03 August 2013

The majestic millennia-old " Mark Twain" giant redwood tree


Cut down in 1892.

Embedded photo slightly cropped from the original at National Geographic Found.

12 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Thank you, Swift. I'll bet that's the most frequent spelling mistake (not a typo) in this blog. I just did a search and found 22 (!!) "millenia" and "millenium" mistakes in old posts. I'll need to go back and correct those as well.

      You'd think I'd learn to associate "eNNium" with "aNNual." *sigh*

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    2. Horrors. Good thing I stopped you when I did. ;-)

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    3. Fixed 22 times. I feel like a small child returning from the blackboard.

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  2. People surely had different values back in 1892. Or maybe the powers of the wealthy were greater than those of the ordinary people, or trade unions, who might have questioned the wisdom of cutting down such forest giants, which were the plant equivalent of dinosaurs and blue whales and which, in National Parks, would be now worth much more than the timber, in terms of tourism for a start. And how much of this timber was used to make the wooden and long-gone boardwalks on beachfronts in major coastal cities... Seemed like such a good idea at the time.

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    Replies
    1. Or we had hundreds of thousands of the trees and they thought that money was worth more than some stupid old tree.

      It may surprise you to know the 1980s are when we cut the most redwood per year.

      The trees aren't worth more as tourism, economically, even today. I think that's sad, but it is true. I saw this, and I live in the redwoods, and I would never cut a large one down. Ever.

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    2. B.S. there were people advocating for their preservation even back then. Sickening. They robbed humans of wonders for AGES with their greed.

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    3. Also Crissa,
      What is your citation that the wood from groves of giant old growth trees used pretty much once is worth more than the cultural and tourism value over hundreds to thousands of years?
      Uh huh....

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    4. The biggest market for Redwood in the early 1900's, was to rebuild San Francisco. Seems they were in the market for "Fire Resistant" for some odd reason. Northern California seemed to have an abundance at the time.

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    5. Sequoias have almost no commercial value. They are brittle and shatter when cut down. Many of the oldest and largest trees (as above) were cut down just to show-off man's "power" during the 19th century. Unfortunately Redwoods have high commercial value and are subsequently harvested en masse.

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  3. My goodness, Crissa, what you write is indeed a surprise! Thanks...

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  4. Nothing is worth more , than to share time with a 1000 yr old being . . For your entire life . .
    Some things are priceless . .
    Cut down smaller , 2nd and 3rd growth trees , and leave "all" the big ones . . That haven't already been cut down . .

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