The Last Stand: The War Between Wall Street and Main Street Over California's Ancient Redwoods

by David Harris

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This "gripping and informative" (Publishers Weekly) account of financier Charles Hurwitz's takeover of the Pacific Lumber Company (PL) in remote Northern California is as much a story about the struggle for the soul of capitalism as it is about the fight to save the ancient redwoods on the company's lands. For generations the family-owned PL had operated on the banks of the Eel River in Humboldt County under the principle of long-term sustainability over short-term profits: employees were treated respectfully, and no more than seventy percent of old-growth redwoods would be cut in order to give the forest time to reseed. David Harris skillfully combines a journalist's astute eye for detail and an activist's moral outrage with fast-paced, thriller-like writing to chronicle the drastic changes that came to not only a corporation but its employees' entire way of life when the PL was bought out by a Texas-based conglomerate-whose greed-fueled destruction of the redwoods ultimately doomed the enterprise.
  • ISBN10 0871569442
  • ISBN13 9780871569448
  • Publish Date 25 March 1997 (first published 26 December 1995)
  • Publish Status Out of Print
  • Out of Print 16 June 2008
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher Counterpoint
  • Imprint Sierra Club Books
  • Format Paperback (US Trade)
  • Pages 384
  • Language English