Giant sequoias, the biggest trees on earth, are only found here in California. Nearly half are found in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
Some scientists are worried that we could face a future with no giant sequoias in Sequoia National Park. Since 2020, up to a fifth of the world’s giant sequoias have died from severe fire — fires made bigger because of climate change and poor management decisions.
Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks are proposing to replant giant sequoias, mostly within wilderness areas. By law, these are areas of public land set aside from development, protected as natural and “untrammeled” from human impacts.
But some environmentalists say that replanting the sequoia trees goes against the very definition of wilderness, and sets a dangerous precedent of trammeling the land in order to restore it to a natural state. The debate is really around the question: What is natural? How much should humans intervene? And what does wilderness mean on a changing planet?
This story was made to be heard. If you are able, press the blue play button above to listen.
TRANSCRIPT:
We’re going on a hike that I’ve been warned many times is hard.
ANDREW BISHOP: So where the trail ends — the official trail is down here — and then we start on these zigzags going up.
We’re headed off-trail to a remote, rugged part of the park, which is kind of the whole point.
ANDREW: I can actually pull out a map.
This is the person I’m relying on not to get us lost.
MARISSA ORTEGA-WELCH: And will you say your name and your title?
ANDREW: Andrew Bishop. I’m the restoration ecologist at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
We’re heading to Board Camp, the name of a grove of giant sequoias that burned in the 2020 Castle Fire.
MARISSA: I'm excited.
(And nervous.)
ANDREW: Yeah, same here.
Luckily, Andrew puts me at ease right away.
ANDREW: I didn't mention rattlesnakes.
MARISSA: Oh!
ANDREW: In the lower elevation part of this hike, there’s a good potential for rattlesnakes.
Plus there’s poison oak and these annoying flies that keep getting in our face.
MARISSA: The sunglasses are helping for the face flies! Just for the record, I don't normally wear sunglasses at 7 A.M.
I’m here today because I have a sort of obsession with wilderness. I’ve been hiking and backpacking in wilderness areas from California to Alaska for the last twenty years. And so questions about what’s happening to wilderness in our changing planet, matter to me–not just as a journalist–but personally. Technically, almost as soon as we leave the trailhead today, we’re in what’s called the John Krebs Wilderness.
ANDREW: I'm curious if we'll see a wilderness sign that says we're entering the designated wilderness.
MARISSA: Well, let's pause if we do. I love those signs.
ANDREW: Nothing says wilderness like a sign.
The fact that we’re in an area designated as wilderness is really important to this story.
Wilderness areas are the most protected public lands in the U.S.. Maybe you’ve been to Yosemite Valley. You drove there or took the bus to see Yosemite Falls or Half Dome. But if you kept heading further on the trail, away from a road, within a few miles you’d enter into one of these designated wilderness zones.
Starting in the nineteen-teens, as roads and buildings sprung up in National Parks and Forests, environmentalists called for halting development in some areas.
HISTORIC VOICE: A wilderness is an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
And in 1964, Congress passed the Wilderness Act.
HISTORIC VOICE: An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this act an area of undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions…
Generally speaking, ecologists like Andrew can only do restoration work in wilderness if the damage they’re trying to restore was directly caused by humans. So like pulling out invasive plants introduced by pack horses or restoring a meadow that was impacted by an old trail.
But now with climate change, every part of the planet is affected by humans, even wilderness.
And Sequoia National Park is a fascinating example in a growing debate: how much should people intervene to restore wilderness?
A couple miles into our hike, Andrew and I stop to look up the steep canyon where we’re headed.
ANDREW: And then we'll kind of go around the back a little bit and over a ridge that you can't quite see from here, and that's where Board Camp is.
MARISSA: And we can see burned trees. I see a bunch of...I think I'm just seeing skeletons of trees up there, right?
ANDREW: Yeah, this fire just ripped up that. You can imagine that's where we really saw high severity fire in the Castle Fire.
The strategy for over the last hundred years has been to put out wildfires in California, to protect homes and timber. Right in this valley, fire crews extinguished dozens of lightning fires over the years. But fire is important. Without it, smaller trees and shrubs grow unchecked, like matchsticks waiting to be lit. All that fuel on the ground, plus a hotter and drier climate means California’s fires now burn hotter, faster, and bigger.
Like the Castle Fire, which was started by lightning in August of 2020, and burned for months.
CHRISTY BRIGHAM: In the moment of the fire, it's very hard to know what you're going to find afterwards.
This is Christy Brigham, Chief of Resource Management and Science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. As the fire kept spreading, she checked on the sequoia groves the way you might check on a loved one after an emergency.
CHRISTY: It’s smoky; you don’t know what’s happening; so we were getting these different reports. I was calling people who had connections like, “Has anybody seen this grove? Or that grove?”
As a biologist, Christy knows that giant sequoias need fire. The heat from the flames below triggers the cones to open and drop their seeds, and the fire clears the ground of underbrush and creates soft, mineral soil - perfect growing conditions.
But with the Castle Fire, Christy started getting signs that something wasn’t right, downwind in the town of Three Rivers.
CHRISTY: Large chunks of sequoia needles were falling on the ground in Three Rivers. And so those were indications when the fire was burning that the fire was destroying a lot of sequoias.
She knew that this meant the fire was burning hot enough to reach the needles of the world’s biggest trees.
As soon as winter was over, Christy assembled a crew to hike out to the Board Camp Grove, where Andrew and I are headed.
CHRISTY: Which was in itself a journey because none of us had been there before.
The group climbed over burned, downed logs and bushwhacked through chaparral to survey the fire effects.
CHRISTY: It was terrible. It was like the surface of the moon. There was nothing alive.
The fire had in fact reached the seed cones in the tops of the giant sequoias, and killed off most trees entirely.
CHRISTY: At that point, we thought, we're going to have to come back out here. There may not be sequoia seedlings here because of the way the fire burned.
That’s when Christy and her team started to plan. Board Camp wasn’t the only sequoia grove that burned. And because most of the fire occurred in a wilderness area, the team knew they’d have to take special considerations.
The Wilderness Act asks land managers to not “trammel” the land, unless absolutely necessary.
CHRISTY: And “trammel” is kind of a beautiful, poetic, old time-y word. But what it's been generally interpreted to mean within the Wilderness Act context is that we're supposed to let nature take its course. Humans aren't supposed to hinder or interfere with natural processes.
But another one of the wilderness characteristics is that the area is to remain “natural.”
CHRISTY: …To have a place that's allowed to change and evolve and undergo its natural evolution. But that is really not what we're seeing with wildfire in California and with these impacts to these sequoia groves.
Christy and other scientists agree that even though the park's recent fires were started by a natural cause- lightning - the severity of the fires were a result of human causes.
CHRISTY: They're driven by 100 years of fire suppression, which were poor decisions that we made as managers and made worse by climate change-driven, hotter drought.
That’s why the land managers feel that they should try and restore the groves by replanting sequoia trees from seeds from surviving cones.
Which sets up this sort of catch-22: if what happened in the sequoia groves–the burning down of thousands-year old, fire-resilient trees wasn’t natural–and the park wants to restore the groves, it might need to do a little bit of trammeling.
SOUND OF A RUNNING CREEK AND PEOPLE HIKING ON A TRAIL
About 3 miles into our hike, at a creek in a small grove of living sequoias, we meet the tree climbers.
ANDREW: Here’s our climbing team. Howdy!
STEEN: Welcome to Cedar Flat Grove.
ANDREW: This is Marissa.
MARISSA: Hi.
STEEN: Hi, Marissa. Steen.
MARISSA: Hi, nice to meet you.
STEEN: Good to meet you, too.
This is Steen Christensen.
ANDREW: Steen is the leader of this wonderful outfit, doing the cone collecting.
STEEN: This is the crew. So Nick and Eli are from Minneapolis, Kai is from Germany, Matt and Justin are from Oregon.
They’ve been camping out here for days and, respectfully, they look like it. Steen’s shirt sleeve is ripped and his socks are mismatched.
STEEN: The flies are just unreal!
The park contracted with Steen and his team of tree climbers to spend the summer climbing giant sequoias, collecting seed cones from living trees.
STEEN: And we can show you what we do.
One of the climbers, Justin Marble, is going to harvest some cones from one last tree.
He pulls on a climbing harness and attaches himself to a rope that’s already been set up.
JUSTIN: I have a foot ascender and a knee ascender, so it allows me to basically walk up the rope.
I give him my extra audio recorder, which he puts in his pants pocket.
JUSTIN: Here we go!
SOUND OF JUSTIN PULLEYING HIMSELF UP THE ROPE
Justin starts pulleying himself up the rope and he’s moving fast. Pretty soon he disappears into the canopy.
JUSTIN: Whoo! Phew. Finally made it to the first branch. OK, onward and upward.
SOUND OF MORE PULLEYING UP A ROPE, THAT THEN COMES TO A STOP.
JUSTIN: There we go. Easy picking right here. All right, I’m headed down. Stand clear!
SOUND OF ROPE SLIDING THROUGH HIS HANDS AS HE LOWERS HIMSELF TO THE GROUND.
MARISSA: Can I come closer?
JUSTIN: Yeah, you can come closer.
MARISSA: How’d it go?
JUSTIN: Good. Here, I can show you what I got. Just got a few cones. If you can break these apart, you can kinda see – there you go.
MARISSA: Oh yeah, there’s the little oatmeal flakes!
Sequoia trees - despite their world-record size - have tiny seeds, smaller than oatmeal flakes.
For the past few days, Justin, Steen and the rest of the crew have been climbing trees in the Board Camp Grove, where I’m headed next. Only about 40 trees survived the fire there and the crew climbed them to collect some of their cones.
STEEN: I think we have it right here. Is this the Board Camp seed?
Steen opens a big military canvas backpack.
MARISSA: These are fresh sequoia cones?
STEEN: Fresh sequoia cones, yes. Just collected yesterday from Board Camp. And now we're headed out with them, and we'll process these cones, get the seed out and grow the seedlings. And then if everything goes well, we'll get them planted back there.
Everything goes well – as in the park’s proposal to replant sequoias here undergoes an environmental analysis and the park doesn’t get sued. See, their plan has some opponents. And it turns out - Steen just met one of them a few days ago.
STEEN: When we got here, we were camped at the South Fork Campground. And there was a fellow there who came over and asked a little bit about us and where we were going and it turns out that he was with Wilderness Watch.
MARISSA: Renee Voss?
STEEN: Guess who hiked out with us?
OK I know Rene Voss because he’s been a vocal critic of the park’s plan. Last night, in my motel room, I was reading an article by him about why the park shouldn’t replant giant sequoias here. And now it turns out, he and Steen were hiking together a few days ago? Like being stuck in a proverbial elevator with someone you don’t agree with.
RENE VOSS: I pretty much spent half the day with them.
This is Rene Voss. He’s a natural resource attorney and on the board of Wilderness Watch - a national organization that advocates for wilderness protection. He just happened to come check out the project area a few days ago.
RENE: And I pull into the campsite. Across from me, there's a bunch of really burly guys that look like they know what they're doing out in the wilderness.
It was Steen and his crew.
RENE: I struck up some interesting conversations with these guys. And these guys are all diehard environmentalists, so we had something in common.
Rene says that the replanting work - with all the boots on the ground and equipment required - will trammel the grove. Plus, the Park plans to lower materials using a helicopter.
RENE: So that means cutting down a bunch of trees.
But Rene’s main issue with the proposal is he believes planting trees in a wilderness is a violation of the Wilderness Act.
RENE: We don't need gardening in a wilderness. We need wilderness to be left alone for its own devices.
Rene says, for park managers to go in and restore after this fire – as tragic as the loss of the sequoias may be – sets a dangerous precedent of imposing our human beliefs about what this area should naturally look like, rather than letting nature take its course. And it could open the door for land managers across the country to be able to intervene in wilderness.
But I have to ask Rene: given climate change, can humans afford not to intervene?
MARISSA: Sequoia National Park may no longer have sequoias and Joshua Tree National Park may no longer have Joshua trees. And that is -
RENE: Glacier National Park is probably not gonna have glaciers, one of these days, for example. I mean, we can't intervene on that one, right? Where do we draw the line? I mean, climate change is affecting every ecosystem. We can't go down the line and try to fix the ecosystems that are caused by climate change because climate is going to continue changing unless we solve the climate crisis.
I’ve been privileged to backpack in places like Glacier and Sequoia National Park.
It’s hard to talk about why I love wilderness without sounding really cheesy. But if you haven’t been to a wilderness yourself, maybe you’ve gotten the chance on a dark night away from any cities to see a clear, starry sky. I don’t know about you, but for me looking at the layers of stars behind stars, puts my own life, and all of human existence into perspective. I know - cheesy.
Being in wilderness for me is like that feeling times infinity. Standing on top of a mountain and seeing a valley in each direction that rises up to another mountain and knowing behind that there’s another valley leading up to another mountain, and another valley and another mountain...And knowing there isn’t a road or a city for miles - that it’s just animals and plants and fungi and insects living their lives.
Seeing an ancient glacier; making eye contact with a fox as it runs through the forest; watching finches eat seeds on snow after a long winter. It makes me aware of how vast and powerful and old and precarious and fleeting the earth is. It gets me thinking beyond my own individual lifetime and stretches my idea of size and time scale. Plus it’s also damn beautiful.
And so I appreciate Rene’s argument that wilderness areas should be places that are left alone from human intervention, where natural systems can dominate. Even after a devastating fire. Because isn’t it a sort of hubris to think that humans can know what’s best here? Especially when these days humans are the ones impacting the wilderness.
STEEN: It's a complicated issue: what is wilderness?
Here’s Steen Christenson, the head of the tree climbing crew again.
STEEN: Historically,when you go on this trail that you're going on to Board Camp Wilderness, there's a trail that was built in 1909. There were cows. There's grasses that were spread by cows that are not native. There's micropollution. There's Fresno right down there. I think the Wilderness Act is fine, but we've got this world that is much more cosmopolitan with its problems.
Rene Voss and Wilderness Watch, the biologists, and the tree climbers all have the same goal of being good stewards for this place but the disagreement is about what stewardship should look like.
STEEN: When you see Board Camp, the fire effect is so extreme with granite exploding and giant trees burned down, it looks like a bomb hit it. It doesn't look like a natural fire. I think you’ll really see something that nobody has seen.
Steen and his crew hike out with the cones they’ve collected while Andrew and I start our hike up the ridge.
MARISSA: Thank you. I'll be in touch.
SOUND OF HIKING ON A TRAIL
We’re following an old grass-covered trail that the Park no longer maintains.
ANDREW: You can see people have gone that way, so this to me is very clearly a switchback. And now I'm doubting it as soon as I said it!
We stop our climb to take in the view down valley.
MARISSA: Oh my gosh, I can see where we came from.
Finally we finish our climb. It’s easy walking along the ridge and then we get our first view down the other side - into the burned Board Camp Grove.
As an environmental journalist in California, seeing a burned forest doesn’t really shock me anymore. I’ve been re-conditioned to think about most burns as generally a healthy thing for a forest. Fires can help forests regenerate and the land needs more fires, not fewer.
But what’s so striking about this view is not just that every tree has burned, but there are these massive trees that have lost their tops and are completely hollow so you can see down into them. I feel like I’m looking into humongous blackened chimneys, not trees. Those are the burned shells of the oldest giant sequoias here.
ANDREW: Wow, it’s...I don't know. Striking. Nothing much to add. It’s just a sad scene.
After the fire, scientists surveyed this grove. They say they didn’t find enough living adult trees or seedlings to indicate that the grove will grow back on its own. They predict that without intervention it will convert into a different habitat, one of shrubs and oak trees instead of sequoias.
ANDREW: I have a really hard time looking at a tree like that, a thousand or more years old, and thinking, “Yeah so what? That’s because of what humans did."
A year after the Castle Fire, another fire, called the KNP Complex, burned through the parks, killing more sequoias. In total, six sequoia groves burned so severely, the loss of trees was unprecedented.
Scientists are still surveying, but so far according to the Park, the data shows that the groves won’t be able to recover on their own.
The Park is accepting public comment on their proposal now - to begin planting as early as this fall and try again for up to six years.
It’s a big under-taking.
Here’s Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks' Chief of Resource Management, Christy Brigham again.
CHRISTY: These are very challenging times. We've never seen fires like this before. And it has taken a lot of really intense conversations, a lot of field work, a lot of philosophical probing, a lot of conversations with Tribal partners about: what does it mean to be a steward?
The park is accepting public comments on the proposal through August 6th.
CHRISTY: We're proposing that we made decisions that resulted in incineration of 1,000 year old trees. And rather than just let them disappear, to plant seedlings and give those trees a chance to continue to adapt and grow and evolve in the face of climate changes that are going to occur in the next 100 to 1,000 years.
This debate makes my head spin. Is intervening the right thing to do, to restore wilderness from climate and fire impacts that humans caused? Or will intervening mean accepting that there are no longer places on the planet free of human impacts? Has that ever really existed though? Luckily, I know just the person to call for this question. He’s sort of like my therapist for wilderness.
MARK DAVID SPENCE: You know, the concept of wilderness: that's entirely in your mind.
This is Mark David Spence, a historian whose family history traces back to Canadian First Nations in the Pacific Northwest. He’s the author of the book Dispossessing the Wilderness:Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks.
MARK: Non-Indigenous people invented wilderness and they actually built parts of it and called it National Parks.
Mark’s work tries to set the record straight about public lands in the U.S. As settlers moved West in the 1800s, they didn’t find pristine wilderness empty of humans. They found hundreds of thousands of Indigenous peoples who were living on the land. And the U.S. federal government killed or forcibly removed them to create our National Parks and Forests.
MARK: So wilderness doesn't mean anything to Indigenous peoples. It's a category of land management that the United States maintains.
The land that the U.S. now calls “wilderness” was home to Indigenous peoples. In the Sierra foothills near Board Camp grove, the Yokuts, Western Mono, and other tribes lived on and managed the land, including regularly burning it.
MARK: To make it more fruitful for the various plants, animals that Native peoples utilized but they also knew that they were creating larger healthier populations of fish, deer, whatever.
Mark says: wilderness is a story, a myth that this land was ever untouched and untrammeled. Natural.
But that story is based on the idea that humans are separate from nature. Which can lead to thinking we’re above it...that we can use it and extract it and chop it all down without repercussion.
The story of wilderness is hiding thousands of stories below it - of the people who lived there for millennia.
MARK: Wilderness is a cultural landscape. What I mean by that is, it's a lived landscape. It’s been shaped for a very, very long time. An extremely long time.
Looking down from the ridgeline at the burned out trunks of these massive, ancient trees, I try to see it the way that Mark is describing it – not as just valley after mountain after valley after mountain with no traces of cities or roads, but as a lived landscape, full of history and stories. Maybe it’s hubris to think that humans know what’s best for these places, but it’s another sort of hubris to think we are separate from them.
In Sequoia National Park, I’m Marissa Ortega-Welch for Crosscurrents.
This transcript was edited for clarity.
This story was edited by Lisa Morehouse and engineered by James Rowlands.
The story was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit calhum.org.
