1850s CE • California
"Redwoods once grew throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The first redwood fossils date back more than 200 million years to the Jurassic period. Before commercial logging and clearing began in the 1850s, coast redwoods naturally occurred in an estimated 2 million acres (the size of three Rhode Islands) along California’s coast from south of Big Sur to just over the Oregon border. When gold was discovered in 1849, hundreds of thousands of people came to California, and redwoods were logged extensively to satisfy the explosive demand for lumber and resources. Today, only 5 percent of the original old-growth coast redwood forest remains, along a 450-mile coastal strip."
"Coast Redwoods," Save the Redwoods League.
Image: Redwood trees in Big Basin State Park, Richard Masoner via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
Learn about Maya Lin’s fifth and final memorial: a multi-platform science based artwork that presents an ecological history of our world - past, present, and future.
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