In Giants Rising, filmmaker Lisa Landers takes us on a journey into the heart of ancient redwood forests. Through stunning visuals and powerful storytelling, Landers sheds light on the urgent need to protect these towering giants, reminding us of their ecological significance, their impact on us as humans, and the role they play in our planet’s future. We spoke to her about the film and her journey in making it.
Lisa, you made a movie about trees! What inspired that and why redwoods in particular?
I think the idea for this film actually first started brewing in my head when I was a 12-year-old kid. I’m from New York and I was on a trip to Northern California and I went to Muir Woods, and it was like game over. I was so smitten, and I was so lit up. I mean, I was a kid who was into fantasy and sci-fi, and I was like, “Oh, oh, this is Middle Earth, I have just landed in Lord of the Rings Land.” I think it just piqued my curiosity so deeply, and my sense of connection with nature. I think in a lot of ways, it is what led me to make a career out of exploring and telling stories about the natural world. The redwoods specifically are what led me to leave my native New York and make my life here in a small redwood grove in Northern California for like 15 years now.
But the film idea—beyond my being 12 years old and just being curious—really started to take root, pun intended, when I started doing short films about redwoods for my work. In the late ’90s, I was sent on an assignment to do a news segment about the woman, activist Julia Butterfly Hill, who was sitting at the top of a redwood tree for two years, in an attempt to protect this beautiful ancient redwood from being logged. And I went there, and I climbed up her tree, and I sat up there with her.
I was so curious about the redwoods and how they do all of the amazing things they do—grow so tall, live so long. But then I was like, wow! How the heck do these trees work their magic on us? I knew that they moved me, but they moved this woman to risk all, to sacrifice so much. At that moment I thought, oh well, gosh! I’m so interested in all the science stuff, but I’m also really interested in this.
I continued making short pieces about different aspects of redwoods, then I had a break in my projects around 2018. I really wanted to tell the kind of epic tale of the redwoods through all these different lenses, not just about the activism to protect them or the impacts of climate change. I wanted to pull it all together, and I went for it.
You mentioned that as a young woman you had an emotional response just to being around the trees, but as we learn more about the science, there’s more to that. Can you speak to that? What are we starting to learn and why is it so beneficial for people to get outdoors? Also, what does that experience do to us?
I went deep into these questions talking to a social psychologist from UC Irvine, who is in the film, to really start to understand what is happening to us physiologically when we are in forests—and specifically among big trees—that really evoke intense feelings of awe. This is someone who has studied that quite a bit. There’s a lot they don’t know, but what they do know is that people all report feeling less stressed, more content, more relaxed.
The brain kind of shifts from being focused on yourself to the outside world, and it creates almost a euphoria. It creates this feeling. What’s so cool is that a social psychologist is asking questions like, why did we evolve to feel that way? Is there something about feeling connected to the natural world that is beneficial to our survival as a species? There’s no answer to that, but it makes you think.
The other thing I did is to really study how the actual physical trees rain down their organic compounds on people when we spend time in the forest. There are all these studies where they put monitors on people and show that your blood pressure goes down, your cortisol goes down and your immunity gets boosted. They can see there are certain white blood cells that target cancer that get a boost. All of these interesting and wonderful things happen, with no side effects.
The third thing I would say is that—and this is something the social psychologist pointed out, based on studies they did with giant sequoias, the cousins of the coast redwoods—they found that people are more compassionate, more cooperative and feel more connected to other people after or during the time they’re spending among trees. They conducted all these tests, and it was like, wow, it just makes us nicer humans to hang out under trees. You could be in any forest, but when you’re in the redwoods, you also get all that awe on top of it because of their verticality, because of their size, and because you know how old they are.
One of the things you discover in the course of the film is that there are linchpins in a much deeper ecosystem. The tree does not live by itself. Can you tell us what you learned about that as you made the film?
That was one of the things that continues to blow my mind. The idea of an ecosystem, that there are all of these interconnections that support everything that lives in this certain area, and the redwoods are no different. But what I didn’t know is how redwoods are very specifically tied to the health of the salmon. There are salmon runs all throughout the redwood ecosystem, and those salmon are totally dependent on the redwoods for shade because they keep the streams cool. They provide little pools when trees fall so there are safe nurseries for the young salmon. And then when the fish dies, all of the nutrients in that fish go into the water and are taken up by the redwood roots and it sustains them. It’s sending all of these nutrients into the trees. There are all these cool connections like that.
If you’ve visited Redwoods you’ve probably noticed they form rings—some people call them fairy rings. Basically, redwoods reproduce by shooting up clones which form a circle around the trunk. It’s not the only way they reproduce, but it’s the main one. Over generations, all of these trees keep shooting up, but they’re really all interconnected underneath. It’s all one organism, sharing resources and communicating. You can be standing in a redwood grove and the entire thing could all actually be one organism.
The largest clone ever discovered to date is 280 trunks, covering an acre and a half. The scientist who’s featured in our film because he focuses on redwood genetics, he was able to look back and figure out when the first seed germinated 30,000 years ago that created these generations upon generations, this family of trees. I could go on and on. But the connectivity is something that is so layered, and I think holds so many lessons for us about survival and resilience.
One of the weirdest stories you tell was this phenomenon of albino redwoods, which I thought was fascinating because these things are like zombies. They shouldn’t be alive but they are, right? Can you explain what that is?
That was the story that first led me to this scientist. I read it, and I was like, what? Because I had seen them. There are these redwood trees, they tend to be smaller than the usual trees, but the leaves, those needles are white, pure white. They have no chlorophyll, and without chlorophyll—which is the thing that plants need to get sunlight and survive—they should be dead.
This scientist has been obsessed with them for a long time and wanted to understand, why is this happening? One of the things he noticed is that these white redwoods appeared in places where there seemed to be a lot of human development, near places where there are railroad tracks or highways or other things.
He took it into the lab and measured it. And what he found was that these white redwoods actually have really high levels of toxins—really high levels to the point where, if it was a green plant, it would die. It’s something that he’s still researching, because again, all the trunks are actually interconnected. So this is like an arm, right? This particular white redwood. And it’s siphoning off all of the things it needs to survive from the green tree. But what if that was an adaptation used to enable the green parts of the tree to flourish? Like taking a hit for the team. Acting as some kind of filtration system. So that’s what he’s studying. And I hope he gets to continue the study because it’s pretty cool.
It’s a fascinating theory, and I hope he proves it because it seems like the sort of thing that would win a science award. You mentioned the threats of human toxins in the soil, but you also documented other threats to redwoods. Can you speak to that?
There were 2 million acres of redwoods when the Europeans started flooding in for the Gold Rush in the 1850s. Beyond gold, they found this remarkable wood, these redwoods. The wood is incredible. It’s rot-resistant. It’s pest-resistant. And it’s a great building material. That itself was pure gold.
Over the course of that time and the following years they logged 95% of that original primeval, never-before-cut forest. What we are left with today are these fragments of old-growth forest. They’re sort of islands and they’re super resilient. Like we were talking about before, these connections in that ecosystem—that’s where they get their resilience from. When you chop them down and you start harvesting them, you don’t have all of that complexity of an ecosystem. They don’t have their resilience.
Ever since the logging of redwoods began there have been calls to protect them because people realize this is not a replenishable resource in our timescale, and they’re so magnificent. And everybody, whether they had quantified the scientific results or not, they felt it.
Starting in the 1800s, people were protesting and trying to save them. This movement to save the redwoods is what launched the movement to create California’s State Park system. There are a few hundred state parks—250 or so—but almost 50 of those actually have redwoods. The oldest California State Park is Big Basin, where some of the oldest, largest primeval redwoods still exist.
There are a lot of conservation organizations trying to buy what’s left of the primeval redwoods. They are also trying to purchase some of the redwood lands that have been turned into timber farms, to be able to restore them, to figure out how we can grow back that old grove forest that once stood there and connect these fragments so that these trees have a greater shot of surviving all of the changes that are coming to our planet.
You documented how redwoods have evolved a pretty amazing resistance to fire, but as fires get hotter and hotter there are situations like the devastating fire in Big Basin. You followed a ranger who spent a lot of time loving that forest and then encountered the worst that can happen.
The fire at Big Basin was devastating, as are all of these other fires that are happening. These fires are sweeping through natural areas, beloved parks, and right through the communities that are adjacent to them. We are all connected in what’s happening now with these fires.
One of the reasons the fires are so intense right now is that there was a policy of not burning anything in parks for a really long time. There were campaigns started 100 years ago, if you see a fire, put it out, not understanding that fire is actually part of the natural cycle of things. The burning actually does all of this good stuff to the soil, and it gets rid of all the stuff that falls on the ground. In a place like Big Basin, they hadn’t really done that for a long, long time, so the whole place was filled with tinder. Lightning strikes and boom! It goes up.
But what’s happening right now, which is pretty exciting, is that there’s a recognition of how important fire is as a tool for keeping forests healthy—something that native tribes in California have always known, but they were forbidden from doing. And so now there is this understanding that what they were doing was really beneficial, and more and more parks and other areas are doing controlled burns. Often now they are working with indigenous partners to do it right. People who have that insight and the knowledge about how to do it.
But it’s still a scary thing. Even setting a controlled fire can be scary for people. So it’s a process for the parks to really talk to people in local communities about what they’re doing, and understand how it may be a little scary, but it is controlled. At the end of the day this is better than waiting for it to happen naturally, because it will and it won’t be pretty.
You followed some amazing characters in the film, including a Native American woman who spoke eloquently about how they were connected to the redwoods. What were some of your favorite characters in the film?
Oh, yeah, I love them all. Of course, there were several who fell on the cutting room floor, and I thought their perspective was so interesting, too. But there was one person in particular who was really neat to be able to spend some time with, and that is Dave Severns who is the Yurok canoe carver. He’s not the main character in the film, but he brings us into the Yurok culture and the Yurok connection to the redwoods.
They carve these beautiful ceremonial canoes out of the redwood fallen trees. They haven’t been able to do it for a long time, because there was a policy that said you can’t take fallen old growth out of the forest, but they were only asking for one a year, and it’s so tied to their honoring of the redwoods. Finally, parks and other places have come around. They need to thin some forests, so things are happening and they’re getting that wood to be able to do it.
The canoe carver brought us into how the honoring of the redwoods and the carving of the canoes is a way they build community. It’s the way they make the younger generations and the tribe feel more connected to each other and to the trees. And he’s a total hoot. I mean, he said, some really really funny things, some things I opted not to keep in the film. But he talked about how special these redwood canoes are to families who make them and have them, and he mentions at one point how they’re so respected that they’re even treated better than some family members. I just thought that was great.
What were the biggest challenges in making this film?
Oh, gosh! So many. Filming in the redwoods is cold and dark a lot of the time, which is hard. Not always the most pleasant to be hanging out for hours and hours at a time. There’s also the fact that the primeval forests were all in parks. So I had to get lots and lots of permissions, and just be really mindful of what I was doing, how I was disturbing the forest—which is a great thing, but it took a lot of extra work. And I had to really convince people that what I was doing was for the benefit of the trees. There are people who go up and they just want to climb to the top of a redwood tree and do all these things. I did have to build relationships and do some convincing.
The other really hard part was that in the middle of making this film, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and everything kind of came to a screeching halt. The only thing I could do to help myself navigate through that period was go out into this redwood grove behind my home and office, and just sit there every day. It was the only place I found where I could really breathe. That sense of perspective these trees gave me is what allowed me to see past all of the anxiety of that moment. And it was real. I mean it really impacted my emotional and mental well-being and helped carry me through that. It also reinforced my dedication to finish the film, which I did, a couple of years later.
On a practical note for those who love your film, what advice do you give to people who want to go out and experience them in person? Many people will know Redwood National Park, because that’s probably the best known. But there are a lot of state parks in California, too.
People know Redwood National Park, it’s true, but that is just one park, and there are so many with redwoods that are just as spectacular. Actually, Redwood National Park is now partnered with three other state parks, Prairie Creek Redwoods, Jedediah Smith Redwoods and Del Norte Coast Redwoods, and they are all spectacular, like primeval, just wondrous.
Everywhere, from Big Sur up and over the Oregon border there are wonderful parks anyone can access. The first park I ever went to, Muir Woods National Monument, is another favorite. What’s so wonderful about Muir Woods is how accessible it is, because getting to these forests you sometimes have to hike in, and they’re not paved. It’s hard to get to. But Muir Woods has this wonderful loop a walkway that is wheelchair accessible. You can be of any age, any ability, and you can go and be in the heart of this primeval redwood forest.
There’s a Redwood Park for everyone, and again, don’t limit it to the national parks or national monuments. I live in a redwood “open space reserve,” and it’s also spectacular. So when those parks get crowded, like Redwood National, you can find a quieter way in, and you can find great resources at places like Save the Redwoods League. They have an interactive map which we also have on our site so you can chart your redwood adventure.
You should start at giantsrising.com, right? Is that the first place to go?
Giantsrising.com. We have a whole section about experiences, which is not just visiting the parks, but things that you can do in the parks. You can do a Yurok canoe tour on the Klamath River through the redwood forest. You can do forest immersions and forest bathing where you go out with a guide. I am now a certified guide. We take people out in parks and other places to just give you permission to play, and really, through your senses, get in touch with your inner child and be with the redwoods. There’s all sorts of things, and we’ll keep posting them as more opportunities and different ways to explore redwoods become available.
What happens next with the film? It’s on the festival circuit. It’s been very well received.
We are still touring, which is great. We’re also starting to do a lot of community screenings. For example, there are communities in and around some of these parks like Big Basin, who have reached out and said, “Hey, we want to show this film in our community center. And we want to talk about fire. We want to talk about how important it is.” So the cool thing is that the film is going to be used by communities in different ways. We’re trying to provide them the tools they need to have these ongoing conversations.
The film is going to be distributed internationally soon. It is starting to screen internationally, which is pretty cool. Who knew that redwoods were going to be of interest? But you know, I think the redwoods are this portal to feeling connected to nature, or to the woods that are in your backyard. I think that resonates with a lot of people. And they’re so iconic. We are working on finding a North American distribution partner so that people will be able to watch this in the comfort of their own homes. Hopefully that’ll be there soon. We’ll put updates on the website. And if people sign up for our newsletters, they can find out more about that, too.
What key takeaways would you hope people leave the film with?
Three things. The first is that there are a lot of organizations and parks doing really important work to ensure the redwood forests can thrive for many years to come. But they need our support, whether it’s your time volunteering, or financial support. I hope people walk away with that—or just by voting for more protection for forests, or things like that.
Number two, there are more people and organizations starting to embrace the value of indigenous insights and knowledge when it comes to managing our forests and other natural landscapes. It’s gone on for too long that many of these tribes have not been at the table, and I think our natural landscapes have suffered because of that. So I hope there are changes in the air for this.
And then, thirdly, I just hope people get out into the woods wherever they are and just soak it up. Soak up all of those organic compounds, the awe, the wonder, the everything. It’s a gift, and it doesn’t have to be redwoods. I hope that people, after watching the film, go out and remember what it was like when they connected with that tree they used to climb as a kid, or a forest that’s had some significance to them, and just make more of those connections. Because if you don’t feel that connection, it’s a loss for you. But also that connection is probably what’s going to get you to be a little bit more engaged and involved in making sure we steward these forests, and these natural places, as they need to be.
5. Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park
Just south of Crescent City, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park encompasses a variety of ecosystems, including old-growth forests, coastal habitats, and riverine environments, supporting diverse wildlife such as elk, black bears, and numerous bird species. In addition to coast redwoods reaching heights of over 350 feet, there are several trails for hiking, including the popular Stout Grove, which offers views of ancient redwoods. The park’s coastal location provides views of the Pacific Ocean along with opportunities for beachcombing and tidepooling.
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4. Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park
Located in Humboldt County, California, this park is part of the Redwood National and State Parks. The views of the redwood trees are just a short walk from the visitor’s center. There are 75 miles of hiking trails, bike trails, scenic drives, campgrounds, and picnic areas. Although the park is known to have some of the best views of the oldest redwoods, it is also known for Gold Bluffs Beach and Fern Canyon, a tranquil creek surrounded by walls of ferns.
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3. Big Basin Redwoods State Park
Big Basin is located in the heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains, just 9 miles away from the picturesque town of Boulder Creek, CA, and 35 miles away from San Jose, CA. Big Basin is California’s oldest state park and is home to the largest continuous stand of ancient coast redwoods south of San Francisco. Some trees at Big Basin are over 2,000 years old. Big Basin is also home to a variety of other wildlife, including banana slugs, deer, frogs, raccoons, and coyotes.
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2. Jedediah Smith State Park
Jedediah Smith State Park joined Redwoods National Forest in 1994 and has become a popular site to see the Redwood Trees. The Park is located in Crescent City, and contains 7% of the world’s remaining old-growth redwoods, including some of the world’s largest specimens. Visitors can hike through a rainforest, fish, snorkel, or kayak in the Smith River, drive on Howland Hill Road, or enjoy a campfire.
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1. Muir Woods National Monument
Muir Woods National Monument is in Marin County, just a few miles north of San Francisco. The Redwoods trees found in the park and along the coast of California are the tallest living on Earth and the last remaining ancient redwood trees in the Bay Area. Muir Woods is also home to the Northern Spotted Owl and Northwestern pond turtles, one of two remaining native freshwater turtles in California.
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In top photo, photographer Sarah Bird walks among the redwoods of California
