From Forest to Fixture

I wasn't expecting an old sign shop to change how I thought about stewardship.

The room was quiet, almost forgotten. Shelves held rows of steel die cuts for letters that once pressed names and stories into redwood signs scattered throughout Santa Clara County Parks. Before computers and printed aluminum panels, this was how visitors learned where they were. Rangers shaped signs from trees that had grown within the parks themselves. The landscape literally introduced itself.

Holding those old tools, I realized they represented more than a way of making signs. They reflected a philosophy that the materials of a park should come from the park whenever possible and that every improvement should strengthen a visitor's connection to the place.

Today, our signs are more durable. They contain more information. They require less maintenance. In many ways, they are objectively better.

Yet something has been lost.

A metal sign can tell you the name of a tree. A wooden sign made from that very forest tells you a story before you've read a single word.

That realization led me to ask a larger question.

When did we stop seeing our parks as places that could build themselves?

Santa Clara County Parks owns extraordinary forests. It owns a sawmill. It manages historic buildings. Every year, trees are removed because of storms, age, fire hazards, trail improvements, or natural succession. Those trees represent thousands of board feet of beautiful lumber with decades, and sometimes centuries, of history embedded within them.

Yet much of that material sits unused while new lumber is purchased, transported, and installed in projects throughout the park system.

This is not simply a missed opportunity for sustainability. It is a missed opportunity to strengthen our parks' identity.

The question is not whether reclaimed wood can replace every building material. It cannot. The question is whether we have forgotten that the materials surrounding us are part of the story we are trying to preserve.

I believe we have.