Читать книгу Like a Tree - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 18
Still-Standing Ancient Trees
ОглавлениеThe coast redwoods in Muir Woods (Sequoia sempervirens) are conifers, one of the three surviving redwood species left on Earth in small pockets in isolated areas. At one time, there were two million acres of virgin coast redwood forests; now a little more than 3 percent of the original forest remains safe from loggers in state parks and one national park. Efforts to save these old growth trees on privately held land has been an ongoing struggle, beginning with John Muir, taken up by Save the Redwoods League, Earth First!, and other organizations and individuals. (“Old growth” forests are where there are no signs of past or present human activity.) The world's tallest tree is a coast redwood. The title is currently held by Stratosphere Giant at 368.6 feet in Humboldt State Park, edging out the longtime titleholder Tall Tree in Redwood National Park, which in 1990 was estimated to be over 1,500 years old and 368 feet (112 meters) tall. Twenty-six redwoods over 360 feet tall have been found, eighty-six over 350 feet. These coast redwoods are the tallest living things on Earth.
Their cousins are the giant redwoods (Sequoiadendron giganteum) found on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. General Sherman, a giant redwood growing in the Sequoia National Park, is the largest living thing on Earth, with an estimated age of 2,700 years, and an estimated weight of 2.7 million pounds (1.2 million kilograms). Their only other living relative is the dawn redwood, which grows in a remote area of the Hubei province in China.
These trees are ancient tree beings and great works of Nature's art. To a tree person, cutting them down for lumber would be like pulverizing Michelangelo's statues of David or the Pieta to make marble tiles, or bulldozing the acropolis in Athens as a site for a hotel.
Trees are the oldest living things on Earth. Among the bristlecone pines growing on a barren mountainside in eastern California's White Mountains, there is a 4,841-year-old (as of 2010) bristlecone (Pinus longaeva) named Methuselah, after the longest-lived patriarch in the biblical book of Genesis (said to have lived 969 years). Methuselah lives in a grove with others that are over four thousand years old. These trees began their lives before the great pyramids of Egypt were built. They grow on steep, rocky slopes at elevations between 9,000 feet and 11,500 feet (2,700–3,500 meters). Half the year, the temperature is below freezing, with deep snowfalls and ferocious winds. The harsh environment and the bristlecones' response to it have enabled them to reach their great age. That they don't have humans in their vicinity is one saving grace, and they are protected and in a national park, which makes their survival much more likely.
The 2009 documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea by Ken Burns is a twelve-hour series that tells the story of each park as well as shows them to us. Meant to be reserved for the people for all time, national parks came into being through the fierce love that influential and often very wealthy men had for the beauty and splendor of wilderness places. Ancient forests of giant sequoias and towering redwoods as well as the bristlecone pines are now within America's national parks.
Anna Lewington and Edward Parker open their book Ancient Trees: Trees That Live for a Thousand Years with this quote from John Muir: “Among all the varied productions with which Nature has adorned the surface of the earth, none awakens our sympathies, or interests our imagination so powerfully as those venerable trees which seem to have stood the lapse of ages, silent witnesses of the successive generations of man, to whose destiny they bear so touching a resemblance, alike in their budding, their prime and their decay.” The authors initially set out on a journey of discovery hoping to include some twenty-four species of trees that live over a thousand years. Their list rose to a hundred and the list is still growing. They comment that some of the world's oldest and most impressive inhabitants have already begun their fourth, fifth, sixth, or even seventh millennium. They report that a carbon-dated small-leaved lime tree (Tilia cordata) in a woodland in the west of England has already celebrated its six-thousandth birthday, and a common yew (Taxus baccata) in Fortingall, Scotland, could be nine thousand years old.
When I came home to find my huge beautiful Monterey pine tree was now an impressive stump, one question that could now be answered was its/her age: forty-two years old. As just about everyone knows, the age of a tree can be determined once it is cut down, by the number of its concentric growth rings. It is part of American tree lore, because this is so for trees that grow seasonally in temperate zones. In good years, the growth rings are broad; in bad growing years, such as a drought year, the rings are close together.