Saving Big Basin: Women Journalists, an Artist, a Banker, and Stanford's Botany Chair

Please join us on March 7 for a presentation by the Stanford alumna, educator, and writer Traci Bliss. She writes:

On May 1, 1900. one of the most extraordinary environmental movements in history began at Stanford: the battle for Big Basin. In less than a year, a coalition of unlikely allies achieved the unthinkable by creating California's first ever public redwood park. On the front lines, female journalists inspired the uprising of women's clubs all though California and the chairman of Stanford's botany department proved indispensable to the coalition led by a Santa Cruz bank president. Without the heroes and heroines of 1900 we would likely have far fewer old growth redwoods surviving today – roughly 5% of what existed 200 years ago.

Traci Bliss is an emerita professor of education, award winning historian, writer and redwood parks docent for the state of California. Her family, who played a key role in redwood preservation, settled in Santa Cruz in the 1870s. Three of her four degrees are from Stanford.