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[footsteps plodding softly]
[footsteps plodding continues]
- [Narrator] The silence is the first thing you notice.
[footsteps plodding continues]
Take a deep breath,
[gentle music]
inhaling that earthy air.
[gentle music continues]
Like stepping into the pages of a fairytale,
[owl hoots]
there's nothing like being among the tallest
and some of the oldest living beings on Earth.
Coast redwoods.
Found only here, woven into the rugged coastline,
from California to Southern Oregon.
These giants have stood watch for millennia.
They are harbors of life,
conductors of weather
and water.
And coursing through them are ancient secrets
that hold modern lessons for survival.
Every year, we learn more about how redwoods grow so tall
and live so long, holding up their communities,
and about the many ways they enhance our own wellbeing.
The redwood's tale has been unfolding
for much longer than ours,
but our stories are deeply entwined.
[tree clattering]
It's an epic saga that's reaching a new cl*max,
as we all try to rise up from the past
and face the challenges of today together.
[gentle music]
[gentle music continues]
[leaves rustling]
[camera clicking]
- This grove is really extraordinary.
Something about being in the trees
that tells me to, like,
do less,
go slow.
You know, maybe it just gets me out of myself, I don't know.
[gentle music]
[camera clicking]
Trees have been the focus of my work for about years.
Four or five years ago,
I was taking photographs of old-growth redwoods,
and I was physically, sort of emotionally blown away.
[camera clicks]
And I needed to understand what that was about.
The scale and the grandeur take us out
of the daily stress of our lives.
The trees give us perspective.
[camera clicks]
[footsteps plodding]
I love sharing the experience and my enthusiasm
and my kind of love of the trees.
And it's also complicated,
because there is nothing like this.
This experience of me standing here in this air
and these birds and this incredible place,
the trees and the ferns, it can't be reproduced.
So, what do I do?
I've made prints that are , feet across,
and equally high, in which we see a portion of the tree,
but in its true scale.
[gentle music]
I bring that sculptural sense into the photographs.
Brings our physicality into it.
I'm looking to create that kind of visceral connection.
Through my portraits, I hope to bring their presence
and their vitality, bearing witness to
something that is way bigger than we are
and lives way longer than we do.
That seems important in terms of connecting us as humans
to the planet in a slightly different way.
My latest ambition is to photograph
and print an entire coast redwood tree life size,
so, that's feet or so,
and to bring it into the urban environment.
And so we have this incredible giant
of the natural world brought into another context.
I think it can be really, really powerful.
- [Narrator] Like portals to another realm,
these trees offer a way to step outside ourselves
and experience life through a wider lens.
But just how they cast this spell on us is still a mystery.
[gentle music]
- We've done some studies where we actually put people,
surround them with big trees,
and then studied what that does to them.
They report having this experience of awe
or this experience of wonder, and as a result,
they feel insignificant, and it feels so good.
And I think that's a really interesting puzzle.
What is it about the human mind that so cherishes
experiences that make it feel less important?
In the emerging neuroscientific understanding of awe,
what we're seeing is decreased activation
in the self-reflective parts of the brain,
suggesting that awe is associated with
an increased attention to the outside environment.
There's a lot about awe that we don't know,
but at this point, we know that awe and time in nature
has a lot of really beneficial effects.
It's been linked to reduced inflammatory cytokines,
which are a part of the stress
and inflammation response in humans.
It slows the heart rate down
and gets people to experience a sense
of calmness and contentment.
It quiets that buzzing of stressors
that people carry around with them on a daily basis,
and reminds you of the bigger,
more complex things in the world, like nature,
that you're an inherent but small part of.
[gentle music continues]
- [Narrator] One of the revelations to emerge from
Paul's research is that experiencing
wonders like redwoods
makes people, well, nicer.
- We found that having people spend
just seconds looking up at big trees
brought about this experience of awe,
and as a result, made them more compassionate,
more ethical, more mindful of others' needs,
less likely to prioritize their own,
and even made them more willing to help a stranger
who is in need of help that they were confronted with.
So you can imagine, seconds,
what if you did seconds of awe or time in trees a day?
What would that do?
- [Narrator] While nothing beats actually
being among redwoods, the researchers observed
that just seeing images of trees can spark awe,
and the good stuff that comes with it.
So the idea that a giant portrait of a redwood
could profoundly impact people is not so far fetched.
- I came walking up this trail in one of my
regular tree looking expeditions,
and I knew immediately, this was the tree
I wanted to make the portrait of.
[gentle music]
It has a name. It's called Old Tree.
It is beautiful and gnarled,
and has witnessed about , years of history.
Groves like this one are rare and really hard to get to.
[gentle music continues]
And so one of my goals in making this full scale portrait
is to take it to places where many, many people can see it
and it's much more accessible.
I just have to figure out how to do it.
- [Narrator] Capturing Old Tree's full height
will be no small feat, but then again,
neither is growing so tall, or sustaining such grandeur.
- One of the key questions when you start working
on a redwood is, how does the water
get all the way to the top of these enormous trees?
[gentle music]
It starts in the soil, where water is absorbed
by this incredible network of roots into the tree
and through this massive plumbing system.
It's almost like a vacuum.
The atmosphere is essentially pulling that water
through the tree molecule by molecule
through a series of really tiny pipes.
And it's a very long journey to the top.
Well, eventually, the water hits the needles
at the top of the tree, and moves through these
minute pores on the leaves back into the atmosphere,
and basically completes that cycle of water
falling in this precipitation, taken up by roots,
and moving all the way back through the redwood tree again.
- [Narrator] But these leaves aren't just
an exit door for water rising from the roots.
Turns out that redwoods actually have
a whole other way of hydrating themselves.
Drinking from the fog.
[gentle music]
- So at the time that we discovered this,
it just blew our mind.
We knew of no other trees being able to
take water directly out of the sky.
It was this aha moment of just going,
"Oh my goodness, this is maybe how they grow so large,
and how it is they're able to sustain this enormous body
that a redwood tree actually is."
Anywhere between and % of all the water
in the coastal redwood forest comes from fog.
In addition, there's all this fog drip
taken up by all of the other understory plants.
Everything in the redwood forest
is sort of linked to this fog absorption.
But as climate has changed, fog has also changed.
Over the last, say, years,
fog has declined by about % here in California.
We don't see that as a very pretty picture.
- [Narrator] Fortunately, redwoods are survivors,
and the secrets of their resilience,
millions of years in the making, could help sustain us all.
[leaves rustling]
[atmospheric music]
million years ago,
as dinosaurs roamed the earth,
the redwoods' ancestors had already taken root.
Over time, the trees rose up across the continents,
their range ever adapting in response to climate changes.
Along the way, evidence of their prehistoric lineage
was etched in fossilized leaves
and petrified trunks found around the world.
Today, some of the living descendants of these trees
include the dawn redwoods of China,
the giant sequoia that inhabit the mountains
of Eastern California, and the coast redwoods,
Sequoia sempervirens, that settled along
miles of Pacific coast,
from California's Big Sur to Oregon's southern border.
Known to reach heights of feet
and widths nearly feet across.
The oldest known coast redwood
has been alive for more than , years,
witness to the march of so much human history
in the span of just one lifetime.
But these trees are not the only ones
who have long made their homes here.
- Family houses like this are built entirely of redwood.
[gentle music]
They're actually still a part of a living culture.
[Rosie speaking Yurok]
[gentle music continues]
I grew up in the redwood forest along the Klamath River,
where my family's lived since the beginning of time.
This is the entrance.
It's pretty small for a door, right?
So you think about the house and, you know,
wanting to keep warm in the winter,
and not having a lot of air draft coming in.
And also, it's small because
predators can't make it in here.
There are documented Yurok villages,
and there are many of them that are recreated
and still used today,
and it, you know, connects us all together.
[child speaking Yurok]
- Redwood is sacred to Yurok people.
We even have specific trees
that are considered guardian trees.
These trees are actually in our creation story.
[gentle music]
And that life force, when it's standing,
it continues into our structures.
They use redwood not only because of the sacred element.
[fire crackling]
It's a practical element.
Redwood is pest resistant, fire resistant, rot resistant.
We've known that forever.
[air whooshing]
- [Narrator] The redwood's resilience
is the stuff of legends.
The tree's bark, which can be a foot thick,
is like a coat of armor,
shielding the inner wood from the elements.
But perhaps its best defense are the chemicals
found in every part of the tree, including tannin,
which does more than just give the trees their red color.
Tannin is an insect repellent containing toxins
that stop pests from munching on the leaves or bark.
These chemicals also help make the tree's core
resistant to disease and decay from moisture.
It's a rare superpower,
which makes it the perfect material
from which to conjure a canoe
for a journey that's been underway for thousands of years.
[gentle music]
- This is a traditional Yurok canoe.
This is how you caught fish. This is how you traveled.
It's used in our ceremonies.
[tool thudding]
At this point, it really looks ugly. [laughs]
What we're doing is we're trying to
find the canoe within the log.
years ago, I started building canoes.
So there's nothing like this. It's so addicting.
My teacher told me that in the beginning.
I thought, "Oh, yeah, right." But it is, it's bad.
For us, canoe building isn't just about the canoe building.
Everybody has to get along here.
And we talk about everything.
We don't just talk about canoes.
Them's the relationships when you're down the mouth
and the ocean grabs you,
that's the guy that's gonna hook you in the back
and save your life, 'cause he's your friend,
'cause you worked on canoes together, you know?
So this builds community.
We think of this as being a living being.
It's a human, and is treated that way just like a human.
You never act up around them.
If you did, you might get kicked out of it or whatever.
You'd never disrespect people around 'em.
It's a member of the family. It really is.
Actually, it's treated better than
some members of the family. [laughs]
Old-growth redwood would be the only wood
that we build these out of.
We as a tribe have very few big trees like this.
The only real old growth that exists anymore
are in the park system.
Having the knowledge is one thing,
but not having the materials to build these with,
it's done, it's just done.
[truck rumbling]
- [Narrator] Carved only from elder trees
that fall naturally, lack of access
has made it tough to build canoes or traditional houses.
Still, the tribe's relationship with redwoods remain strong,
much like the ties between the trees themselves,
which run deeper than you may know.
[wind howling]
[gentle horn music]
[gentle horn music continues]
- Playing the French horn helps me express my feelings,
things that are hard to express sometimes in words.
[gentle horn music]
Music really speaks to me, and redwoods really speak to me.
[gentle horn music continues]
Combining those two really is powerful,
a cathartic experience that helps me
deal with the stress of everyday life.
[gentle horn music]
[birds chirping]
[gentle music]
As a kid, I remember just being
in awe of these amazing trees.
You do not need to know the science behind any of this
to be just floored by these trees.
But awe can be inspired even more
when you learn a little bit more about them.
[gentle music]
Today I'm here to meet with some docents
and take them on a tour, talking about redwood genetics.
There's a specific phenotype,
which is this curly redwood phenotype here.
It's like wavy hair.
Like, some people have straight hair,
but then some people have wavy hair.
We are learning a ton about these trees.
If you see, there's three standards.
But if we wanna understand more about
what makes a redwood tree so remarkable,
it's height, it's size, it's age,
and how they're so resilient.
Genetics would be the way to answer some of these questions.
- [Narrator] Redwoods have genetic traits
that are shared by family members, just like we do,
but how they build their family trees is a little different.
[gentle music]
Every winter, the trees open their cones,
showering the earth with their seeds.
Millions of seeds may fall from a single tree,
but very few actually take root.
Luckily, there's a workaround.
- Redwood trees also have another means of reproduction,
and does it through sprouting or cloning
at the base of the tree.
We think of trees as individuals,
and the reality is that redwood trees are not.
They are often clonal, which means that
multiple trunks are all the same tree
interacting and communicating underground,
and connecting and sharing resources.
- [Narrator] Beneath every redwood grove
lies a tangle of long but shallow roots,
many of which can be traced to a single source,
a mother tree, that channels her life force
into her cloned offspring, even as she dies.
While this tree may be long gone,
her descendants still hold each other up
as they sprout families of their own.
It's a lineage that can span thousands of years,
connecting an entire grove.
Above ground, these clones do something else
that captures the imagination.
They form circles, known as fairy rings.
- You're seeing this big, beautiful form
that's sprouting from the ashes
of this dead tree in the center.
These clones are physically
and genetically connected, all one thing.
When you stand in a fairy ring,
in a way, you can feel that connection.
In order to understand all the redwood's unique adaptations,
we need to look at the genetic code of that redwood tree.
To do this, we would have to do something
that we once thought impossible, map the redwood genome.
The redwood genome has been ridiculously hard
to try and sequence because it's about
times larger than the human genome
and it has multiple copies of genes, which is really tricky.
It'd be like if you got three human beings
to spit in a tube, you sent it off to andMe
and told them, "Hey, you figure out who's who in this tube."
- [Narrator] The quest to unlock the tree's genetic code
is underway, codes that could be used
to help safeguard the redwoods' future.
That is if we first help them rise up from the past.
[leaves rustling]
[rhythmic music]
The tale of the redwoods' fall and salvation
is as much our story as it is theirs.
It began with a rush of European settlers
who struck out for California in the s.
Many came seeking gold,
but discovered something more accessible,
and in some ways, more valuable.
million acres of giants.
- The first reaction was just jaw dropping awe,
that you have these massive, massive creatures.
And you had two responses.
One was, "Wow, that's amazing timber."
And the other was, "It's really dark and gloomy in here.
How am I going to raise my cows?"
- [Reporter] So down they come,
some of the world's oldest, biggest, and tallest trees.
[trees rumbling]
[somber music]
- Right here where we're standing,
the largest tree in the world at the time,
the Fieldbrook Giant, was cut down.
This place which had these amazing
only-here, in-the-whole-of-the-world trees
became dairy farms.
- [Narrator] The people living in and around these forests
for an eternity suffered unthinkable losses.
- They want to extract the gold.
They wanted to, you know, cut the trees down.
So Yurok people were in the way of that.
And so there was state policy to k*ll Indians
to gain access to those resources.
They wanted us gone.
You know, I'm not supposed to be here.
[tree clattering]
- [Narrator] The devastating impacts on the Yurok
and other tribes continued as the cut redwoods
became building blocks for homes,
schools, and growing cities.
Advances in technology continually made it easier,
cheaper, and more profitable
to cut and process the big, old trees.
And before they knew it, % of the coast redwood forest
was logged, most of it multiple times,
leaving behind forests that were fragmented and vulnerable.
Still, the other less tangible value
of these majestic trees was never totally overlooked.
[train horn blaring]
[gentle music]
- Look at these soft, light, new growth.
How does it feel to you?
- [Visitor] It's kind of waxy.
- These trees really are adapted to hold on,
save water, gather water.
I love connecting people to these redwoods.
Their awe of these giants inspires me.
As somebody who's worked here for years,
I am so grateful for these forests.
What if it had all been cut down?
What if they hadn't saved it?
In the s, there were sawmills
in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
People were hearing the woodman's axe
throughout these hills,
and they realized that within a year,
all these beautiful trees in the Big Basin could be gone.
So this group of people came together.
It was bankers, it was scientists, it was religious people,
it was artists and poets, women's groups,
setting aside their differences, all joining together
to save these magnificent trees.
Finally, in , their efforts paid off.
A bill was passed to create
what would become Big Basin Redwoods,
California's oldest state park.
- Have you ever tasted a redwood?
Go ahead, try. Give 'em a bite.
I love these trees, feeling their antiquity,
and connecting people.
Working here, it just, it fills me up all the time.
- [Narrator] Since Big Basin first opened,
more than redwood parks have been created,
including a group of national and state parks up north
that hold most of the world's oldest
and tallest redwoods, alongside other trees
that are struggling to make a comeback.
[static buzzing]
[upbeat music]
- My parents were very involved
in the formation of Redwood National Park.
We would come up here, and they would walk all around
private property, looking at places
for the Redwood National Park.
And as this became more spoken about,
people would call my family's home to tell my parents
exactly what they thought of them for this idea.
I had been taught as a child to answer the phone,
and sometimes people on the other end of the phone
would say, "I'm going to k*ll your family."
- This ceremony is the crowning moment
of a crusade which has lasted two generations.
- [Narrator] In , Redwood National Park was established,
but tensions continued to mount.
- [Reporter] This was the day when , men
who worked the tall trees let out their
frustration and anger.
A congressional committee meant to hear testimony
on the proposed expansion of Redwood National Park.
The men and their families demonstrated against that.
- Well, we're gonna have to break into something new,
and nobody knows what.
After you did something for years, it's not easy
to pick up and do something, start all over again.
[tense music]
- [Laurie] It really pitted the people who loved redwoods
as this world wonder, and those people who said,
"But I earn my living by cutting these trees down
and by working in the mill."
- We want our jobs!
- People felt so passionate and so threatened.
- [Narrator] A decade later, the park was expanded,
but it wasn't quite what they had bargained for.
- In those intervening years,
a lot of that landscape that was acquired was logged.
When you looked out here and you saw nothing but
brown patches of dirt, you felt devastated.
Especially if you were invested in the
creation of this national park.
So we have approximately , acres,
the ancient redwood forest
that people love to come and visit.
But this park also has about
, acres of harvested forest.
In this stand, you have no diversity of anything.
You have one condition.
Everything's sh**ting for the canopy.
Anything that doesn't make the canopy dies,
and it just lays on the ground.
And when you see that density,
there's something not quite right.
The lack of understory,
the lack of the next generation of trees.
The canopy is blocking sunlight
from hitting the ground floor,
providing what's necessary for seedlings
to germinate and grow.
So what we do is we take out those trees
that are overrepresented, and we reduce the stand density.
By opening that up, you get an immediate flush
and recovery of understory vegetation.
And that diversity in structure is so key and important
to habitat quality for wildlife and plants.
These redwood forests are really harbors of connected life.
And what we're trying to do in this park
is reestablish those connections
- [Narrator] From park managers to scientists, to artists,
people have always given their all to support redwoods.
[siren blares]
Including those moved to take great risks on their behalf.
[gentle music]
- I am calling you from feet up
in an incredibly beautiful, ancient redwood tree
that we've named Luna.
She's over , years old.
- [Narrator] Julia Butterfly Hill
lived atop this redwood for two years
to protest the clear cutting of the ancient forest.
- Stove, pot, office, bed.
- [Narrator] While up there, she endured wild storms
and harassment by helicopters
used by the timber company to try to scare her down.
- You've gotta ask whether there's something about
these giant trees that reminds us of our deepest values,
of our most cherished beliefs, if people are willing to go
to such lengths to protect them.
- [Narrator] Today, about % of the original
ancient redwood groves are protected,
and efforts to restore logged forests are underway,
but the trees are definitely not out of the woods.
And just like in the past, today's activists
are finding creative ways to remind us of what's at stake.
[zipper opening]
- [Sarah] Today I begin the process
of making the portrait of Old Tree.
[gentle music]
- [Drone Pilot] So I'm gonna take off.
[drone buzzing]
- In order to photograph the tree's full height,
I knew I would need to use a drone to take
a series of images all the way up the tree
that I would then stitch together later.
The drone allows me basically to have a flying tripod.
- Let's take a look at
how much of the tree- - Whoa!
- We're seeing, yeah. - Whoa!
I've come to visit this tree many times,
and I've sketched it and I've looked at it
and I've walked around it,
but I have no idea what the tree really looks like up top.
And so today we're gonna find out.
[drone buzzing]
[gentle music]
What we needed to figure out technically
was how to avoid the lower trees.
- [Drone Pilot] Lean a little bit over this way.
- [Sarah] There are a lot of things that can go wrong
technically, weather, environmental concerns.
- [Drone Pilot] It's crazy. That's just halfway.
- But today, everything seemed to go just right.
[dramatic music]
- [Drone Pilot] We're gonna bring it through the canopy now.
- [Sarah] That was amazing.
- [Drone Pilot] It's crazy how big this thing is.
[gentle music]
- [Sarah] It's really magnificent.
[choir vocalizing]
[choir vocalizing continues]
- It has a solidity and a rootedness,
obviously, and a groundedness.
I have had a really unrooted life in a lot of ways.
There's something about connecting to these trees that
has really allowed me to kind of settle in
and to feel a sense of belonging that I think
I've been looking for for a really long time.
- There's something kind of ineffable about
the experience that people have when they're around
redwoods and giant trees.
They're deeply resonant and almost ancestral.
We don't really know why that is.
[gentle music]
Is it connecting us to something in our past
that we don't really know about,
but that's very almost primitive?
At the very least, it speaks to how we
as a species have evolved in relation to nature.
They remind us of how we're connected
to the natural world, inherently.
- [Narrator] Generation after generation,
we live our lives and depart, while the trees remain.
They've experienced eras long gone,
but not forgotten.
Like living history books,
they hold secret stories from the past,
written in a language we've just begun to understand.
[crickets chirping]
[leaves rustling]
[gentle music]
Not far from the heart of some of the most ancient groves
lies a place where redwood research
is being pushed to new heights,
including the work of a scientist with an unusual skill.
- It's amazing how I'm really looking at
what this tree was doing over , years ago.
This lab is filled with samples from hundreds of trees,
and it's like a library of ancient texts
that I'm honored to translate.
Each tree ring represents a year of growth.
And you can get an idea of how old the tree is
simply by counting the rings,
but to get an accurate age or to learn
more about the tree, it's more involved.
But in order to get a slab like this,
a tree has to have fallen.
To be able to see the rings on a living tree,
we bore a really small hole into the tree
and extract a tree core.
So for these giant trees,
we're just gonna take a tiny sample,
and that gives us a glimpse
of every ring going back in time.
The team will collect samples every meters
on the main trunk, and we'll do this
for about five trees in each location.
So, if one sample has missing rings,
other samples on that tree would show those rings.
[sander buzzing]
When the cores come back to the lab,
we sand the top to reveal boundaries between each ring.
We can have hundreds of years of growth
just in a matter of a few inches.
So if the width of the ring is larger,
the tree has grown more that year,
and that's linked to climate conditions.
You can see here, this is a smaller ring.
This is inferred to be a drought year.
When we have plenty of rain, the ring won't be as small.
And so over a region,
trees share those conditions of growth,
and that makes a pattern
that's linked to each and every year.
And also, since we understand these patterns back in time,
we can use this to study many areas,
from climate to fire history,
to dating of archeological structures.
[fire crackling]
For example, if a fire comes through,
we can find that unique signature in the tree rings,
and also understand what the response was afterwards.
We can also use that information to start to understand
how these trees and forests might respond
to future conditions.
We've learned a lot, but there's still
so much more to understand.
We have so many more questions to ask.
- [Narrator] Allyson's search for answers in the lab
is one part of a bigger undertaking,
led by two pioneers who have spent decades
exploring places few others will ever go.
[gentle music]
- [Steve] When I started working at Humboldt State
in mid 's, there really wasn't much
known about the redwood canopy.
Everything we found was new.
And there were phenomena up there
that I wasn't prepared for.
- [Marie] There's this whole hidden world up there
that you can barely fathom from the ground.
- We're doing a survey of all the different things
that live on the bark of the tree,
and we're finding all kinds of stuff.
That's a lot a lichen, man. Look at all that!
Over the years, we climbed and mapped the crowns
of over redwood trees.
Okay, ready, Marie?
- You absolutely get a sense of individual trees
as individuals almost with different personalities.
- When the wind rushes through the forest,
each tree has a different sound.
It's not just a [imitates air whooshing],
there's some of the big trees,
they have a roar, a resonance.
[wind howling]
- The team has made all kinds of discoveries
about these giants, including their ability
to offer a critical service, capturing carbon dioxide.
[gentle music]
- Coast redwood forests have the highest amount of biomass
and carbon storage per hectare
of any vegetation type on earth.
In terms of carbon locked away
in a very decay-resistant material,
these primary redwood forests are the champions.
- [Narrator] Their close encounters with these elders
inspired names for the trees like Zeus and Atlas,
and revealed that it's not just their height
that gives them their might.
- This tree is really something.
It weighs about metric tons.
It has million leaves.
But the thing that's amazing about it is its history.
[thunder crackles]
Several centuries ago, the top blew out of it.
But instead of dying, it reiterated.
And now look at it, it's got multiple trunks
arising from one giant central crotch
that is covered with soil and ferns.
It's an incredible tree.
- Remember there's a hemlock tree growing out
at the top of that broken redwood tree.
They can be so beat up by life,
and that is actually what makes them cooler
and more interesting and more unique individuals,
and actually, more valuable members of their ecosystem.
I think there's some interesting analogies there
to draw with humans.
[gentle music]
- [Narrator] High up in the craggiest trees
lie secret fern gardens, where remarkable creatures roam.
- The top predator of the redwood canopy
is a creature called the wandering salamander.
It's a lungless salamander,
so they breathe through their skin,
and so they require moisture,
and yet they live feet
above the ground in redwood trees.
How do they do it?
Well, they do it because these ferns
create these spongy soil masses full of moisture.
They can spend their whole lives up in the canopy.
So they're up there, a lot of 'em.
- [Narrator] From salamanders
[owl hoots]
To northern spotted owls, to Pacific fishers,
Steve and Marie are among the few
to catch sight of these rare tree dwellers.
But the Yurok and other native tribes,
whose ancestral lands now lie within these parks,
have always had their eyes on the residents
of the forest's lower levels, including a creature
that sustains both humans and redwoods.
[gentle music]
- For millions of years, there's been redwoods and salmon.
And redwoods need salmon just like salmon need redwoods.
They're completely interconnected.
And it's really tough in this particular ecosystem
to have one without the other.
A simple lifecycle of a salmon would be
it's born in a stream like this one,
it migrates out to the ocean,
and it spends two to four years out there,
and then it returns to the same location
where it was born at, and then it spawns.
The really important part of that
is after the salmon spawns, it dies,
and then its body is recycled.
All the energy and all the nutrients in its body
are deposited back onto the landscape to be
taken in by other plants and animals,
and especially by redwood trees.
Redwood trees are equally as important to salmon.
These streams are kind of like their nurseries.
And this incredible canopy keeps the streams cool.
And when these redwood trees fall into the stream,
create pools, little areas where the fish can
get out of the main current and be safe.
Historically, salmon were abundant,
and when logging came and dams came
and diversions came, salmon suffered.
We think that we're probably somewhere around to %
of their historical abundance now, which is devastating.
It's one of our main food sources.
Spiritually, you know, we look up to the salmon.
If it wasn't for salmon, there wouldn't be Yurok people,
and we're just as important a part of
a healthy stream, a healthy forest.
We're part of nature and part of the solution.
- [Narrator] The legacy of human impacts
on the natural world is never an easy problem to solve.
But sometimes, in the interim,
nature will find its own workaround.
[atmospheric music]
- One thing that has always interested me is this big
redwood mystery, and that's albino redwoods.
These white phantom trees that,
basically, the part of a redwood that's green
in these individuals is pure white.
We know of about albino redwoods
throughout the whole redwood range.
And it's magical, but it is very weird.
So the leaves are white
because they lack a pigment, chlorophyll.
It's the pigment that makes plants green
and enables photosynthesis.
It allows plants to get energy from sunlight to live.
So without chlorophyll, this tree should be dead.
It shouldn't be alive.
And yet it is alive.
So the current understanding of these trees
is that they're sucking the life out of the green trees
without contributing anything to them.
While fair, that might not be the whole story.
[gentle music]
So, I started investigating this
by looking at the biochemistry,
and found the white redwoods had a lot of heavy metals,
sometimes up to times
what would be lethal to a green plant.
The concentrations of metals in the green leaves
tend to be right at the threshold
that green photosynthesizing plants can allow for.
They're right at the threshold.
Like, this can't handle any more heavy metals,
or it will die, or maybe turn white.
As we were documenting where these albino redwoods exist,
we notice a lot of them in areas where
the soil either had heavy metals in them
due to natural causes or human activity,
right next to a railroad, right next to a road,
asphalt, creosote.
So I wondered, what if these white trees
are filtering out some of the heavy metals
in a way that's beneficial to the entire organism?
This is a theory, and we don't know yet if it's right,
but we do have a couple lines of evidence showing
that this might indeed be what's happening.
- [Narrator] If this theory proves true,
it would underscore just how adaptable redwoods are.
But of course, we all have our limits.
- We know that they've made it
through other climate changes in the past,
but the warming temperatures, the decline in fog frequency,
and the increase in fire that's now
penetrating into the redwood forest,
that is gonna be a situation
that the redwoods might not be able to withstand.
[leaves rustling]
[thunder booming]
[sirens wailing]
- [Dispatcher] Fire is rolling down. There is lightning.
- [Narrator] In August, ,
lightning strikes ignited wildfires
across California's Santa Cruz Mountains.
[tense music] [fire roaring]
The blaze tore through communities,
leaving a wake of destruction.
It roared through wilderness areas,
creeping closer and closer
to the place that Old Tree calls home.
But the forest that would be hardest hit
was in the park where the movement
to protect redwoods first began.
- emergency dispatcher radio chatter
- My husband and I have been living in Big Basin for a while
in a housing area with lots of other staff.
We got a text from my neighbor saying,
"We're being evacuated immediately."
And Dennis and I realized we had to go back.
We had our dogs with us, but we didn't have our two cats.
[tense music]
We arrived at our residence and started racing around.
There were rangers that were coming by and saying,
"Leave, you gotta leave now."
And we raced out of there.
[fire crackling]
The flames were on the sides of the road
and the sky was so orange, I'll never forget that color.
About two days later, my boss called me
and did give the news that we had lost everything.
Over % of Big Basin burned.
[gentle music]
- [Reporter] The oldest state park in California,
one of the crown jewels of the Santa Cruz Mountains,
is unrecognizable.
And a half dozen huge fallen redwoods blocking the road
means the four mile round trip must be done on foot.
[gentle music]
- [Susan] We were able to go up to our melted trailer.
Didn't find much, hardly anything survived.
Things from my father and grandfather
and grandmother that I'll never get back.
The headquarters area,
our campfire center, all burned.
years of doing campfires was a long time,
and I just grew to love it so much.
It was so part and parcel of who I was.
You know, Big Basin was me. I was Big Basin.
This was my habitat.
So many thousands of people came here.
They felt they knew each one of these trees.
They felt such a connection with them.
[rustling against bark]
- I'm back in the area where I first made
that deep connection with these trees.
[gentle music]
It's really hard to be here.
I wanted to come to the park to see the trees,
to understand what had happened to them
individually and collectively.
I'm not sure how or where these prints will be shown yet,
but I am compelled to tell their story,
which is the story of our relationship
with the natural world.
The sooner that we understand that we're all connected,
the more hopeful I am for the future.
[wind howling]
- [Narrator] Fires are part of the
natural cycle of life in any forest,
but fires of this magnitude and intensity are not.
Why did this happen?
[atmospheric music] [fire crackling]
In the wake of devastating wildfires
more than a century ago,
national policies were created to make sure
all forest fires were put out as quickly as possible.
A well-intended policy with unintended consequences.
- This fire suppression policy
made it so we had no burns in the forest,
and that allowed the forest to be full of flammable debris,
all the sticks and leaves that naturally fall.
And that tinder on the forest floor
mixed with our drought conditions,
high temperatures, and a spark
[fire roaring]
is what caused these catastrophic fires.
Today, it's pretty much widely understood
that in order to prevent these massive blazes,
we actually need to set more fires.
- [Narrator] Known as prescribed burns,
the practice of safely setting controlled fires
to burn off tinder and reduce fire risk is nothing new.
- As Yurok people, we've burned in the redwood forest
for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
Redwood likes fire. Redwood likes disturbance.
[gentle music]
Fire nourishes the soil and it makes it more healthy.
It purifies the water because of the
charcoal that's left on the landscape.
Fire creates habitat for the animals.
It is good for the plants.
Fire is just like this amazing spirit
that we as humans have been gifted with
to keep our world healthy.
[singing in Yurok language]
People are starting to understand
that if we don't use prescribed fire on the land,
then the wildfires will continue to get bigger.
[gentle music]
I am really encouraged by
the direction we are going in terms of
bringing fire back to the land in a good way.
[gentle choral music]
- [Narrator] Guided by strategies old and new,
the stage is being set for the return of the giants,
especially in light of a grand plan
that calls to mind how redwoods themselves
draw strength from their connections.
A plan that includes tapping into
the trees' deepest secrets.
[air whooshing]
[leaves rustling]
[birds chirping]
[gentle music]
- Inside this tiny seed is all the genetic material
to make one of these big giant redwood trees.
But getting a hold of this genetic blueprint,
cracking its code, has not been an easy task.
In order to sequence a redwood tree,
you need to collect a seed and then some foliage.
We took the seeds outta the seed cones,
sliced it open, extracted the DNA for the seed,
and we sent it off to sequence.
It took nine months in a supercomputer,
but we've done it now, and that's big.
This is the most complex genome ever sequenced.
- [Narrator] This genetic map is the key
to deepening our knowledge of how these trees work,
including clues that might even shed light
on longevity in other living beings.
Mapping the redwood genome is also a big deal,
because it's the first step toward creating a tool
that could help identify trees with genes
that make them more resistant
to conditions like extreme temperature, drought, and fire.
- If we find that logged redwood forests
that we're seeking to restore actually have lost a lot
of the unique individuals that just might be the ones
that help this population survive in the future,
we might design a tactic to collect seeds
and plant into those forests
individuals that have unique combinations of DNA.
That's how we can create resilience
after genetic diversity has been lost.
- [Narrator] While the genome has been sequenced,
deciphering its secrets is going to take a while.
But it's all part of a bigger vision,
including a mission that's well underway
in Redwood National and State Parks.
A plan to return , acres of forest
to their full glory.
A plan called Redwoods Rising.
- What I see is the recovery beginning.
I could see already one in one year,
the next generation of redwoods are popping up.
So we don't want just trees.
We want the whole chaos
of a forested ecosystem restored back here.
- [Narrator] It's a giant endeavor,
from thinning overcrowded trees
to removing hundreds of miles of crumbling logging roads
that choke streams with debris and slice up the land.
- [Leonel] What makes Redwoods Rising so exciting
is it gives me, as a practitioner
who's been here for years now,
an opportunity to see a way to do large scale restoration.
We don't know what the future holds,
but what we do know is that with a little bit of assistance,
this forest will have the capacity to grow back
into that old-growth forest that it once was.
- [Narrator] Taking a note from the redwood's own playbook,
these recovery efforts are being forged
by a web of powerful alliances
between conservation groups, the parks, and native tribes.
- So we're creating this habitat, adding all this wood.
This large wood is perfect for fish. They love it.
When you have a Yurok crew working on a project like this,
you can assure that we're putting everything we have
into it, because we're fixing our homeland.
I really want my children to experience a healed ecosystem.
The work that we're doing is gonna be beneficial for
generations and generations to come.
[gentle music]
- [Narrator] Here, where a redwood mill once stood,
the land is being returned to the tribe
and transformed into a new gateway
to these world renowned parks.
- We are looking to work with our tribal partners
at the project level and at the higher leadership levels,
working with us to make sure that what we're doing
makes sense for the recovery of these landscapes.
[wind howling]
- [Narrator] The parks have also begun providing
the Yurok tribe with something hard to come by,
fallen old-growth redwoods,
to carve into canoes.
- It's been amazing, because you see these
canoe projects really taking off.
Right now, a canoe is being carved in order to
take members of the public out on the river.
And part of that is to teach people about Yurok culture
and to have them understand our connection with redwood
and to have the connection with
that canoe as a living being.
[birds chirping] [gentle music]
- I think it's awesome, I really do.
I'm really happy to be part of it.
The money that's spent on their rides
is actually financing our culture.
Rosie's department, our cultural department,
have made it happen with the park.
Without our relationship with them, this wouldn't happen.
[birds squawking]
- You know, we're finally at a place
where we're talking about co-management, right?
We're talking about utilizing traditional techniques
with modern science to restore the redwood forest
and to bring everything back into balance.
[gentle music continues]
[birds chirping]
- So, my photo editor and I finished stitching together
all of those drone images of this foot redwood.
But one of the most complicated things about this project
has been figuring out what to print it on.
How big, how heavy it's gonna be.
And then it occurred to me.
[gentle music]
what if I made the portrait out of light?
I started scouting places in San Francisco
because it's a city that was mostly built out of redwood.
I searched around for ages,
and then I found the perfect spot.
This historic ferry building isn't quite as tall
as Old Tree, but it's such a beloved icon.
I can't believe we're here.
Welcome, everyone.
[suspenseful music]
Tonight, Old Tree takes root in the city.
[projector whirring]
[uplifting music]
[crowd applauding and cheering]
- I think it's beautiful and fitting that we have a chance
to experience awe, the awe of nature,
in this awesome part of our city.
[gentle music]
- It's a good reminder that we need to get back to our roots
by walking among the trees and being in nature.
- [Sarah] I hope when someone experiences
this giant redwood projection,
that they begin to experience
kind of kinship that I feel.
That's what's really motivated me over the years,
to create a space where
kindness and caring among humans
and other beings in the natural world,
where that can flourish.
- [Narrator] As Old Tree takes root in the city,
young trees are rising from the ashes in Big Basin.
[gentle music]
- Looking at these redwoods, you see that they just
look so burnt, and how could they be alive?
But they are so resilient.
All that ash that came down is full of nitrogen.
It's like what you put on your garden.
And so we've just fertilized this place,
and it is popping out.
We put timelines to things being healed and repaired,
but I'm willing to be like the redwoods
and, you know, take it slow.
Just like the trees are coming back,
I too, I feel a whole new life starting.
We have a chance to completely reimagine Big Basin
in a much more sustainable way,
recognizing what these trees need from us
and what they don't need from us.
The animals are coming back.
The plants are coming back.
And soon, the people will be coming back too, I hope.
- We think that awe might have evolved as an emotion
for humans because it helped us connect to others,
be more cooperative.
Our ability to forego self-interest
in the favor of larger common goals.
That is critical to how we survive as a species.
[gentle music]
I think redwoods and experiences in nature
are one of the primary ways in which people
get to be reminded, "I'm a small part of this bigger world,
and I need to do things to help protect it
and to help make sure that others
get to experience it as well."
- [Narrator] What will the next chapter
in the redwoods' tale bring?
It's hard to say.
But it's easy to imagine that these silent giants
have always known how things should be.
Knowing the value of reaching their full potential,
of staying connected,
and of bestowing their timeless magic on us all.
[gentle music continues]
[upbeat music]
[upbeat music continues]
[upbeat music continues]
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