‘The Ghost Forest’ author Greg King recounts odyssey as an activist battling the North Coast timber industry

There’s a redwood in Armstrong state reserve, not far from where Greg King grew up, that has stayed with him his whole life.

When he was 5, he stumbled on a secret grove far from the well-mapped trails in the state preserve. In it, he found a tree that resembled an animal.

“It had these burls that looked like elephant ears, especially to me as a child,” he remembers. “I would always go back there. When I was a teenager, it was kind of a home away from home for me.”

Even though he lives in Arcata today, King has returned many times to Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve as an adult. He even took his daughter there when she was 2 years old.

Wednesday night, when King stands onstage at Armstrong amphitheater to read from his new book, “The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods,” he’ll have that tree in mind, and many, many others.

“Armstrong woods gave me a consistent infusion of the feel and understanding of an ancient forest, even before I knew that’s what I was getting,” he says. “To go back there and present this book, which is really a life’s journey, is profound to me.”

Journalism to activism

King talks about trees the way others talk about family. In dramatic detail, loaded with sucker punches, death threats and even bombs, the book recounts his personal odyssey as an activist battling the timber industry and fighting to save the Headwaters Forest among other groves — that’s the hook.

But the most compelling surprise is King’s deep dive into the history of the vast redwood forests along the North Coast and the backroom deals and shady politics that forever changed its landscape — to the point that only about 4% of old-growth coastal redwoods still exist today.

In many ways, King was born to write this book. His great-grandfather David King and his three brothers arrived in Guerneville in the 1870s and 1880s. They hunted, logged and built roads in the forests around Guerneville. When King was growing up, his family owned 75 acres adjacent to Armstrong Redwoods. Allowed to run freely through the forest, King almost took it for granted.

“I didn’t know what was occurring, but almost certainly it was an infusion of the energy of the forest, the life of the forest,” he remembers. “It’s a sentient being. It’s a singular life force, made up of a lot of individual lives that are communicating with each other.

“Modern science tells us this now. But we don’t need modern science to tell us that there is a brimming life force within these forests. They’re pumping hundreds of gallons of water a day through these massive stems. How could that not involve this incredible life force?

“It probably took me a lifetime to fully grasp how the life of the redwood forest syncs almost perfectly with my own life, because that’s where I’m from.”

Not long after graduating from college, and a job bagging groceries at the Guerneville Safeway, King signed on as a reporter at The Paper, an independent weekly run by a dogged editor who encouraged him to dig beneath the surface and find compelling stories.

One day, he learned that Louisiana-Pacific Lumber was planning to log redwoods in the Silver Estate tract in Guerneville, home to the massive 278-foot Clar tree and what is described as “the largest remaining flat grove of redwoods on the banks of the Russian River.”

The forest was literally right outside the back door of his rental house. He wrote a series of stories and from there, followed the trail north to virgin groves and ancient redwoods slated to suffer a similar fate.

Joining up with Earth First activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, King quickly reached a fork in the road and chose activism over journalism.

As an advocate, he never stopped writing, but his life’s work became the story. It’s all in the book: There he is standing in the middle of a clear-cut sea of stumps and brought to uncontrollable tears. There he is squatting in a tree to protect it from being cut. During a night hike, he senses the trees talking to him. Some of the tallest giants have names — Medicine Tree, General Sherman, Crannell Creek Giant and Founders Tree.

In 1986, when Maxxam Corp. took over Pacific Lumber Co. and made plans to double its rate of cutting trees, the line was drawn and Earth First stepped up to protect thousands of acres of old-growth redwoods, including a grove that King would name Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County.

They confronted Maxxam every step of the way, attending shareholder meetings and state forestry permit hearings, staging protests, blockading lumber trucks, raising awareness with everyone from local logging families to national press and eventually scaling the Golden Gate Bridge with banners. Repeatedly, law enforcement looked the other way as King and other Earth First members were physically assaulted at demonstrations. After getting sucker punched by a logger, King later landed a roundhouse in self defense (summoning an old fighting trick he learned in Guerneville).

“We understood by ’88 and especially by ’99 that the authorities — the sheriff’s offices and the D.A.’s offices — were not our friends,” he says. “We were out there on our own.”

Save the Redwoods League

When a bomb went off in Bari’s car while she and Cherney were driving through Oakland in 1990, “it was shocking and horrifying when it happened, but in a sense, it wasn’t surprising that someone would try to kill us,” King says.

The bomb was intended to kill Bari (Cherney wasn’t supposed to be in the car at the time) and also Proposition 130, the Forests Forever Act to ban clear-cutting and prohibit loggers from taking more than 60% of the timber in a forest.

Obviously, much of this story has already been told before, first in news stories at the time and later in memoirs. But the biggest revelation in the book arrives in King’s systematic takedown of an organization that most people consider to be a champion of trees — the Save the Redwoods League.

Digging through the league’s archives, he uncovered letter after letter and document after document showing how a wealthy, good-old-boy network of industrialists joined ranks in the early 1900s to create the league and protect their financial interests. They were “saving” the redwoods more often for timber, he argues, than for conservation and public appreciation.

It’s something King didn’t discover until after he pitched the book. “I didn’t know there was a major exposé to be had on the actual history of redwood preservation,” he says. “I was just as ignorant as anybody else. And so when people say to me, ‘I had no idea,’ I say, I had no idea either.”

Time after time, he shows in the book how the League opposed major legislation proposed to save large swaths of North Coast ancient redwood forests.

“The league had its first meeting about incorporation two weeks after (Santa Rosa congressman) Clarence Lea introduces his Redwood National Park bill (proposing to turn 64,000 acres of virgin redwood forest along the Klamath River into a Redwood National Park),” he says. “So you can see it was a reactive measure — they were mobilizing in opposition.”

It’s what inspired The Atlantic magazine to run the headline “The Greatest Act of Greenwashing in American History” across the top of a book review of “The Ghost Forest.”

The irony is that all of these detailed accounts and correspondences were made available for the first time — more than 200,000 pages — when Save the Redwoods League donated its archives to the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley.

“The league records themselves told me this story,” King says. “That’s what’s so powerful about it. The information is drawn straight from the league archives, and it’s irrefutable. I would not have written these conclusions had it not just been a slam dunk. There was no other way to define what occurred.”

After “The Ghost Forest” was published, Save the Redwoods League released a one-page response, asserting that “King combines historical research with personal essay-style interpretations of that history. Along the way, he makes many claims — some fact-based, and some purely speculative — about how the League operated in its early decades and what its leaders’ motivations and influences may have been.”

The next statement by the League almost acknowledges the ethical pitfalls of its early leaders (some of whom were eugenicists, thus the “Racists” in the book’s title), by writing them off as rookie mistakes. “King focuses much of his attention on the first half of the 20th century, when environmental policy and the concept of ‘conservation ethics’ were still in their infancy,” the League said.

“Hopefully, the message people are getting is that this is still going on — greenwashing is now epidemic,” King says. “You really have to dig behind the sources of information, and not just in the environmental world, but in everything. It’s more difficult now than ever.”

Today, at the age of 62, King is rising to yet another challenge, leading the Siskiyou Land Conservancy in its battle against pesticide poisoning in the Smith River estuary, which lies downstream from the world’s largest array of Easter lily bulb farms.

But the fight to save the redwoods is never far from mind. It’s all interconnected, like the trees he first laid eyes on.

In the book’s acknowledgments, King comes full circle back to Armstrong Redwoods, describing how “I would wander alone among the great trees, a precocious child immersed in a fairy world of living history. When, as an adult, I moved north to defend the last of these magic realms, it was as if I’d been called to rescue family.”

By this point — people, trees, forests, family — they’re all intertwined.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the name of Greg King’s organization, Siskiyou Land Conservancy.