Mergers and Consolidation... A Clearcut Concern

Ever notice how frequently we seem to forget the original insight underlying our castles of complexity? Simple truths, like simple pleasures, are often overlooked in our rush from moment to monument. Remember the last time you stepped from a chilling shade into a burst of warm sunlight? Every cell in your body shuddered its approval. What an exquisite delight.

Chanced into several patches of sunshine recently on the West Coast in Calaveras County. This part of California was made famous by Bret Harte and by Mark Twain's short story about the local "jumping frogs". Never been too impressed by frogs. In North Carolina frogs are everywhere, part of the scenery; in fact, frogs are so numerous, we've even been known to elect one from time to time.  

I'd come to see the California redwoods. Calaveras County has two groves of these magnificent trees. A "Sequoia" redwood is a perfect example of the expression, "You have to see it to believe it." A 300-foot tall tree, 30 feet in circumference? No Easterner will ever accept on faith that the "first limb 150 feet up (!) on the General Sherman Sequoia tree is larger than any tree east of the Mississippi River". Come on now. Just sounds like more of the usual California hype – “Our weather is perfect, our culture is unique, our women are prettier, our budget deficit the largest." Well, at least in terms of Sequoias, the rap is true.

It's kind of difficult to exaggerate about a Sequoia. "Discovered" in 1852 by Augustus T. Dowd, one of the largest trees was cut and a section shipped east for exhibition. A tree of such size was unthinkable and the exhibit was roundly branded a hoax. (The stump of the tree, by the way, was later covered with a pavilion and used as a dance hall!) You may get some feel for the enormous size of these trees when you consider that you've probably never seen a photograph of all of a Sequoia.  

You've seen the bottom part or the top half, but a "full length" photo is a rarity. To capture the full height of a Sequoia requires that you step back so far that you lose perspective! Hard to explain, but you folks in Iowa just imagine if the telephone pole along the roadside were 300 feet tall rather than just 20 feet tall. As Californians would say, "Far out, man, far out." The other difficulty in photographing Sequoias is that they grow in thickly forested areas and an unobstructed view is almost an impossibility. Clearly, a case where one can't see the tree for the forests....

Sequoias are found only in limited groves in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and require a delicate balance of climate, rainfall, altitude and soil type to prosper. These giants have extremely shallow root systems and therefore rely heavily on the dense forest for protection against erosion and the forces of the wind. The fragile Sequoia ecosystem requires the presence of ponderosa and sugar pines, white fir, dogwood, bracken ferns, incense cedar and an active creek. It takes several hundred years of luck and patience to grow a "good size" Sequoia.

Any message here? I thought there might be several. 

The credit union movement represents a dynamic, finely-balanced, eco-financial system. There are many ferns, cedars, firs and ponderosa pines in the CU movement – and yes, a few Sequoias. A substantial amount of "logging" is going on in "our forest." Whether the cutting tools are SEGs, mergers, liquidations or consolidations; the end result of the current process seems pretty "clear cut". Have we overlooked the fact that even Sequoias, when left standing alone, stripped of support and protection, are unable to resist "the elements"?

Maybe as a movement we've made the choice against "conservation" and I just missed the debate. Maybe we really know where we're going with this furious logging activity. If so, we'd better at least focus on greatly deepening our roots in a hurry. Maybe we shouldn't worry about reforestation; although it's a well-known fact that new Sequoias do not sprout from the stumps of past mistakes.

Perhaps the stumps in Calaveras County are eloquent reminders of how often our failure to consider the future becomes an irretrievable decision. Even though some CU folks seem to have an axe to grind on this matter; perhaps, just maybe on this issue, we should all sharpen our wits first...

As the saying goes... 

"The first rule of tinkering is to save all the parts."