The fate of the oldest tree

[Nitro]

How One Man Accidentally Killed the Oldest Tree Ever | Smart News | Smithsonian

 

[Warmheart]

Thank you for this story! The accident was indeed tragic, but this article is enlightening. What amazing, resilient beings Bristlecone pines are.

 

[Mia]

Plants of many kinds including some trees are immortal. Accidental cutting down a tree of that age would have induced a great deal of guilt. When you look at bristle-cone pines they are not terribly impressive trees, they look almost dead. But they are certainly survivors on this earth.
These trees have experienced everything that the planet could throw at them, volcanoes, desert conditions, flooding, rain forests, dinosaurs, ice ages. Wonder what they understood and who grazed or lived in their branches? Wish they could whisper stories, they would be the most interesting things I could ever hear in my life, about the beginnings.

 

[Chance]

And we thought Gorge Washington cutting down the cherry tree was bad... Wow, I would feel pretty crappy to kill the oldest living tree on earth... Karma says this dude is now a tree growing by a sewage pond... : )

 

[Streetwise]

sad

How One Man Accidentally Killed the Oldest Tree Ever | Smart News | Smithsonian

obviously the equation is human=destruction

 

[Judge]

Reminds me of several visits to the Armstrong Redwoods in Northern California.

Armstrong Redwoods SNR

 

[DuckRabbit]

I've just read in a book called 'Nuclear Power for Beginners' (1978) by Croall & Sempler that "...by the Christian Era the forests of northern Africa and the Middle East had all but vanished - gone to fuel, building timber and farmland... Today we know these regions as desert." (p. 9).

The page goes on to say: "People shouldered their bags, moved on to Western Europe and spent the Middle Ages cutting down all the trees there instead... Strangely, they didn't start clearing the North American continent until modern times... and there's still some virgin forests in Siberia and the amazons..."

The cartoon shows a lumberjack thinking: "Yeah, we're getting round to them..."

This reminds me of some interesting quotes that someone with the username of "deindoctrinator" posted on a Daily Mail article (bold added by me):

deindoctrinator, reading, United Kingdom, 2 hours ago
In a section of his Notebooks entitled Prophecies, vegan Leonardo predicted the modern carnivore: "There will be no bounds to their malice; by their strong limbs a great portion of the trees in the vast forests of the world shall be laid low, and when they are filled with food the gratification of their desire shall be to deal out death, affliction, labour, terror and banishment to every living thing; and from their boundless pride they will desire to rise towards heaven, but their excessive weight of their limbs shall hold them down, Nothing shall remain on the earth or under the earth or in the waters that shall not be pursued, disturbed, or spoiled, and that which is in one country removed into another. And their bodies shall be made a tomb and the means of transit of all the living bodies which they have slain." He then proceeds with a curse.

Animal rights activists blockade McDonald's only UK burger factory with trucks and bamboo obstacles | Daily Mail Online

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

I know it's a little late after you initially posted this, but thank you for posting this. I didn't know that bristlecone pines could live so long. I knew they were old, but I didn't know they could be older than sequoia trees. One of my special interests is dating old trees. (Maybe I should rephrase that- I mean counting tree rings to estimate a trees age, and using ring size to determine that year's weather- Not sitting at a restaurant asking a tree how the water year was in 1593 to find out if we're compatible.)