Great God Pan

-from Great God Pan #12, 1998

Two years ago in San Francisco, Dave Boyd ordered what amounted to genocide. Some 12,000 Australian natives were felled. “It’s a nightmare,” bemoaned a visiting Oakley resident. But don’t get all outraged just yet, these victims weren’t human, they were trees. Eucalyptus trees.
The carnage took place on tiny Angel Island, just north of San Francisco. Known to Northern California residents as the “jewel of the bay,” and once home to an army fort and immigrant induction center, the island has in recent years become a popular destination for hikers and campers. That was until California State Park resource ecologist Dave Boyd came on the scene. Referring to the massive specimens as “weeds,” he deemed it his mission “to bring (the island’s habitat) back to its natural state” and to “restore biodiversity.”
But some residents see otherwise. “This habitat restoration is like an ethnic cleansing operation,” complained the former executive director of the Angel Island Association.
And some folks agree. After hiking “nearly an hour with their four young children in backpacks and strollers,” Tom McGrane and his family arrived at their barren campsite, freshly hewn clean by a state-hired lumber crew. “This is a vacation from hell,” he cried out, although it is not apparent whether he was complaining about the barren landscape or his tiresome chore of hiking whilst pushing a stroller.
Central Coast bug lovers no doubt side with the Aussies in the case of keeping or leveling the trees. Every winter, nearly 200,000 monarch butterflies flutter southward from their rookeries in Canada and Alaska. Their destination is the eucalyptus groves of Santa Cruz and Pacific Grove. “They hang like fruit” in large groups from the bows of the Australian gum, noted a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1990 the people of Pacific Grove or “Butterfly Town USA” (as they like to call it), spent over a million dollars to save a three acre eucalyptus grove from being developed so that the “fascinating little beasts” would have somewhere to winter. A group that calls itself “Friends of the Monarchs” meanwhile busies itself planting eucalyptus and pine seedlings in the area so that the butterflies’ habitat will be more comfortable.

The genus comprises a wonderful array of trees, including species which produce specimens so gigantic as to rival the sky-piercing sequoia; others are mere bushes; others thrive in swamp land; others in coastal situations or on high plateaus, hillsides, rocky lands and deserts. There seems to be no limit to the adaptability . . .
-F.D. Cornell, Sunset magazine, 1909

First named and classified in 1788 by French botanist L. Heritier, Eucalyptus trees were introduced to California from their native Australia in the 1856. Groves of the trees had already been distributed around Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean by Frenchman Baron von Mueller and other scientists as an answer to the regions’ need for a quick-growing source of fuel. But it was not really until 1870, when Elwood Cooper began extensively planting various species of the trees on his land in Santa Barbara, California, that the trees caught on in America. Another early booster (and a name that should be familiar to Angelenos) was Venice developer Abbot Kinney, who as a chairman of the California Board of Forestry from 1886 to 1888, spread the seeds of Eucalyptus farming far and wide. He would go on to pen America’s most informed work on the subject.
By 1909 there were some “ten thousand acres of California soil planted to timber eucalypts,” wrote Sunset magazine. “In another twelve months probably fifteen thousand acres of strictly commercial forests will be planted. Another year and the planting will perhaps be doubled or trebled.”
Eucalyptus seemed tailor-made for the spread of agriculture in California. Fast-growing and adaptable, the trees provided much needed windbreaks for farms. Their dense wood was heralded as a cheap and adaptable source for uses from “plow beams to intricate parquetry.” Health-conscious Californians embraced the tree as a cure-all. Salves were prepared from its oils and the belief that the massive trees would soak up fetid water in the fields and cleanse the air with their strong, medicinal odor was propagated by boosters.
Jack London, adventurer and writer, was an early advocate of the Australian blue gum. He became smitten with the trees on one of his trips to the Land Down Under. Thinking them ideal for the manufacture of railroad ties in the States, he spent a small fortune on planting them on and about his homestead in the Oakland hills. His venture was doomed to failure, though, as the wood of the blue gum proved too soft for the purpose. Supposedly a large grove still stands on his property.
One hundred years later, just up the Sacramento Valley a ways, the Simpson Timber Company of Seattle claim they have made eucalyptus farming profitable. On 12,000 acres of rolling hills just south of Red Bluff, foresters have planted 6.3 million Eucalyptus camaldulensis, or red river gum. Unlike London’s blue gum which rose to popularity around the turn of the century and frustrated carpenters with its “twisting grain” and tendency to warp and split, the red river gum is known for its straight trunks and quick growth. Regardless, these trees are not slated for use as lumber. They are to be chopped, chipped and shredded into high-quality paper.
“It’s not a forest, it is a farm,” clarifies Michael Bacca, who is in charge of the Tehama Pulp Farm, referring to the rows of overgrown, yet orderly giants. And although the orchards are now home to bands of coyote, deer, and wild turkey, they will soon be hewn to ground level and a whole new batch started.
After only seven years the eucalypts are ready for harvest. Some are a foot thick and up to 75-feet-tall. It is estimated that the trees grow about 500 cubic feet per acre every year, “five times as much as a grove of coast redwood trees.” It is this rapid growth that makes the trees so popular today. Compare this with the 20 to 25 years necessary for your typical pine to mature and it’s easy to see why the Simpson Company is so excited.
It’s also easy to see why environmentalists like Dave Boyd are so worried. As well as their oily wood being a fire hazard, he claims that if the blue gum were to continue to grow unchecked on Angel Island, it would completely take over, leaving “no understory, no wildlife to speak of.”
The job of removing the eucalyptus trees on Angel Island began in October of 1995 when state park officials came to the conclusion that the foreign trees, planted on the island by the U.S. army as windbreaks around the turn of the century, were “upsetting the natural balance” of the island’s habitat.
But not everyone is happy about the change. “Those were old trees. Older than all of us,” mourned a Mill Valley resident who visited the island. So who are we to make decisions about something that’s been around since before we got here? Are we to begin hacking away at any foliage that offends us? Opponents’ anger was fueled further by reports that loggers hired to clear the trees had accidentally chopped down a nearly hundred-year-old flagpole on the island. “We’re good but not perfect,” was their official response.
And now the eucalyptus trees of California have more to fear than just Dave Boyd and a bunch of clumsy loggers.
A tiny but vicious foreign pest has been located on trees in Ventura county and Malibu. A weevil by birth, the newest threat goes by the rather harmless name of snout beetle. He is only one of 200 exotic insects that have shown up on California shores in the last forty years.
The snout beetle’s larvae favor stripping clean eucalyptus trees’ leaves to sate their unbounded hunger. And with an ability to spread at the incredible rate of sixty miles a year, naturalists worry about the bug’s impact—in the mid-1980s, a similar critter, the longhorned borer, decimated drought-weakened trees from San Diego to San Francisco. Though not quite as ominous as the dreaded Formosan termite—often referred to as “the terminator termite” due to its ability to chew through plastic and metal to reach its favorite meal-wood—the snout beetle still poses a real threat to the California eucalyptus.

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The scene would appear idyllic to many Angelenos. A row of shiny SUVs parked beneath an aisle of tall grey-green eucalypts. Shoppers returning to their cars spared from burning hot steering wheels and viscous vinyl seats. No glare or reflection in sight, just the cooling shade and breezy air of a tree-lined Southern California parking lot. Sound like the scene at your local mall?
Doubtful.
Although the city of Los Angles passed an ordinance nearly three years ago insisting that new developments must provide their parking lots with shade trees, few have reaped the benefits of this action. “The seat will be so hot,” complained a soccer mom in the San Fernando Valley after emerging from the mall, “I have to wait for it to cool down,” she told the L.A. Times. According to the ordinance, new parking lots must have a one-to-four tree-to-parking spot ratio, and 50% of the area must be covered with shade within ten years. Why would the city do this? Are they really that interested in the comfort of their citizens? Do they really care when Valley residents complain that their “seat will be so hot” when they come out of the Galleria?
Partially.
“Parking lots are a wasteland,” explains Greg McPherson who conducted a recent pollution study through the U.S. Forest Service. The sun’s heat, beating down on parked cars causes the gas in the vehicles tanks to evaporate, releasing deadly hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. By measuring the temperatures in a parking lot in Davis, California, McPherson calculated that a 50% shade canopy could reduce the emissions by “nearly a ton a day” in the Sacramento area alone.
So what does this mean for Los Angeles residents? According to the Forest Service, Los Angeles is made up of about 10% parking lots—that’s a lot of cars—and on a hot day those lots produce one sixth of L.A.’s total emissions. And although cars are now fitted with mechanisms to counter the release of these deadly gasses, shade could decrease them even more. Fast-growing trees like eucalyptus could feasibly provide enough shade to cool tempers and save the ozone in just a few short years. Unfortunately the ordinance only applies to new construction. Parking lots that were built before the 1996 date are exempt from it. Environmental groups like TreePeople, whose headquarters incidentally is surrounded by a eucalyptus grove, hope this study will help them in their mission to plant more and more trees in the Los Angeles basin.

•••

Meanwhile the battle between humans over whose definition of nature is the right one escalates on other fronts. On the Channel Islands off Southern California’s coast, non-native populations of feral pigs and goats were exterminated by hunters and helicopter-borne military sharpshooters. Environmentalists hoped these drastic actions would restore the hilly islets to some sort of pre-colonial natural state. More recently, wild horses, who had roamed freely on Santa Cruz Island for generations, were ordered by a California State court to immediately vacate the premises. Naturalists had complained that the beasts were nibbling away at the island’s fragile ecosystem. Infinitely luckier than their cousins of the horned and snouted variety, the horses were spared instant bloodshed and instead airlifted to the mainland, presumably to meet grisly ends as either pampered mounts of bratty Palos Verdes teens or providing nourishment for Los Angeles’ burgeoning pit bull population.