Belated 2022 article, just stumbled over this one.
The forest was in Del Norte County, the northwestern tip of California; also Humboldt County. Many people wrongly think it was filmed in Muir Woods, Marin County (close to ILM), which the filmmakers initially requested, but were rejected mainly due to the pyrotechnics.
The Del Norte forest was clear-cut right after the film shoot was over, except you can visit the grove where the speeder chase scene was shot. Protected in perpetuity within a state park in Humboldt County are the remaining shreds of Endor. The Film Commission highlighted the area in its “Map of the Movies” for a self-guided tour through the two northern counties. [https://hdnfc.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/map-of-the-mov...]
(That maps shows that film location and many others, almost all right off Highway 101:
E.T. (1982), Outbreak (1995), The Tree of Life (2011), The Majestic (2001), After Earth (2013), the canoe chase scene from Last of The Mohicans (1936)...
Exactly why it was chosen; a forest already scheduled to be clear-cut and the loggers didn't think you could do any serious harm to the wood, so why not go wild?
It's just like how some famous destructive bar fight scenes or other building-destroying scenes are just filmed in a building scheduled to be demolished anyway.
Yes, Muir Woods rejected them, they're a National Monument under the NPS, and rarely allow commercial filming anyway, and the article says they freaked out at the request for pyrotechnics.
Whereas the Del Norte forest was land privately owned by Miller-Rellim Redwood Company, and already had a timber harvesting plan/permit.
Interesting, but yes, thinking about it, the movie did not contain any jungle scene. Except from a helicopter? But I thought also some other scenes are quite tropical. All staged? Impressive.
I'm always amused by the joke "Of course Kubrick faked the moon landing, but being a perfectionist was only willing to film on location", when in reality he was nothing of the sort. A lot of his filming locations were within an hours travel from home. I suppose it makes sense, even without the 3 month break, FMJ would have been 11 months of filming.
The most immersion breaking part of Dr Strangelove for me is always the outside shot of the ground assault on the "American" base which architecturally is so obviously British it snaps me out of the film each time.
There’s a scene in Smokey and the Bandit filmed in California and it’s entirely recognizable for natives of the area - and horribly immersion breaking.
Well for me also some scenes in FMJ felt weirdly off, not what I expected of vietnam, but since I never been there, I just thought, ok, so they also have that there..
'Full Metal Jacket' was shot in or around London (urban scenes), with countryside scenes in Kent, Essex, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and RAF Swinderby, Lincolnshire. Kubrick was reclusive and refused to fly.
> Full Metal Jacket was filmed in Bassingbourn (for Parrish Island), Beckton Gas Works, Cliffe, Epping Forest, Isle of Dogs, Pinewood Studios, RAF Swinderby and The Broads.
And here's another description of several locations and which scene they're in:
I doubt they "freaked out". They more than likely looked at the request, consulted with a few other employees in the same branch of government and then denied the request.
I live just up the road from the former Beckton gas works. Also the original Max Headroom (see username) adventure series British feature was filmed there. It amuses me.
The destruction of 'Cadillac Heights' in Robocop 3 was a part of downtown Atlanta scheduled to be razed to make way for Centennial Olympic Park. Worked out good for both sides.
Not being from California, those are way further away than I thought from the article. Sounded like, "Muir Wood said no, so we walked down the road a bit."
A lot seems like areas where they just didn't/don't even bother replanting. 40 years after 1983, it would probably be a pretty decent size redwood forest again. For maybe ... a $1 a tree? (based on some of those NGOs. Heck, hire an NGO to do it.)
Umm the SFGate article was sloppy about everything, that's specifically why I wrote "Del Norte County, the northwestern tip of California; also Humboldt County."
Not Muir Woods, Marin County (close to ILM), the county just north of SF, over the Golden Gate Bridge.
If you know that California is big (1040 miles from north to south), then the northwestern tip of California is going to be a long way north of Marin and SF.
> Had somebody been able to foresee the popularity and success of ‘Star Wars,’ it would have been crazy not to save the grove where Endor was made and use it as a tourist venue,”
This was the third movie. Star Wars was already extremely popular by the time this as filmed.
Hey that's nasty, it's nice road-trip material, redwoods, coast, historical towns; Mendocino to the south, and Oregon to the north. Some people live there by choice.
You know you've been in SV too long when your first association for 'sequoia' is 'VC' or 'portfolio' not 'tree' or 'forest'.
For sure. That drive (or bike) on 101 is priceless. Good attractions, that I remember, are the glass beach and Samoa cookhouse.
Met someone a few weeks ago and found out today he went to Humboldt for college - came up while exchanging phone numbers and I have a 707
Edit: way better driving north from the Bay Area on hwy 101 than south towards SoCal on 5
Certainly nobody chooses to live there for the tourists!
And it’s a fine place; I’ve just driven Seattle-LA on every path imaginable more times than I can count. It happens to be right around the point where you’re really far from absolutely everything, and it all looks the same.
Wait, what? People travel to see things all the time. The original Star Wars sets in Tunisia, hobbiton in New Zealand, the evil dead house in Tennessee, or even Petra because of Indiana Jones. I guarantee you it would be a tourist attraction today if it still existed.
Also, Humboldt is not really that far from anywhere and is a lovely journey through some incredible forests.
No, it doesn’t. Flying to Vegas is 3 hours all said and done, and $20. For a party of 2 any car under 35mpg would be more expensive, and that’s not counting depreciation. And assuming you even have a car. And you even get unlimited food and drinks at the lounges, if that’s your bag.
Also when you fly to Vegas you end up in Vegas, with about a million things to do. When you drive to Humboldt you end up at a forest, after spending the past 5 hours driving through… forests.
But they only had two films to base it on; they would have had to make that decision a few months after the RotJ scene filming ended but before it released.
And presumably since the forest was privately-owned, somebody would have had to pay $$$ to acquire it then make it a park (and that somebody would have to be the state of CA, not Del Norte + Humboldt Counties).
In those counties the state already had RNSP (Redwood National and State Parks), a complex of one national park and three California state parks (139,000 acres; 560 km2). [0]
This makes me curious about the economics of when are the rare occasions it makes economic sense to use public money to buy and preserve popular movie locations on private property/land (as opposed to paying a premium for sentimental or tourist value). For example the famous 'Friends' apartment exterior in NYC is still private property. 'Shawshank Redemption' on its initial release bombed at the box office.
Scranton, PA has a self-guided tourist trail [1] for the US version of 'The Office'. Only rare places like Punxsutawney, PA [2][3] (the town 'Groundhog Day' is set in, although the film was entirely shot in Woodstock IL [4]) make $. For the hardcore tourists there's Tataouine, Tunisia.
And lumber for other parts of houses as well, and wooden furniture, and paper products. And since trees in managed forests are grown denser than they grow naturally, a thicker, more carbon-capturing forest was planted in its place.
Making things out of wood might just be the most environmentally friendly thing to make things out of though. Mining and refining mined products seems terrible in comparison and the Petro chemical industry is definitely harmful.
We need to make sure the wood is responsibly harvested as much as possible but turning trees into part of a home is a actually pretty much inline with how nature works in general.
Trees take hundreds of years to grow that large. If we replanted the forest today, it would take until perhaps the year 2500 to restore the forest to its former glory.
A redwood forest is, on the scale of a human lifespan, a non-renewable resource.
If by "redwood forest" you only mean old-growth forests, sure. The trees being harvested commercially today are only a few decades old. Second-growth and managed forests won't have the occasional ancient giants the old-growth ones have but they are still clearly forests to the humans and other animals living among them.
I don't think anyone defends what they were doing to the redwoods in the 80s and 90s.
But, you know, public opinion changes, policies change and, as it turns out, they have learned a lot about the ecosystem from studying how the clear-cut areas regrow.
I worked for Weyerhaeuser Canada in the late 90's / early 00's when they bought Macmillan Bloedel. This was notable because Weyerhaeuser quietly harvested in the interior of BC and Northern Alberta/Sask - much of it secondary growth - while MacBlow was ground-zero of the old growth fight on Vancouver Island. I don't think Weyco had any idea of the controversy they were stepping into with that purchase. I still think it was done solely so executives from the mother ship in Tacoma could just go to Vancouver when visiting Canadian headquarters vs. the pain of going into the boondocks interior.
The decking in the article was rhetorical. And I admit I was speaking exclusively of the forests in northwestern California. I have no idea what anyone does in British Colombia.
With sufficient investment in this it is pretty easy to grow a large forest. May not be redwood forest and may not be tree whose bark is wide enough to drive a car through, but you can grow pretty large trees in < 30 years which can capture tonnes and tonnes of carbon every year.
Suburban housing boom, building more homes is one good way to put that into long term storage while reducing cost of housing and improving our carbon footprint as suburban homes can last for a century.
We can also genetically modify trees to grow faster and bigger.
You're not talking about forests, you're talking about tree farms. Man-made "forests" are monocultures that are extremely susceptible to environmental hazards and the trees are usually intentionally short-lived. In Europe for example there are barely any natural forests left because most so-called forests were planted for pre-modern industrial uses.
Forests are good at carbon capture but forests are intricate biotopes with different plants serving different functions and debris from dead trees fulfilling an integral role.
Building more homes is definitely important but suburbia is probably one of the worst ways to do this as sustainable housing must be walkable and integrated, not car-centric like American suburbia always is. It also assumes those homes will last for centuries when most American houses are torn down and rebuilt on much shorter cycles than that. And that doesn't even get into how building more homes generates emmissions first.
I live in Sweden where most forests are natural, isn't that hard to make those either. Just do nothing with a piece of land and a ton of trees starts to grow, it is hard to not get trees every year you have to go and pull all the new small trees that started growing if you don't want a forest, not sure how it could be hard to plant such forests.
Forest management is a little more complicated than "just do nothing" with a piece of land. Most of the US lumber stock is under private management; Canada is owned by the crown and licensed to private companies. Lumber is a very expensive, very bulky commmodity, and supply managment needs to balance a lot of market, logistic and environmental factors.
You can grow a forest, you just do that in a different way than you grow a tree farm. And there isn't a lack of insects and other things to move in once you laid down the foundation for that ecosystem, they are still everywhere in Europe.
In much of Canada the line is a little blurry. You can usually tell when you're in a replanted block but it could be 50 or more years since they cut it, and it doesn't look like an orchard or christmas tree farm. It really depends where in the country you are; secondary growth in BC can seem far more natural than untouched Northern Saskatchewan, for example.
Tree farm is basically a solid brick of brown matter with some bushes on the top. The trees are sick, light starved, growing too closely together, and generally a mess. The things that live in tree farms are not nice, rats, it's too thick for anything bigger. This type of environment does not support a food chain. Overall, the trees grow like a group of sickly cotton swabs.
Now that I recognize tree farms, I no longer feel quite as bad when I see then clear-cut. They were sick trees that were destined to be cut down.
The clear-cut gives a nice cross view into the trees. It's a mess in there.. not much green. It's pretty clear the total available surface area in a natural forest is larger. The forest/nature/plants all optimize themselves to have as much surface area as possible. Loggers optimize for the greatest number of tree trunks and fewest number branches.
Another point to consider with parent comment is also that newer homes are built are often built with monoculture trees that are younger (as you point out). This wood isn't nearly as dense and won't last as long. A lot of the stick build homes going up now won't last like the home I am living (from 1905) where the wood is from local pines that were hundreds of years old when harvested.
Is wood density correlated with how long a building will last?
In my experience, degradation of wood-framed buildings comes down to one thing: water ingress. And that is independent of how "dense" the studs are. Old growth timber will rot just as quickly as new timber if water gets in, and I suspect new-growth wood will last just as long as old-growth if water is kept out.
New growth is genetically engineered to grow quickly, in dense conditions, to have short branches & to drop branches quickly. Loggers have optimized for growing tree trunks, not trees. The wood quality is very different from these trees. They are sick. The wood from them is going to warp on you.
I suspect that wood density, tree health, warping of lumber, and the resulting new ingresses of water could all be correlated. I'd love to know more if anyone knows more details.
Your suspicion is incorrect. Warping happens as wood dries due to uneven drying and stresses in the wood. Old growth can be just as stressed as new wood - those stresses arise from winds, growing on a steep grade, etc. And old wood can be incorrectly dried just as new timber can be. The wood will not warp further after it is milled into a 2x4, kiln-dried and installed in a building. It may expand and contract due to humidity changes, but those changes will be minimal within a sealed wall. Timber found in a Home Depot is more warped than wood 50 years ago because of cost-cutting at the kiln and the use of much smaller trees for the mass market.
Water penetration into a building is 100% down to the exterior cladding and waterproofing system, it has absolutely nothing to do with the material used for the skeleton of the building. Cladding is done with traditional plywood, which is infinitely better than old-growth diagonal planking used a century ago. Waterproofing is via plastic wraps like HouseWrap or more recently the Zip system where the waterproofing is integral with the sheathing.
Houses today may be less durable than houses 100 years ago (although there's huge survivorship bias in that claim), but if they are it will come down to tract houses being built to a very low standard of workmanship. It has nothing to do with old-growth versus new-growth timber.
I live in a country where stone houses are the traditional norm and wood frame houses are still seen as flimsy despite becoming increasingly popular for new family homes.
The way I understand it, a major difference between the two construction styles is that stone is wet and wood is dry.
Stone shouldn't be sealed (hence the notion that stone walls can't be painted) because this traps the humidity and erods the stone. A major downside of this is that this means stone houses are more prone to trapping humidity, especially with better insulation, and grow mold.
Wood on the other hand must be sealed so you can use forms of insulation that are highly efficient but very susceptible to damage from humidity. A major downside of this is that the outer layers essentially act as a water barrier and even things like driving a dowel into an exterior wall can cause damage over time from water entering the wall via condensation on the screw.
Traditional wood frame construction in my country used wooden beams along with loam or stone. Because these buildings often expose wood to the elements and are generally wet because of the stone and loam there is an inherent risk of the wood decaying over time and I've seen restorations that removed almost everything but the wood frame to remove integral beams. There are many very old wood and loam/stone buildings left in my area but there are probably many more that had to be either torn down or stripped down to the bones for restoration.
I was referring to the comment that said it would take 2500 years to grow "that kind of forest".
What I am saying is that it is possible to grow "that kind of forest" if you have money in much shorter time. Tree farming is one way to make the whole thing profitable (and hence sustainable) but it can be designed to resemble a natural forest with sufficient biodiversity and so on.
For example we can take a deforested region in Haiti or India or Zimbabwe, grow tree farms on say 10K acres of land and reserve another 10K to grow a more traditional forest. We don't have to wait 2500 years to grow sufficiently large trees which can host wide variety of species of fauna. Even for smaller shrubs and such we can do enough research to grow them faster with help of better irrigantion, enriched soil etc.
One of the reason why this does not happen already is because we have reduced the entire topic to zero sum between normal people and tree people.
> sustainable housing must be walkable and integrated, not car-centric like American suburbia always is.
I am not sure why such statement should be made. Large homes with huge backyard offers great quality of life in ways the densely packed animal like city human farms can't.
You could use old growth redwoods as a renewable resource, you just cut down ~1/500th per year across a large enough area, make sure replacements are of the same species, and you can keep doing so essentially forever. At that scale it wouldn’t even be obvious the forest was being harvested.
People don’t do that because they don’t really want old growth redwoods specifically and or don’t generally care about sustainability. However, setting up a trust to manage some forest while maintaining an income stream is probably viable.
> At that scale it wouldn’t even be obvious the forest was being harvested.
Humans' hand is always visible: the stumps of cut-down trees, and the (mostly, if not complete) absence of fallen trees. Besides the odd trail used for vehicles. And trash, wood chips, markings on trees, etc. Such signs remain visible for centuries.
Natural forests are littered with fallen trees, which serve as food for sapplings that take their place (nurse logs). And trees don't fall with a clean cut: they are ripped from the ground in a storm, split by a lightning strike, or they die, rot & come down in pieces.
I seriously doubt you’re going to notice century old wood chips and markings on trees. Similarly large branches would look like fallen trees in other forests.
A given section may not have seen anyone in 30+ years, others would have more noticeable impact but you’d have trouble seeing the logging vs all the trees. There would be remnants of trails and even some fresh ones, but that doesn’t specifically imply logging.
> People don’t do that because they don’t really want old growth redwoods specifically and or don’t generally care about sustainability.
Yip, folks got greedy and cut down the redwoods. They use to be common, running all the way from south of San Francisco to well into Oregon. What remains is a patch work.
"Today, only 5 percent of the original old-growth coast redwood forest remains, along a 450-mile coastal strip." [1]
> You could use old growth redwoods as a renewable resource, you just cut down ~1/500th per year across a large enough area
Hence to do that, we're probably talking nobody cutting down another red wood for a good 500 years. Considering Europeans have been at it for only about 200, and have nearly cut down all of the redwoods... ...
I would urge anyone to go visit these trees. It's truly soul-touching, they are something to be protected, if only for that.
It really literally does. The number of animals that use wood in one way or another for housing is astounding. Nests, beaver dams, tree hollows etc. Wood is natures housing.
One of my professors once told me that we have too much CO2 in the atmosphere, and that the best thing we could do to the planet was to cut down trees, bury them, plant more trees, cut those down, and bury those.
If they become decks, paper, or other useful products in between, reducing usage of plastics things which emit carbon, so much the better.
Your prof was correct. We need to cut down existing large trees, put them into long term use where they can be used for 100+ years and plant new trees in their place. It is the simplest and very natural way to capture carbon.
Fully grown trees are mostly carbon neutral, growing trees on other hand are capturing carbon. Perhaps we can cut down large trees, coat them with very durable recycled plastic and simply store them on coastal line.
Canada and USA can heavily subsidize logging industry where
1. They have 100 year plan to plant and cut trees.
2. Wood gets exported to poorer countries where deforestation is a problem.
The new growth also needs to account for the emissions of cutting down and processing the old trees (even with solar, machines don't run on sunshine alone) and planting/nurturing the new growth itself. The prof was likely just trying to be provocative, not speaking based on thorough modelling.
Using concrete for building also causes massive emissions. Generally speaking, making long lasting buildings from wood is ecological compared to alternatives. Of course doing the harvesting in a sustainable way and replanting are necessary for this to be true.
IMO old growth forests should be protected, but at the same time we should plant new industrial forests as much as possible, and harvest them for building material. Old agricultural land that is no longer used for farming is ideal for that.
I'm not saying using wood instead of concrete is bad. I'm just saying "build more houses and use wood" doesn't reduce emissions, it produces them. "Build more houses and don't use wood" of course produces more. But the distinguishing factor here is "use wood" not "build more houses".
Likewise planting trees to be used for industry instead of materials with worse emissions is good and planting forests is good but the two are largely unrelated as the kind of forest you want for restoration projects is different from the kind you can use for logging.
It's a bit like how there were news headlines about bees becoming endangered followed by tons of startups selling honey bees for greenwashing when honey bees are specifically the one species of bees that is nowhere near endangered because they are used at industrial scales.
We need to protect old growth forests but also expand them, because they're vital habitats that help protect biodiversity and maintain plant matter for sustainable carbon capture. We also need industrial wood plantations to produce wood we can use instead of more harmful building materials. We also need to reduce the overall need for building materials, e.g. by investing in long-term sustainable housing projects rather than McMansions with a lifespan of less than one generation.
One of the nice things about concrete -- if done right -- is that it produces emissions only once. We have Roman concrete structures which were still standing 1500 years later (and went down due to war, rather than wear).
The problem is if they become used in disposable or short-lifetime materials, most of that carbon will go right back to being CO2 once the thing is thrown away and it decomposes.
Ideally all that stuff would be sent to a facility where it can be properly sequestered long term, but most of it probably won't.
How much of it decomposes into the atmosphere? How much stays down?
That's a serious question. I have no clear sense of what happens in landfills. For all I know, they might be the new fossil fuel reserves in the year 30,000.
Forests do a lot more than hold carbon. And many of these other uses require more than young, fast growing monocultures.
Quite a lot of rainfall over land originates as transpiration from forests, for example; they're a key part of the water cycle, holding and releasing water which would otherwise just run into the sea.
Likewise, a lot of species depend on healthy first habitat. Clear cut all the trees, and you lose all the species that depends on them. And all the species in adjacent ecosystems which rely on the forests.
This isn't to say that tree planting and harvesting can't be a part of carbon management strategies, but that it must be done judiciously. Clear cutting everything and burying it all is as short-sighted as, say, spending a century dumping leaded CO2 fumes into the atmosphere.
Who's going to pay you to cut down trees and bury them? Especially since they are considered an incredibly valuable asset by everyone (for very different reasons), from the environmentalist to the unrepentant capitalist.
Biochar is a lot like this. It's believed to have created the incredible soils of the Amazon basin. Basically, wood gets burned to charcoal rather than ash, and the carbon is then buried – creating rich organic soil.
One thing worth mentioning though is that people often forget that the trees themselves are not the only aspect of CO2 when it comes to forestry. So-called "natural forests" are apparently much more effective at sequestering carbon, due to the dense web of life contained within them – much more so than the monoculture forests that tend to get planted these days.
The studies that say newly growing forests absorb carbon at a faster rate are suspect (logging industry funded). For starters, I wouldn't believe the logging industry propaganda.
First, let's consider tree farms, modern mono-cultures. Please look at google maps at anywhere in the northwest, and you'll see it looks like checkerboards. This is not satellite imagery being stitched together, that is what it looks like. So much forest have been cut and regrown several times over.
These tree farms - they're dense, bio-engineer to have small branches that are shed early. The trees grow like an overgrown bush, the canopy is almost exclusively at the top 10% layer. The effective area for photosynthesis is that of a field covered in a thick layer of bushes. Compare that to a field of conifers that have far more photosynthesis area on them overall, it extends from the top of the tree to the even the bottom half, in addition to the tree being taller. In a natural forest trees will fall and create gaps, allowing for more use of the vertical space. A natural forest is effectively a series of vertical gardens.
Next, let's consider tree rings. I don't buy the idea that a few saplings are going to do anywhere near the same activity as a 200 foot redwood. The amount of carbon in a tree ring for a 1000 foot tree is likely astounding. A new layer of bark on something that has a 10-40 foot diameter. (Red woods are amazing trees)
Next, it takes a good 30 years for that regrowth cycle to happen. What's more, humans have been doing that round-the-clock in North America since Europeans arrived. The "2nd" growth is like the 6th to 10th time we have been through this. The forests that have been managed like this are not great (they have low recreational value, they burn like crazy, they clearly don't have the same mass of green material that would be doing photosynthesis (so I don't buy that the carbon sink activity is lower), they are crap habitat for animals). More so, the wood from these forests is poor, it's soft, warps easily, not strong.
Back to the point of the 30 year cycle.. if our game plan is to bury a bunch of trees and regrow them in 30 years, and repeat that once or twice - the climate goals are not going to be achieved.
Another reason - small little trees burn easily. Trees need to get to a good height before they are "fire-proof". Trees in the NW drop their lower branches and their trunks grow thick bark allowing for the undergrowth to burn off & leaving the tree alone. This is where you can also get your rapidly growing "new forest". What's more though, if you cut down a forest, trees that are 10-20 years old are more akin to kindling, you wind up with a mega blaze. Where once there was a forest, you get a Savannah. This is happening in california, places that burned so hot, several feet of soil are burned, those forests are truly gone. If anything gets a foot hold again in those areas in the next decade, it'll all burn again before it's all big enough to survive a fire.
> If they become decks, paper, or other useful products in between, reducing usage of plastics things which emit carbon, so much the better.
The research from the "other side" notes that these "useful" products often go back into the atmosphere within a couple decades. [1] Compare that to the forest, which naturally buries its own trees as they die. Leaves fall, they form new soil along with other fallen trunks. Not to mention that trees do this on time scales of centuries, rather than decades. Point being, over time, the elevation of the forest floor grows. In sum, this idea of burying trees - it's already happening naturally.
It's kinda sad to see most commenter focusing on short sighted utility (only serves as a co2 capture and source of material, and we can grown terrible trees fast)...
Maybe the mentality would be different if we haven't ef-uped our planed by exploiting oil to drive oversized gas-guzzlers to the sprawling single-family oversized homes? but no... better keep ruining beautiful nature...
If it was a commercially-managed forest, it's a bit dramatic to say it was "obliterated" any more than a cornfield gets "obliterated" when the corn is harvested in the fall. Tree seedlings would have been planted in the field soon after the wood was harvested.
The days of lumberjacks going into virgin forests to harvest wood in that area are over - it's all either national parks or other protected forests which might get thinned for fire management reasons but never clear-cut, or managed forests that periodically get harvested and replanted, just like corn and wheat. (Source: I grew up in Humboldt County and still have family there.)
I suppose if you had a fondness for that particular arrangement of trees, yes, it's sad they're gone. But there are other forests in that area which look practically identical to what you saw in the movie, believe me, just waiting to be hiked through and camped under. Some of them are literally in city parks.
I remember the day that my dad told me that tourists actually came to Humboldt to see the trees. Boring old trees? Really? Having grown up among them I didn't understand how unusual they were yet.
Well that's a bit like saying that if you have one forest already then you don't need another one; I personally think it's OK to treat each configuration as having value.
They all have value in the environmental sense, but in terms of hiking and camping and sightseeing, it's pretty hard to tell one forest from another once you're among the trees. (Maybe there's an idiom along those lines.)
If all the forests near you look the same perhaps it's time to try a Queensland rainforest, a Tasmanian horizontal forest, Western Australian jarrah or karri forest (each visibly distinct), or the many other types about the globe.
Okay, my fault for forgetting where I was posting. What I meant to say is this:
When you are amongst the trees, one redwood (sequoia sempervirens) forest located in or near Humboldt County, California, looks very similar to any other redwood (sequoia sempervirens) forest located in or near Humboldt County, California, unless one forest or the other is very new growth or very old growth or similar extreme circumstances, and assuming you visit the two forests at roughly the same time of year.
I hear this from time time and it is usually said by people who do not frequently visit forests. They are not at all same, not in the slightest. Nature has so much variation due to landscape such as hills, species competition, water distribution. It is like saying one city on earth is the same as the rest of them. See one suburb in Korea and it is exactly the same in Minnesota. This is just nonsense.
What I meant was that two redwood forests in the Pacific northwest will look very similar to each other at the ground level. If you want to find another forest which looks similar to the one that the Star Wars scene was filmed in, they're all over the place.
This was 1982; Clearcut-logging of old-growth Redwood was a live possibility as late as 1996[1], and Headwaters[2] wasn't fully established until 1999. David Chain[3] was killed by a falling redwood in 1998.
Of course there are sustainable, responsible ways to manage and harvest forests including redwood, but wildly destructive, wasteful harvests didn't stop in the 1800s either.
I think some people get confused because they do log second growth redwoods on state park land (eg Jackson State Forest) here in CA but the old growth forest was destroyed by logging company clear-cutting so even if the trees are 100 years old they aren't old growth.
There are places where old growth trees are being logged even today. It's a patchwork: some old growth is federally protected, some state protected, some locally protected. And some is private land where oversight varies.
This is not true. I have no idea about the US but Canada, specifically BC, still has large amounts of old growth forest that is being cut. Really sad to see and read about.
At the end, the author quotes someone saying that if it was a known Star Wars location they could preserve it. So if you’re a lumber company, you should price a movie shoot the same as you would the entire value of that land over time since if you let someone do something on it, they will aggressively try to remove your property rights from it.
So be very careful with these things. It’s very similar to the NYC squatters rights thing. If you let someone have a little they’ll take everything. So sometimes you just have to either prevent them or you have to act fast (here by cutting right after to remove the value of your land from them).
The argument is that the company could have preserved their forest because it would’ve been more profitable to keep it.
That old growth or near old growth forest of red woods shouldn’t be harvested at all is a separate issue, has little to do with Star Wars, except that Star Wars vi was shot in such a forest.
> they will aggressively try to remove your property rights from it.... similar to the NYC squatters rights thing.
I think that's bad-faith reading of the quote from one arborist, not the CA Governor or Treasurer or Dept Director of Parks and Recreation.
The way I read the article is that it was implied the state should have considered buying out the owner of the forest (or at least part of it) with state money and convert it to a park. I don't know whether that would have been economically viable and I don't understand people discussing here how forestry policy on redwoods changed after that, but it would be good to see numbers on all this, even
if the answer was no.
FYI Lucasfilm shot the Endor scenes in Del Norte in Apr-May 1982, a year before release of RotJ. So, another huge errorbar would be estimating the film's popularity (if there's a deadline on the property being destroyed, as in this case).
99.999% of movies aren't memorable or profitable like the Star Wars trilogy, so they add no value. Also, this stuff isn't predictable at shooting time before the film's release.
Compare e.g. 'The Matrix Reloaded' (2003) car-chase scenes were filmed in Oakland, but aren't that popular. But also the Boston Public Garden Bench from "Good Will Hunting", a low-budget $10m film by two young guys people had never heard of [0], or the prison location from 'The Shawshank Redemption' (the closed Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, OH).
> Had somebody been able to foresee the popularity and success of ‘Star Wars,’ it would have been crazy not to save the grove where Endor was made and use it as a tourist venue.
This was not the first Star Wars movie. This was the followup to the most successful sequel ever made at that point, which was itself a sequel to the highest grossing film ever. So successful it was famously given a pseudonymous title to acoid attention from fans.
The bigger concern to me about redwoods is Sudden Oak Death syndrome, an oomycete related to the organism that caused the great potato famine in the 19th century, that affects a wide variety of trees but in California is particularly damaging to three tree species, one of which is Coast Redwood. It's been spreading inexorably in a slow motion ecological disaster. It's also been detected in several eastern US states, and is causing damage to larch in the UK.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadThe forest was in Del Norte County, the northwestern tip of California; also Humboldt County. Many people wrongly think it was filmed in Muir Woods, Marin County (close to ILM), which the filmmakers initially requested, but were rejected mainly due to the pyrotechnics.
The Del Norte forest was clear-cut right after the film shoot was over, except you can visit the grove where the speeder chase scene was shot. Protected in perpetuity within a state park in Humboldt County are the remaining shreds of Endor. The Film Commission highlighted the area in its “Map of the Movies” for a self-guided tour through the two northern counties. [https://hdnfc.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/map-of-the-mov...]
E.T. (1982), Outbreak (1995), The Tree of Life (2011), The Majestic (2001), After Earth (2013), the canoe chase scene from Last of The Mohicans (1936)...
I remember seeing that in the theater it was filmed in when I was going to Humboldt State.
Exactly why it was chosen; a forest already scheduled to be clear-cut and the loggers didn't think you could do any serious harm to the wood, so why not go wild?
It's just like how some famous destructive bar fight scenes or other building-destroying scenes are just filmed in a building scheduled to be demolished anyway.
Whereas the Del Norte forest was land privately owned by Miller-Rellim Redwood Company, and already had a timber harvesting plan/permit.
Like when Kubrick filmed the urban Huế scenes in 'Full Metal Jacket' (1987) at London's Beckton Gas Works, which was scheduled to be demolished. [https://www.latlong.net/location/full-metal-jacket-locations...]
The most immersion breaking part of Dr Strangelove for me is always the outside shot of the ground assault on the "American" base which architecturally is so obviously British it snaps me out of the film each time.
The link I already gave above lists all locations for FMJ, with map pin and picture: https://www.latlong.net/location/full-metal-jacket-locations...
> Full Metal Jacket was filmed in Bassingbourn (for Parrish Island), Beckton Gas Works, Cliffe, Epping Forest, Isle of Dogs, Pinewood Studios, RAF Swinderby and The Broads.
And here's another description of several locations and which scene they're in:
https://giggster.com/guide/movie-location/where-was-full-met...
That's an odd way to describe a show premised on a head stuck in a TV. Kinda hard to have any kind adventure when you're tethered to a power-supply.
Also: man, I really enjoyed that show.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/29/olympics-i...
COP displaced 30,000 people (though, I suppose it's not as bad as Seoul, where over 700k people lost their homes due to Olympics redevelopment).
The new Oldsmobiles are in early this year!
https://youtu.be/IIdGxR-aU6o?si=XUiZyK6CLG5J9GuZ
https://jalopnik.com/the-story-of-the-trashed-mall-from-blue...
Google Maps says more like ~270 miles: https://www.google.com/maps/search/Del+Norte+forest/@39.8350...
Distance measurement gets lost on the link, yet Del Norte is almost Oregon, and Muir Woods is San Fran.
Also, while there's definitely clearcutting in the area, such as:
https://www.google.com/maps/search/Del+Norte+forest/@41.5564...
A lot seems like areas where they just didn't/don't even bother replanting. 40 years after 1983, it would probably be a pretty decent size redwood forest again. For maybe ... a $1 a tree? (based on some of those NGOs. Heck, hire an NGO to do it.)
If you know that California is big (1040 miles from north to south), then the northwestern tip of California is going to be a long way north of Marin and SF.
This was the third movie. Star Wars was already extremely popular by the time this as filmed.
You know you've been in SV too long when your first association for 'sequoia' is 'VC' or 'portfolio' not 'tree' or 'forest'.
Edit: way better driving north from the Bay Area on hwy 101 than south towards SoCal on 5
And it’s a fine place; I’ve just driven Seattle-LA on every path imaginable more times than I can count. It happens to be right around the point where you’re really far from absolutely everything, and it all looks the same.
Also, Humboldt is not really that far from anywhere and is a lovely journey through some incredible forests.
Takes longer to fly to Las Vegas if you count all the Security Theater and whatnot.
Also when you fly to Vegas you end up in Vegas, with about a million things to do. When you drive to Humboldt you end up at a forest, after spending the past 5 hours driving through… forests.
In those counties the state already had RNSP (Redwood National and State Parks), a complex of one national park and three California state parks (139,000 acres; 560 km2). [0]
This makes me curious about the economics of when are the rare occasions it makes economic sense to use public money to buy and preserve popular movie locations on private property/land (as opposed to paying a premium for sentimental or tourist value). For example the famous 'Friends' apartment exterior in NYC is still private property. 'Shawshank Redemption' on its initial release bombed at the box office. Scranton, PA has a self-guided tourist trail [1] for the US version of 'The Office'. Only rare places like Punxsutawney, PA [2][3] (the town 'Groundhog Day' is set in, although the film was entirely shot in Woodstock IL [4]) make $. For the hardcore tourists there's Tataouine, Tunisia.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwood_National_and_State_Par...
[1]: https://www.visitnepa.org/things-to-do/self-guided-tours/the...
[2]: "Groundhog Day: Punxsutawney’s Million Dollar Holiday" https://nation.time.com/2014/02/01/groundhog-day-punxsutawne...
[3]: Punxsutawney Phil’s town misses Groundhog Day boost (2021) https://apnews.com/general-news-d4a183fdd599322fb9b23a5cb214...
[4]: "Groundhog Days in Woodstock, IL" https://woodstockgroundhog.org/
Continuous clear cutting is bound to dry out the soil eventually.
https://theconversation.com/british-power-stations-are-burni...
https://www.forest2market.com/blog/pacific-northwest-log-mar...
But old growth forests don't. Not on human scale, at least.
We need to make sure the wood is responsibly harvested as much as possible but turning trees into part of a home is a actually pretty much inline with how nature works in general.
A redwood forest is, on the scale of a human lifespan, a non-renewable resource.
> The trees being harvested commercially today are only a few decades old.
The province of British Columbia publishes figures on old growth logging. They're cutting down ~40,000 hectares per year. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/old-growth-l...
But, you know, public opinion changes, policies change and, as it turns out, they have learned a lot about the ecosystem from studying how the clear-cut areas regrow.
Suburban housing boom, building more homes is one good way to put that into long term storage while reducing cost of housing and improving our carbon footprint as suburban homes can last for a century.
We can also genetically modify trees to grow faster and bigger.
Forests are good at carbon capture but forests are intricate biotopes with different plants serving different functions and debris from dead trees fulfilling an integral role.
Building more homes is definitely important but suburbia is probably one of the worst ways to do this as sustainable housing must be walkable and integrated, not car-centric like American suburbia always is. It also assumes those homes will last for centuries when most American houses are torn down and rebuilt on much shorter cycles than that. And that doesn't even get into how building more homes generates emmissions first.
Forests doesn't need humans.
I think this is the main issue here. They redefined "tree farms" as "forests" a long time ago, so they can put an equal sign between them.
A forest is an ecosystem. A tree farm is not.
You cannot regrow a forest.
Now that I recognize tree farms, I no longer feel quite as bad when I see then clear-cut. They were sick trees that were destined to be cut down.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/07/the-wrong-kind...
(all the trees you see in the guardian article are tree-farm trees, not just the ones that are clear-cut)
https://www.savetheredwoods.org/wp-content/uploads/cr-unders...
The clear-cut gives a nice cross view into the trees. It's a mess in there.. not much green. It's pretty clear the total available surface area in a natural forest is larger. The forest/nature/plants all optimize themselves to have as much surface area as possible. Loggers optimize for the greatest number of tree trunks and fewest number branches.
In my experience, degradation of wood-framed buildings comes down to one thing: water ingress. And that is independent of how "dense" the studs are. Old growth timber will rot just as quickly as new timber if water gets in, and I suspect new-growth wood will last just as long as old-growth if water is kept out.
I suspect that wood density, tree health, warping of lumber, and the resulting new ingresses of water could all be correlated. I'd love to know more if anyone knows more details.
Water penetration into a building is 100% down to the exterior cladding and waterproofing system, it has absolutely nothing to do with the material used for the skeleton of the building. Cladding is done with traditional plywood, which is infinitely better than old-growth diagonal planking used a century ago. Waterproofing is via plastic wraps like HouseWrap or more recently the Zip system where the waterproofing is integral with the sheathing.
Houses today may be less durable than houses 100 years ago (although there's huge survivorship bias in that claim), but if they are it will come down to tract houses being built to a very low standard of workmanship. It has nothing to do with old-growth versus new-growth timber.
Personally, I do wish we could strike a better balance in the US. I don't think we want these trees entirely constituting the "forests".
The way I understand it, a major difference between the two construction styles is that stone is wet and wood is dry.
Stone shouldn't be sealed (hence the notion that stone walls can't be painted) because this traps the humidity and erods the stone. A major downside of this is that this means stone houses are more prone to trapping humidity, especially with better insulation, and grow mold.
Wood on the other hand must be sealed so you can use forms of insulation that are highly efficient but very susceptible to damage from humidity. A major downside of this is that the outer layers essentially act as a water barrier and even things like driving a dowel into an exterior wall can cause damage over time from water entering the wall via condensation on the screw.
Traditional wood frame construction in my country used wooden beams along with loam or stone. Because these buildings often expose wood to the elements and are generally wet because of the stone and loam there is an inherent risk of the wood decaying over time and I've seen restorations that removed almost everything but the wood frame to remove integral beams. There are many very old wood and loam/stone buildings left in my area but there are probably many more that had to be either torn down or stripped down to the bones for restoration.
What I am saying is that it is possible to grow "that kind of forest" if you have money in much shorter time. Tree farming is one way to make the whole thing profitable (and hence sustainable) but it can be designed to resemble a natural forest with sufficient biodiversity and so on.
For example we can take a deforested region in Haiti or India or Zimbabwe, grow tree farms on say 10K acres of land and reserve another 10K to grow a more traditional forest. We don't have to wait 2500 years to grow sufficiently large trees which can host wide variety of species of fauna. Even for smaller shrubs and such we can do enough research to grow them faster with help of better irrigantion, enriched soil etc.
One of the reason why this does not happen already is because we have reduced the entire topic to zero sum between normal people and tree people.
> sustainable housing must be walkable and integrated, not car-centric like American suburbia always is.
I am not sure why such statement should be made. Large homes with huge backyard offers great quality of life in ways the densely packed animal like city human farms can't.
People don’t do that because they don’t really want old growth redwoods specifically and or don’t generally care about sustainability. However, setting up a trust to manage some forest while maintaining an income stream is probably viable.
Humans' hand is always visible: the stumps of cut-down trees, and the (mostly, if not complete) absence of fallen trees. Besides the odd trail used for vehicles. And trash, wood chips, markings on trees, etc. Such signs remain visible for centuries.
Natural forests are littered with fallen trees, which serve as food for sapplings that take their place (nurse logs). And trees don't fall with a clean cut: they are ripped from the ground in a storm, split by a lightning strike, or they die, rot & come down in pieces.
Doesn't take an expert to see what's what.
I seriously doubt you’re going to notice century old wood chips and markings on trees. Similarly large branches would look like fallen trees in other forests.
A given section may not have seen anyone in 30+ years, others would have more noticeable impact but you’d have trouble seeing the logging vs all the trees. There would be remnants of trails and even some fresh ones, but that doesn’t specifically imply logging.
Yip, folks got greedy and cut down the redwoods. They use to be common, running all the way from south of San Francisco to well into Oregon. What remains is a patch work.
"Today, only 5 percent of the original old-growth coast redwood forest remains, along a 450-mile coastal strip." [1]
> You could use old growth redwoods as a renewable resource, you just cut down ~1/500th per year across a large enough area
Hence to do that, we're probably talking nobody cutting down another red wood for a good 500 years. Considering Europeans have been at it for only about 200, and have nearly cut down all of the redwoods... ...
I would urge anyone to go visit these trees. It's truly soul-touching, they are something to be protected, if only for that.
[1] https://www.savetheredwoods.org/redwoods/coast-redwoods/#
If they become decks, paper, or other useful products in between, reducing usage of plastics things which emit carbon, so much the better.
Convince me otherwise.
Fully grown trees are mostly carbon neutral, growing trees on other hand are capturing carbon. Perhaps we can cut down large trees, coat them with very durable recycled plastic and simply store them on coastal line.
Canada and USA can heavily subsidize logging industry where
1. They have 100 year plan to plant and cut trees.
2. Wood gets exported to poorer countries where deforestation is a problem.
IMO old growth forests should be protected, but at the same time we should plant new industrial forests as much as possible, and harvest them for building material. Old agricultural land that is no longer used for farming is ideal for that.
Likewise planting trees to be used for industry instead of materials with worse emissions is good and planting forests is good but the two are largely unrelated as the kind of forest you want for restoration projects is different from the kind you can use for logging.
It's a bit like how there were news headlines about bees becoming endangered followed by tons of startups selling honey bees for greenwashing when honey bees are specifically the one species of bees that is nowhere near endangered because they are used at industrial scales.
We need to protect old growth forests but also expand them, because they're vital habitats that help protect biodiversity and maintain plant matter for sustainable carbon capture. We also need industrial wood plantations to produce wood we can use instead of more harmful building materials. We also need to reduce the overall need for building materials, e.g. by investing in long-term sustainable housing projects rather than McMansions with a lifespan of less than one generation.
Ideally all that stuff would be sent to a facility where it can be properly sequestered long term, but most of it probably won't.
Sure, you can soak up some water temporarily, but eventually the water comes back out.
That's a serious question. I have no clear sense of what happens in landfills. For all I know, they might be the new fossil fuel reserves in the year 30,000.
Quite a lot of rainfall over land originates as transpiration from forests, for example; they're a key part of the water cycle, holding and releasing water which would otherwise just run into the sea.
Likewise, a lot of species depend on healthy first habitat. Clear cut all the trees, and you lose all the species that depends on them. And all the species in adjacent ecosystems which rely on the forests.
This isn't to say that tree planting and harvesting can't be a part of carbon management strategies, but that it must be done judiciously. Clear cutting everything and burying it all is as short-sighted as, say, spending a century dumping leaded CO2 fumes into the atmosphere.
Who's going to pay you to cut down trees and bury them? Especially since they are considered an incredibly valuable asset by everyone (for very different reasons), from the environmentalist to the unrepentant capitalist.
One thing worth mentioning though is that people often forget that the trees themselves are not the only aspect of CO2 when it comes to forestry. So-called "natural forests" are apparently much more effective at sequestering carbon, due to the dense web of life contained within them – much more so than the monoculture forests that tend to get planted these days.
> Convince me otherwise
Why?
That sometimes leads to solutions, improvements, or startups, and if nothing else, better civic society and better personal choices.
First, let's consider tree farms, modern mono-cultures. Please look at google maps at anywhere in the northwest, and you'll see it looks like checkerboards. This is not satellite imagery being stitched together, that is what it looks like. So much forest have been cut and regrown several times over.
These tree farms - they're dense, bio-engineer to have small branches that are shed early. The trees grow like an overgrown bush, the canopy is almost exclusively at the top 10% layer. The effective area for photosynthesis is that of a field covered in a thick layer of bushes. Compare that to a field of conifers that have far more photosynthesis area on them overall, it extends from the top of the tree to the even the bottom half, in addition to the tree being taller. In a natural forest trees will fall and create gaps, allowing for more use of the vertical space. A natural forest is effectively a series of vertical gardens.
Next, let's consider tree rings. I don't buy the idea that a few saplings are going to do anywhere near the same activity as a 200 foot redwood. The amount of carbon in a tree ring for a 1000 foot tree is likely astounding. A new layer of bark on something that has a 10-40 foot diameter. (Red woods are amazing trees)
Next, it takes a good 30 years for that regrowth cycle to happen. What's more, humans have been doing that round-the-clock in North America since Europeans arrived. The "2nd" growth is like the 6th to 10th time we have been through this. The forests that have been managed like this are not great (they have low recreational value, they burn like crazy, they clearly don't have the same mass of green material that would be doing photosynthesis (so I don't buy that the carbon sink activity is lower), they are crap habitat for animals). More so, the wood from these forests is poor, it's soft, warps easily, not strong.
Back to the point of the 30 year cycle.. if our game plan is to bury a bunch of trees and regrow them in 30 years, and repeat that once or twice - the climate goals are not going to be achieved.
Another reason - small little trees burn easily. Trees need to get to a good height before they are "fire-proof". Trees in the NW drop their lower branches and their trunks grow thick bark allowing for the undergrowth to burn off & leaving the tree alone. This is where you can also get your rapidly growing "new forest". What's more though, if you cut down a forest, trees that are 10-20 years old are more akin to kindling, you wind up with a mega blaze. Where once there was a forest, you get a Savannah. This is happening in california, places that burned so hot, several feet of soil are burned, those forests are truly gone. If anything gets a foot hold again in those areas in the next decade, it'll all burn again before it's all big enough to survive a fire.
> If they become decks, paper, or other useful products in between, reducing usage of plastics things which emit carbon, so much the better.
The research from the "other side" notes that these "useful" products often go back into the atmosphere within a couple decades. [1] Compare that to the forest, which naturally buries its own trees as they die. Leaves fall, they form new soil along with other fallen trunks. Not to mention that trees do this on time scales of centuries, rather than decades. Point being, over time, the elevation of the forest floor grows. In sum, this idea of burying trees - it's already happening naturally.
[1] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08022022/do-young-trees-s...
For completeness, here is a reference for "young trees&q...
Maybe the mentality would be different if we haven't ef-uped our planed by exploiting oil to drive oversized gas-guzzlers to the sprawling single-family oversized homes? but no... better keep ruining beautiful nature...
The days of lumberjacks going into virgin forests to harvest wood in that area are over - it's all either national parks or other protected forests which might get thinned for fire management reasons but never clear-cut, or managed forests that periodically get harvested and replanted, just like corn and wheat. (Source: I grew up in Humboldt County and still have family there.)
These trees took far longer to grow than a corn crop, far longer than a human lives. It's sad that they're gone.
I remember the day that my dad told me that tourists actually came to Humboldt to see the trees. Boring old trees? Really? Having grown up among them I didn't understand how unusual they were yet.
Horizontal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJLp5dgpSjQ
Karri: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFlmkFBC9tg
Jarrah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDCP4ZABpqM
Daintree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pCXYHdjxyg
When you are amongst the trees, one redwood (sequoia sempervirens) forest located in or near Humboldt County, California, looks very similar to any other redwood (sequoia sempervirens) forest located in or near Humboldt County, California, unless one forest or the other is very new growth or very old growth or similar extreme circumstances, and assuming you visit the two forests at roughly the same time of year.
I still urge you, if you get the chance, to get out and wander through other forests .. there's quite the variety about the place.
Of course there are sustainable, responsible ways to manage and harvest forests including redwood, but wildly destructive, wasteful harvests didn't stop in the 1800s either.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/15/us/company-agrees-to-dela... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headwaters_Forest_Reserve [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/19/us/national-news-briefs-l...
There are places where old growth trees are being logged even today. It's a patchwork: some old growth is federally protected, some state protected, some locally protected. And some is private land where oversight varies.
So be very careful with these things. It’s very similar to the NYC squatters rights thing. If you let someone have a little they’ll take everything. So sometimes you just have to either prevent them or you have to act fast (here by cutting right after to remove the value of your land from them).
That old growth or near old growth forest of red woods shouldn’t be harvested at all is a separate issue, has little to do with Star Wars, except that Star Wars vi was shot in such a forest.
I think that's bad-faith reading of the quote from one arborist, not the CA Governor or Treasurer or Dept Director of Parks and Recreation. The way I read the article is that it was implied the state should have considered buying out the owner of the forest (or at least part of it) with state money and convert it to a park. I don't know whether that would have been economically viable and I don't understand people discussing here how forestry policy on redwoods changed after that, but it would be good to see numbers on all this, even if the answer was no.
FYI Lucasfilm shot the Endor scenes in Del Norte in Apr-May 1982, a year before release of RotJ. So, another huge errorbar would be estimating the film's popularity (if there's a deadline on the property being destroyed, as in this case).
99.999% of movies aren't memorable or profitable like the Star Wars trilogy, so they add no value. Also, this stuff isn't predictable at shooting time before the film's release. Compare e.g. 'The Matrix Reloaded' (2003) car-chase scenes were filmed in Oakland, but aren't that popular. But also the Boston Public Garden Bench from "Good Will Hunting", a low-budget $10m film by two young guys people had never heard of [0], or the prison location from 'The Shawshank Redemption' (the closed Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, OH).
[0]: https://www.livethemovies.com/home/the-boston-public-garden-...
> Had somebody been able to foresee the popularity and success of ‘Star Wars,’ it would have been crazy not to save the grove where Endor was made and use it as a tourist venue.
This was not the first Star Wars movie. This was the followup to the most successful sequel ever made at that point, which was itself a sequel to the highest grossing film ever. So successful it was famously given a pseudonymous title to acoid attention from fans.
How could you not expect it to be remembered?
> Stealing from the trees of Eden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eZZBZLNpNU