J. Matt

Photographer/Writer/Reporter

California Forest Dispatch

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Focus: Photographer, Photojournalist, Journalist, Writer, Reporter, Fine Art, Environment, Architecture, Science, History, Documentary, News, Photography, Journalist Investigative, Civil Rights and Social Inequality, Humanitarian, Columnist, Assignments, Teacher, Educator, Conservationist, Human Rights, Artist, Multimedia Journalist, Editing, Storyteller, Visual Artist, Climate, News Reporter, Print Journalism, Environmental Stories, Still Photographer, Landscape, Social Justice, Nature, Reportage, Visual Journalist, Visual Storyteller, Visual Storytelling

Clients: ZUMA Press, Inc., Red Canary Magazine, Vox, The Guardian, Public Radio Exchange

School: San Francisco Art Institute

Coastal redwood trees are showi...he California coast. (2013) USA

Coastal redwood trees are showing themselves to be endangered by the hotter fires burning in California due to a combination of global warming exacerbated drought and understory overgrowth caused by aggressive fire suppression. This tree shows the sort of forest tree density that threatens redwoods in Monterey County and elsewhere along the California coast. (2013) USA

Sierra junipers are native to t...was 2,675 years old. (2010) USA

Sierra junipers are native to the northern Sierra Range and may grow as trees or shrubs, depending on exposure and available water. Host to mistletoe and popular as a bonsai subject, this is another long-lived species. The oldest accurately measured specimen, still standing in 1998, was determined to have died sometime after the year 1165, at which time it was 2,675 years old. (2010) USA

Douglas firs are a native conif...intensity wildfires. (2015) USA

Douglas firs are a native conifer, distributed throughout northern California. They are long-lived and possessed of thick bark able to stand low-to medium-intensity wildfires. (2015) USA

Coast or California redwoods re...servation of Nature. (2011) USA

Coast or California redwoods rely on coastal fog, and their range is constrained by this necessity. They can live more than two thousand years and are some of the longest-lived terrestrial organisms; they can reach over 350 feet tall, and their trunks can be 20 feet in diameter. Thick-barked and adapted to fire, coast redwoods are nevertheless susceptible to the extremely hot wildfires fed in recent years by drought and generations of thick undergrowth. Coast redwoods in the wilderness are red-listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. (2011) USA

Coast or California redwoods ar...or fire suppression. (2013) USA

Coast or California redwoods are adapted for fire survival, with thick bark and strong tannins; fire thins out competitors like the Douglas fir, and reduces the load of combustible underbrush that, left in place, leads to hotter and more destructive burns. A changing (warming) climate stresses trees and leaves them increasingly vulnerable to fire, as do management protocols that favor fire suppression. (2013) USA

Hikers investigate an old-growt...tractive to loggers. (2011) USA

Hikers investigate an old-growth “goose-pen” redwood, so called because settlers allegedly kept flocks in such cavities, which are the result of fire or other physical damage. After a trunk sustains a significant but survivable injury, the injured area may rot and dry; fires will later burn out the dried wood. Redwoods take up moisture and soil nutrients through a relatively thin exterior-bark layer, and are thus able to livewith these large caves — as long as they are structurally sound enough to remain standing. The cathedral-like openings may even have protected trees by making them unattractive to loggers. (2011) USA

This fused redwood likely forme...trees grew together. (2014) USA

This fused redwood likely formed as two trees grew together. (2014) USA

The acorn woodpecker fills the ...ja California Norte. (2013) USA

The acorn woodpecker fills the bark of many trees (and the wood of even finished fenceposts) with acorns to supply themselves through the winter. One family unit will stock several granaries, and defend their caches from other birds and squirrels. The thick-barked Jeffery pine is a favored granary site. Related to the Ponderosa, the Jeffery pine prefers high elevations, and ranges as far as Baja California Norte. (2013) USA

Douglas firs were once an impor...oth trees and seeds. (2011) USA

Douglas firs were once an important industrial resource in Northern Californian logging and mill towns. The seeds of manzanita are activated by fire, although high-intensity burns will kill both trees and seeds. (2011) USA

Bay laurels are a native Califo...Camp Fire burn zone. (2019) USA

Bay laurels are a native California species commonly known as “pepperwood trees” due to the scent of their leaves. Often occurring with redwoods in low-altitude forests, they also grow in river estuaries. These trees were photographed in the Camp Fire burn zone. (2019) USA

Blue oaks, sometimes called whi...tensity grass fires. (2013) USA

Blue oaks, sometimes called white or mountain oaks, are endemic to California, found in the Central Valley foothills from north to south. Adapted to drought and poor, shallow soil, they are one of the state’s most common chapparal-zone trees. Younger trees, especially, can withstand low-intensity grass fires. (2013) USA

Coast live oaks are a defining ...d south to Monterey. (2013) USA

Coast live oaks are a defining feature of California’s coastal grasslands, spreading from San Diego well past San Francisco in a band extending roughly sixty miles inland. Sudden oak death, a “water mold” or algal disease, has been devastating to Northern California populations. The disease is believed to have arrived in nursery plants from Asia, and was seen first in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. Cases have since been confirmed as far north as Curry County in Oregon, and south to Monterey. (2013) USA

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Public Project

California Forest Dispatch

Copyright J. Matt 2024

Date of Work Dec 1969 - Dec 1969

Updated May 2023

Location California

Topics Media

Summary

We are repeatedly told in so many words by foresters and scientists that California’s arboreal emblems will not survive in the majesty we have taken for granted. The plain language of the paper describing the decimation since 1985 is worth repeating: “Post-disturbance recovery has not been able to compensate for recent severe losses of tree cover, and, as a consequence, forest resources are declining across the state.”

Photos and essay published in Places Journal

To lose a totem is destabilizing, individually and culturally, and I have spoken with Californians deeply distressed by the state of the state’s forests. I am not a Californian, but I have seen beetle-wrought devastation in sub-alpine areas of the Sierras, high enough in elevation that the beetles had not previously been able to survive the winter, and the experience has shaken me. This is an irrefutable view of global warming in process, as powerful as watching glaciers calving at the Arctic Circle. We inhabit a time where the symbols we have built on the charnel grounds of the myths told by the state’s first folklorists are themselves being dispatched — and again at our western hands.

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