Redwood Light
Winner of the American Forest Magazine Photo Contest
I never buy lottery tickets. I hate casinos and those one-armed bandits that whisper in your ear, “You might hit the jackpot and roll around on the floor in a pile of cash if you stuff just one more dollar into my money taker.” Yeah. Right. Cynical? Maybe.
I rarely enter contests, because I rarely win. But this winter I got a bee in my bonnet and entered a photo contest for American Forest Magazine. And I WON - the Big, Beautiful Trees Category!!!
The image is published in the Summer 2022 Issue, alongside other wonderful photos of forests and trees. This makes me incredibly happy because this organization, and the magazine, shines a light on a cause close to my heart: protecting trees.
With Climate Change breathing down the neck of humanity and life on earth, we need every tree we have - especially the Big, Beautiful Trees. Shade. Oxygen. Carbon sequestration. Canopy cover slowing ground water evaporation. The West Coast has lost the majority of the old growth trees that once blanketed these watersheds. And we wonder why every summer is hotter, and hosts bigger and bigger mega-fires. It is insane to think of cutting down another single healthy large tree given what we are up against now. Yes, I will repeat that. It is insane.
This photo contest is more than picture kudos. It shows what is worth protecting. And it reminds me personally, that sometimes we do win.
It’s not lost on me that last weekend I attended a local protest to save our own Big, Beautiful Trees from a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) sale cloaked in “Fire Mitigation” language. This small, rural community is fighting this commercial logging sale because it would decimate the canopy in our watershed by cutting the largest trees, endangering our ground water, and increasing fire risk. The BLM isn’t interested in handling small brush, undergrowth or thick stands of smaller, high-risk trees that are the real fire danger. They want to cut the large trees that bring in high profits for them. And our community, and the Climate, lose.
The irony of my last StoryLife dovetailing into this one, is palpable. If you haven’t read Living In A Forest yet, click here. Climate Change is not some esoteric theory or concept to me. I’m dealing with it daily right now in the form of cutting down Big, Beautiful Dead Trees. A majority of the old-growth Ponderosa pine on our land have died from drought and beetle infestation. I counted rings on some of them - 188 to 204 years old. Gone in two years.
I don’t know what the answers are, or how to fix what feels like a bottomless existential problem. But I do know, saving all the Big, Beautiful Trees we have left is a good place to start.
I’m grateful to the local conservation organizations who care enough to do the hard work of protecting the healthy forests and rivers we have left. Here are just a few of the many people doing gargantuan work right now:
Williams Community Forest Project
If I missed your organization, please forgive me. I know this is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good place to start.
And THANK YOU American Forests Magazine and the contest judges, for selecting my Redwood Light photo as a winner in the Big, Beautiful Trees category for the Summer 2022 Issue.
My wish is that generations to come will have the same opportunity and privilege that I have, to capture photos of Big, Beautiful Trees.
© 2022 Michelle McAfee
Photos by Author
Congratulations on winning. The article is also a winner.
Congrats! That photo is beautiful!