The coast redwood species is monoecious, with pollen and seed cones on the same plant.
Location
Luna is located on a windswept ridge overlooking the community of Stafford,[2] south of Scotia.[3] Due to its proximity to the small community of Stafford, this tree has also been referred to as the "Stafford Giant".
On New Year's Eve 1996, a landslide in Stafford caused by clearcut logging by Pacific Lumber Company (Maxxam) on steep slopes above the community resulted in most of the community being buried up to 17 feet (5.2 m) in mud and tree debris; eight homes were completely destroyed.[4][5]
History
The 1,000-year-old[1] lightning-struck tree[6] was named by a group of Earth First! members, who built a small platform from salvaged wood to serve as a tree-sit platform.[7] As the moon was rising at the time, they chose the name Luna, the Latin word for moon, to commemorate the event.[8]
For 738 days, from December 10, 1997, to December 18, 1999, forest activist Julia Butterfly Hill lived on the platform in the tree, 180 feet (55 m) above the ground.[7] Hill occupied Luna in order to save it and the surrounding grove from being clear-cut by the Pacific Lumber Company (owned by Maxxam, Inc. and Charles Hurwitz).[5][1] The Pacific Lumber Company and Hill reached an agreement to save the tree and a 200 feet (61 m) buffer zone around it for $50,000 after which Hill left the tree.[1] Later she wrote a book called The Legacy of Luna about her experiences treesitting in the giant redwood.[7] Some of her predictions came true, as Maxxam, Inc. failed in bankruptcy after cutting a 100-year timber reserve in 20 years, leaving employees and suppliers in the lurch.[8][9]
In November 2000, an unknown vandal used a chainsaw to cut halfway through the tree.[10] In 2001, Eureka civil engineer Steve Salzman headed Luna's "medical team" which designed and built a bracing system to help the tree withstand the extreme windstorms with peak winds between 60 and 100 miles per hour (100 and 160 km/h).[11] They were assisted by Cal Poly Humboldt professor Steven Sillett.[11]
^ abMartin, Glen (1998-12-08). "A Year in the Sky". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved November 25, 2013. They don't care about their employees, and they don't care about their forests. When they're finished, there'll be no jobs, no trees - just eroded earth. We don't have a problem with sustained-yield logging. But this isn't sustained-yield, and the loggers will ultimately suffer with the rest of us."
^ abDonahue, Paul (Winter 2001). "The Cabling of Luna". The Maine Woods. Forest Ecology Network. Retrieved 18 January 2013. The gravel road up to Luna took us through PL (Pacific Lumber) clearcuts of all conditions - impossibly steep, naked, eroded hillsides where not a single plant had grown since our last visit in June 1999, clearcuts with scrubby orange vegetation killed by herbicide spray, and other clearcuts still black and smoking from the Napalm dropped to burn off the slash. From high on the ridge above Luna we had a clear view of the blight of PL's patchwork clearcuts covering the landscape. Most bizarre of all, the whole time we were working to save a single tree we could hear the roar of a large twin-bladed Chinook helicopter coursing over the steep slopes across the Eel River from us, hauling out huge tree trunks in a PL helicopter logging operation.
