the postwar industry vision of logging. At issue in Redwood Saga are the social and economic roles of the logging industry, and their purpose in sustaining the needs of Americans. To describe these roles, the film compresses the process of cutting, milling, and transporting redwood lumber and frames the process through concepts of progress, and necessity. Overall, the purpose of the Redwood Saga was to generate respect for the California logging industry. To accomplish this, and masking the ecologically unsound practice of clear-cutting as well, the mythological status of the redwood trees is framed as a fundamental resource of American society.
Before the film begins, the words “Redwood Saga” ?designed with wood twigs letterforms—appear on top of the globe-icon of Simmel-Meservey. Accompanying the introduction, and continuing throughout the film is an orchestral arrangement made up of violin, brass, woodwinds and piano. Through the use of sticks to construct letterforms and an idealized melody, the first message about the film can be deduced—something like, what you are about to see is part of a glorious pioneer tradition, yet what is actually occurs in the film is far more ‘sans-serif,’ a streamlined destruction of the landscape.
In the first sequence of the film, the tree-selection process is described, and immediately the character of the logger and logger team are introduced. The boss is shown surveying the tree, a team of workers begins building the temporary railroad needed to haul-out the massive logs, and climbing the tree is the ‘topper,’ whose job it is to climb up the tree and cut the top half of the tree down. The opening scene makes clear that this film is not simply about redwood trees, rather, it is about our use of them and the Americans who cut them down. To clarify this the narrator introduces the logger as a heroic figure. In describing the axe men the narrator says, “For most people a job like this would seem to dangerous, but then, logging is a hard and dangerous work, and these men take pride in their strength and courage, they are the men who fell the trees and get the logs out of the woods, so we may have lumber for house for furniture for the thousand uses of wood and all in his days work.”
Through technical operations in the film—the compression of time and space, and the meta-narrative arc which bypasses the non-linear complexities of redwood logging, such as soil erosion, water siltation, employee injury, and the destruction of wildlife habitats—the trees solely become a natural object at the service of American dreams. Bizarrely, this includes the fact the trees predate civilization. In one sequences a train stacked with ancient trees chugs across a bridge while the narrator describes the natural history of the trees: “Thousands of years ago, redwoods were found throughout Europe and Asia, they grew in countries that are now cold but were once warm, places like Alaska, Iceland, and Greenland. Their history goes back millions of years to the time of the dinosaurs.” He describes them as containing, “All of the worlds history since Christ was born.” Yet, instead of using the natural history of the redwood species to argue for its preservation, they become the reason to log them: “The enduring qualities of a tree that has survived billions of years are translated into the richness, warmth and color of our homes.”
The Redwood Saga was a private production and a contrast to films about America’s natural resources produced a decade earlier such as The Plow That Broke The Plains. Directed by Pare Lorentz, The Plow That Broke The Plains made a claim that the dust bowl and subsequent depression, is to be blamed up on man, and his social and political operations on the land. In contrast to this Redwood Saga is made to mask the environmental impact of man, and keep logging in a positive light. In The Plow, Lorentz, borrows techniques from Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, where the land itself is ‘emotional and dramatic,’ and technology ‘reckless and ruinous.’ In Redwood Saga, this relationship is reversed—the lumberjack, and technology takes center stage. “[T]he logs are cut by lengths wanted by mills and carpenters… boards useful to mankind, but the journey is not simple quick or easy, the logs must be snaked out by big tractors and loaded onto heavy trucks.”
At the heart of the film’s message is that redwoods are pre-destined to satisfy the American dream of homeownership, and that lumberjacks and technology embody the strength of the country. But the ideolgy bolstering the logging process shown in the film was developed when logging was a significantly different practice. The loggers and tools are far more advanced than the logging conditions of mid 19th century, when the mythological stature of Americans taming wild nature originated. The first one hundred years of the practice of logging redwoods in both the Sierra and coastal redwoods regions was a far more physical commercial endeavor. Teams of bulls, oxen, and horses hauled the logs along skid roads. The equipment consisted of axes, eight and twelve foot saws, sledgehammers, with which a team of choppers working in a couple of acres for an entire season, cut trees down one at a time. And when a tree was ready to fall everyone crossed their fingers, hoping that upon crashing to the ground it wouldn’t shatter upon it tonnage. The loggers were trained in Maine, Wisconsin, Canada or other eastern logging communities. “Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians, Frenchmen and Germans, Englishmen, Scotsmen and Irishmen, graduates of the Maine logging camps, and although they might have had trouble at times understanding each other they all shared the same pride in the depth and cleanness of their axe cuts.”
These conditions were celebrated in the portraits of 19th century champion loggers posed amongst downed trees and poeticized in Walt Whitman’s 1873 poem Song of the Redwood-Tree. In each, the axe-man is portrayed as evolutionarily superior to the redwoods, to boost the confidence of a fragile nation, although when the film Redwood Saga was made, half a century later, the conditions of living and the logging practice of the 19th century had thankfully been eradicated through technological innovation. By trying to parallel the modern logging practice of the 1940s with the natural and cultural history of redwood logging, Redwood Saga attempts to re-embody the passivity imposed by modern technology with a virile and mythological logging past.
The logging industry of the 1940’s was conquering nature ruthlessly, yet, defending the practice as if we were still living-off-the-land. Sustaining the priority of economic gain over sustainable logging practices is partly why this film was made. It was propaganda directed at young adults born in societies of luxury who had or would have political power to promote a specific redwood logging agenda. It was used to position concepts of hard work. It was an image showing the landscape as utilizable resource.
But perhaps the most vivid aspect of the film are sequences that show trees plummeting to the ground as they are being logged. Alone these images document an unmatched dramatic and spectacular effect rarely viewed in reality or film. As a montage of falling trees begins, the narrarator comments, “So down they come, some of the worlds oldest biggest and tallest trees, trees that grow over 350 high and 20 feet wide, with which 20 houses can be made from just one tree.” As each tree falls the reality of its hugeness is shown as it transitions from a vertical form, to an increasingly horizontal form through the camera frame. Its diameter flips up, the field of focus cannot adequately manage a clear image, and like the view of a whale breaching beside one’s boat—seeing it becomes a sublime experience. It gives us a queasy feeling, shock, and a negative reaction. The mere spatiality of old-growth logging is so rare and unusual, but seeing it fall is something even more rare. In addition to the symbolism of strength and nationhood—qualities previously attributed to the natural condition of the trees—the edited sequence of tree falling further portrays a controlled domination over nature—and therefore trivializes its destructive impact. Together the falling trees in sequence lose any sense of individuality, rather, like the cogs of a machine they become consumed and the viewer desensitized.
The years between 1939 and 1969, were the most destructive period of redwood logging. In the 1930s, the annual cut rate fell from 500 million board feet to a low of 135 million board feet. Following the World War II, at the same time Redwood Saga was first produced, it increased dramatically, peaking in 1958 at over a billion board feet a year. “During the 1950s, three times as many redwoods were logged each year as had been logged in any year during the previous decade…In 1954 unprecedented flooding, caused by soil erosion on clear-cut lands upstream from Humboldt State Park, uprooted prize redwoods purchased for preservation decades earlier.”
These events, as well a greater visibility of logging impact along highway 101, heightened public attention for redwood landscapes. As a result, the Sierra Club, which had been producing a large-format series of coffee table books about environmental decay during the 50s published The Last Redwoods in 1963. The idea to produce large-scale coffee table books, to raise public awareness for endangered landscapes, was developed by nature photographer Phylip Hyde, and editor Wallace Stegner following a trip to Dinosaur National Monument( a 200,000 acre repository of Dinosaur bones, wilderness area, and future site of Echo Park Dam, a Bureau of Reclamation Project). In 1955, Hyde and Stegner produced This Is Dinosaur, which intended to “grasp(ed) the symbolic significance of a book—as an artifact and a statement about conservation. “The mere weight of a book,” he wrote “does some good; anything worth making a book about should be worth saving…It [a book] is kept and referred to.” By including the Coastal redwood landscape into the series with The Last Redwoods: Photographs and Story of a Vanishing Scenic Resource, they hoped to describe their views on logging practices, and preservation as part of a media campaign for the formation of a Redwood National Park.
The Last Redwoods, as the title infers, was more of a requiem for the trees that had been lost. On the left hand page of the opening spread, a dense forest of redwood stalks is shown in a high contrast black and white photograph. Except for a thin sliver of bright light streaming through the branches of the trees, the image is almost completely black. And on the opposite page, in the lower right section, set in script-like text reads, “This is the land of the last Redwoods.”
The first section of the book is titled, “Life Of An Immortal.” The section includes a description of the evolutionary and fossil record of the species, and images of pristine virgin forests, its creeks, and ferns. As intended, the sections that follow are designed to despoil this image, beginning dramatically with a wide landscape photograph taken by Ansel Adams near Eureka in 1919. Taken from a height over twenty-five feet, the image depicts a scene of scarred stumps and snags as far as the eye can see.
In the next section of the tastefully designed book, images of old methods of logging, such the image of loggers proudly posing under a nearly felled tree, are contrasted with contemporary methods, such a logging truck packed with timber. With each flip of the page, the frustration of the Sierra Club during the pre-Redwood National Park era becomes more obvious, and as the requiem for the redwoods continues, through the juxtaposition of image and text, the messages framed by formal type setting and image placement, are clever in that they evoke refined dissent toward the destruction of the landscape, yet saddening. For instance, in the section titled, “The Redwoods Go To Sea,” the page is divided with two alternative concepts of the title. The top image shows a Japanese freighter packed with lumber and the bottom image depicts logging debris and driftwood scattered at the mouth of the Smith River. Together, redwood is shown as both waste and lumber, taken from the forest and sent out to sea. The play on words and images continues in a section titled, “Forest Renewal,” where a 1961 Chevy wagon is shown kicking up dust along a dirt logging road on Bald Ridge, which, as the caption describes, is “likely to remain bald.” Like the section, “The Redwoods Go To Sea,” “Redwood Renewal.”
The Last Redwoods and Redwood Saga each portray the destruction of logging differently. Redwood Saga frames redwood logging as a utilitarian vision of the redwood landscape in moving image, and The Last Redwoods juxtaposes clear-cut landscapes with unspoiled redwoods in the subversive elegance of a coffee table book. Like Redwood Saga, The Last Redwoods uses the sublime effect of clear-cut landscape imagery to underline its message. However, the meaning of the two different portrayals of destruction couldn’t be more different. In these two examples the power of the image to save or supplant redwood landscapes is taken to the extreme. Where postcards and brochures of tourist sites passively distract society from the destructive role of logging industry, images of clear cutting leave nothing to hide. Yet, as the redwoods vanish the desolation left behind becomes fertile ground for interpretation.
NOTES:
(details/ formatting forthcoming fyi)
TheSierra Club message becomes the third layer of “image making” in the landscape. The first is the physical appearance of the hillside left by the logging company who cut the trees down, the sign adds a second meaning to it, and the third is produced by the Sierra Club by printing the image in their book takes on a critical viewpoint of the first to messages.
Supporting information needed here
Redwood Saga, 1946. Simmel-Meservey.
Front and Back
Some Plain Facts About The Forest. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. Miscellaneous Publication No. 543 1949, courtesy of the Prelinger Library.
Dunaway, Finis. Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform. University of Chicago Press.
Sierra Club, The Last Redwoods and the Parkland of Redwood Creek.1969
Barnett, Gabrielle "Drive-By Viewing: Visual Consciousness and Forest Preservation in the Automobile Age" Technology and Culture - Volume 45, Number 1, January 2004, pp. 30-54. The Johns Hopkins University Press. pg 48
Dunaway, Finis Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform . University of Chicago press. 2004. 119-24
