'The Last Stand: The War Between Wall Street and Main Street Over California's Ancient Redwoods'
by David Harris
Times Books, $25
California's redwood forests began growing more than 2,000 years ago - centuries before Columbus set sail, before the Dark Ages began. Neither Wall Street, nor its famed takeover artist Michael Milken, remotely existed.
Yet by some curious twist two millennia later, the fate of these ancient forests somehow ended up the subject of a highly leveraged hostile takeover and a classic battle between corporate America and its environmental antagonist, Earth First!
The Pacific Lumber Company, operated by the Murphy family in the tiny Northern California town of Scotia since 1904, seemed in its prime a highly unlikely target of environmental protests. It was notable not only for its huge stands of virgin old-growth redwoods, but also for its relatively benign approach to forestry. Long before it was fashionable, the company abandoned clear-cutting, instituted selective logging and limited the total cut to the growth during the same year - in other words, sustained forestry.
All that came to a rather screeching halt in 1985, when the firm came to the attention of a Texas-based conglomerate, Maxxam Inc., and Maxxam CEO Charles Hurwitz. To Hurwitz, Pacific Lumber was grossly undervalued: All one needed to do was borrow money to finance a takeover, then pay back the loans by selling off divisions and liquidating the forest, yielding a tidy profit in the process. Assisted by financing from Michael Milken, Hurwitz and Maxxam set out to do just that.
They met remarkably little resistance at first. But then, enraged by the highly accelerated logging of old-growth, the environmental movement began confronting Pacific Lumber. Earth First! activists staged large-scale protests, sit-ins on trees, and other acts. The battle reached its peak with a car-bombing attack on two leading Earth First! activists, a crime never solved.
"The Last Stand" hardly takes a neutral stand on all of this. David Harris, overwrought and breathless, builds the story in David-and-Goliath terms; in his world, the bad guys are irredeemably evil, and the good guys can do no wrong.
Well, maybe. There certainly isn't much to be said in defense of unsustainable cutting of virgin old-growth, particularly when dictated by corporate conglomerates trying to fund their own hostile takeovers. But Harris - like Sen. Slade Gorton on the opposite side of the fence - doesn't even try to imagine a middle ground. Worse, his approach leaves one longing for the sound of Goliath hitting the ground, but that fall, at least in this case, never comes. As Harris well knows, the war is still being played out.
Nonetheless, "The Last Stand" is an arresting portrait of the redwood battle at its high-water mark. For entirely different reasons, the book is likely to cause both sides of the timber dispute to grind their teeth. That alone is a considerable accomplishment.
