This week, Sierra Club supporters made a giant difference in protecting one of the greatest natural treasures on Earth. The giant sequoias are direct descendants of the enormous trees that once covered North America and loomed over dinosaurs in vast forests of fern and evergreen. Now they survive in just one small redoubt -- the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada.

By the time modern man first encountered the giant trees, only sixty-odd scattered groves remained. Our first response was awestruck incredulity. Our second was to start cutting them down. The wood wasn't good for much -- too fibrous and brittle for construction, most of it became shingles, stakes, and matchsticks. The plundering lasted for decades, with one lumber company felling an estimated 8,000 trees in the Converse Basin alone. Soon, nearly a third of the giant sequoias were gone.

In fairness, it's difficult to imagine the mindset of a 19th-century lumberman. We can more easily understand why over 1 million people would sign a petition to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 demanding that something be done to protect the trees (that's about one in 80 Americans, at a time when signing a petition required more than a mouse click). ...

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Coming Clean is the blog of Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune.