Members of the ultra-exclusive Bohemian Club—2,500 of America’s richest, most conservative men—are known to urinate freely on the ancient redwoods that cover their 2,700-acre property. Have they been chopping down the trees as well? VFArchive
Members of the ultra-exclusive Bohemian Club—2,500 of America’s richest, most conservative men, including Henry Kissinger, George H. W. Bush, and a passel of Bechtels, Basses, and Rockefellers—are known to urinate freely against the ancient redwoods that cover their 2,700-acre property. Have they been chopping down the trees as well? According to one former member turned whistle-blower, the San Francisco-based society may have logged some of its old-growth forest.
Another hallmark of the encampment is the promiscuous micturition—guys standing up to the redwoods and relieving themselves everywhere you look. Maybe they’re trying to symbolically assert their primacy over nature. But the amount of drinking that goes on, plus the fact that many members are elderly and likely have prostate problems and can’t make it back to their camp fast enough, also plays a role in what has become, if not a formal ritual, a group-reinforcing collective activity.
The family that redwoods belong to, the Taxodiaceae, is 250 million years old. We humans appeared less than half a million years ago. There were redwoods whenwas the top dog and everything was gigantic. Sixty million years ago, there were more than 40 species in the Taxodiaceae, and their forests blanketed much of the world. Today, only three remain: the coastal redwood; the sequoia, in the southern Sierra Nevada; and the dawn redwood, in one valley in China.
Apart from running Oz, Jock has devoted himself to preserving California’s extraordinary natural bounty. He helped write the regulations implementing the National Forest Management Act of 1976 and, while heading the Sierra Club’s national-forest-management program in the early 80s, was the principal author ofHe’s the vice-chair of the California Tahoe Conservancy, and spends a couple of days a month up at Tahoe, doing what he can to alleviate that once gin-clear body of water’s massive problems.
Jock brought his discovery to the attention of the Grove Committee and the club’s president and told them about the other old-growth stands on the property. As a new member, he was deferential and almost apologetic: “Gentlemen, I feel presumptuous in the extreme in bringing these matters to your attention.
In January 2004, the chairman of the Grove Committee responded, “We have devoted extensive time to the issues you have raised. For over a year they have been an agenda item for almost all our meetings. And our decision is that our forest management practices will remain in effect.” Cutting old-growth redwoods on your property is not illegal, but if the stand is 20 acres or more, there are strict guidelines. California Fish and Game has to come in and make sure there are no endangered species. There are few restrictions at all when it comes to cutting second-growth redwoods, some of which have gotten so big that they are indistinguishable from old-growth trees. As a result, old-growth is sometimes cut under the radar.
Last year Singer was hired by the San Francisco Zoo in the wake of the mauling of a 17-year-old by one of its tigers. Chevron had hired Singer to help it deflect responsibility for the cleanup of the massive toxic contamination from 356 wells that had been drilled in the Ecuadoran Amazon, and to question the reputations of two rain-forest activists, Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanze, who were trying to hold Chevron accountable for it.
When I then told him I’d rather not talk to the people who are doing publicity for the club, but directly to Mr. Mancini and the club’s management, Singer shot back, “I don’t do fucking publicity. I do public affairs. I’m not trying to sell you a bill of goods. There is no flackery here. We handle difficult issues for people. The issue here is how to preserve the Grove, and Jock and his merry band have acted in an ungentlemanly manner and gotten the members angry.
The most far-out thing about redwoods is that they don’t just stand there passively in their rain forest. They actually create it. Each of the millions of narrow, pointed needles in their crowns acts like a miniature condensation panel, capturing the fog that blows in off the Pacific. When their moisture reaches a critical point, the crowns cut loose with drenching downpours, even when the sky is cloudless and there are drought conditions nearby.
The top of Lookout, my informant told me, looked more like a park than a forest, because most of the big firs had been taken out, several within the last few years. Mancini portrayed it as typical of the rest of the property. This is what we’re up against if we’re going to restore the redwood forest that used to be here, Mancini told the tour, waving at the dense jungle of understory trees and shrubs that had shot up in the absence of the big trees.
As I continue toward the Cremation of Care, I can’t help but think it’s in the interests of California that these trees continue to live, so they can remove carbon and water vapor from the atmosphere and mitigate global warming. They are worth more, actually, standing. So why doesn’t the Grove get a conservation easement for the entire property, then sell carbon credits, emissions offsets, for all the trees? They could in fact make a lot more money than they would from cutting them.
I’m a little early. Only a dozen men are sitting on the lawn. Dinner has not yet let out. Two rows of blue canvas folding chairs have been set up facing the lake. Only one elderly gentleman has arrived, so I plunk myself down two chairs away from him. It turns out he is the retired coach of the U.C. Davis football team. We talk football. I tell him about the crucial sack my son, a six-foot-six-inch defensive end for the Yale Bulldogs, made during the 2003 Harvard-Yale game.
While he is scrunched over his receiver, I crawl along on the grass ever so discreetly for about 50 feet, slowly get up, and nonchalantly walk around the lake, past the band shell, where a large orchestra is tuning up, and behind the Owl, and steal a glance behind me. He’s following me. But when I get all the way around the lake, passing a group of young men in maroon elf costumes, tights and all, and start back up Edwards Road, I turn and he’s gone.
The guard takes me back up to the road, and I come clean. “My name is not Roger Austin. I’m a journalist, and I’m here just trying to do my job, like you are. I’m just trying to get a sense of what this place is all about, and if you like I will leave the property immediately.” So the opportunity to see Bull Barn, Kitchen Creek, and Mount Heller didn’t pan out. I wasn’t going to be able to get an idea of how many big redwoods there are on the property. But you can see the damage to Kitchen Creek, still horrendous after three years, on Google Earth. And there is a way of using infra-red to sense vegetation types by satellite.
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