Fay is not alone. "My idea is to cut less trees and make more money per tree," says Jim Able, a former industrial forester for Louisiana Pacific who now manages small private timberlands, most fewer than a thousand acres. Wearing his trademark straw hat, Able leads Fay through the Howe Creek tract, a timber plot he's managed for nearly three decades and is thinning for the third time. Douglas firs and large second-generation redwoods, three or more feet thick and up to 200 feet tall, rise from the steep hillside straight as arrows. Here and there a few trees lie on the ground, waiting to be yarded, creating a mosaic of shadow and sun. The key, Able says, is form. He and his foresters mark every tree they want cut, aiming never to exceed 30 to 35 percent of the volume of the stand. Unlike high-grading, a form of selective logging that Able considers worse than clear-cutting because it takes the best and leaves the rest, Able cuts weak and poorly formed trees, leaving the straightest and strongest to thrive in the newly available light. And unlike timbermen who harvest clear-cuts every few decades, Able comes back once a decade to eval­uate whether to cut again. He never takes more wood than the forest has grown over that time, which means that the remaining trees—what he calls his principal—continue to increase in height, volume, and quality.

"What I'm doing is growing old trees and taking the interest in the interim," he says. "I firmly believe I can keep doing this over a hundred years."

More landowners are following in Able's footsteps, growing their redwoods older and cutting them more sparingly. Some call this ecological forestry, in which the forest is managed to provide wildlife habitat and clean rivers as well as forestry jobs and wood products. The 2,200-acre van Eck Forest near Arcata, managed by the Pacific Forest Trust, serves an additional purpose: It earns some of its keep by providing green­house gas reductions, which can be used to offset emissions. Thanks to their phenomenal growth, resistance to disease, insects, and rot, and their incredibly long lives, redwood forests are the best of all forests at capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking away the carbon in their wood. California's voluntary market for forest landowners is among the most rigorous in the world. The market allows owners to sell credits for the carbon stored in each year's grown wood as long as they guarantee to maintain that growth for a century.

Money for carbon stored in living trees could help landowners make the transition from short-term clear-cuts to long-term rota­tions where bigger, higher quality trees could once again dominate the landscape. So far, based on the amount of carbon the van Eck is estimated to sequester over a hundred years, the Pacific Forest Trust has sold more than two million dollars' worth of emissions-reduction credits.