"If it's all about short-term yield, there's not an effective argument for big trees," Sillett says. "But if it's about long-term yield, carbon sequestration, and ecosystem services, then you've got an effective argument for old trees. What do we need to remove and keep lots of carbon out of the atmosphere? Massive amounts of decay-resistant wood."

On the last day of their transect, as they hunted for the northernmost redwood near Oregon's Chetco River, Mike Fay and Lindsey Holm talked about the characters they'd met in the forest. There were Lud and Bud McCrary, octo­genarian brothers who pioneered uneven-age forestry in the Santa Cruz Mountains—Lud's family even built a redwood bomb shelter after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. And there was the story of Tim Renner, a veteran logger with a hearty dislike for forest activists. Renner told about the time he had been hired to cut some trees in the Arcata Community Forest, a selectively logged tract near town that also serves as a community park. He was putting away his chain saw at the end of a day's work when a young man came walking down the trail with long hair, a long beard, and dirty clothes. And Renner thought, This kid is going to chew me up.

The young man stopped and looked at the freshly cut forest, and to the logger's astonishment, he said, "This looks great! There's so much more light coming in. I really like the way this looks."

Which means that along with high-quality wood, carbon storage, clean water, and wildlife habitat, ecological forestry can bring back another benefit for which redwoods are justly famous: utter awe.