Editor’s note: Don Peterson is a contractor and a self-described unpaid lobbyist for the natural world. He is a longtime resident of Lowell.
[L]ast week, a giant sequoia toppled in California. It was one of those famous trees you see in postcards; somebody hollowed out the base so you could drive a car between its knees. That went on for years until there got to be so many people driving it was bad for the tree. It must have been a thousand years old and last week it just fell over in a rainstorm.
The idea of experiencing something so alive and so much older than yourself by driving a station wagon through its heart is worth thinking about. The news of that fallen tree reminded me of a coffee table book I got for Christmas this year. The book was a collection of Darius Kinsey photographs, the kind you see on half the coffee tables of the Pacific Northwest — old photos of loggers with their vanquished forest. On the cover was a group of three men, fallers, at work on a western red cedar tree. One of them is lying full length in the undercut of the tree — that first big wedge you cut out to direct the fall of a tree. I’ve been looking at books like that all my life. I even have some original Darius Kinsey photos my father bought when one of the Kinseys visited the Kosmos Logging Co., where he was working. What a forest that must have been.
There was a name for this first cut through — they called it the “old growth” forest. Even in my childhood my uncles talked about logging the old growth, mostly just patches here and there by the 1960s, and almost always on National Forest land. When I was home for a funeral in 1993 I got to talking to a bunch of loggers about the old days.
“Think there’s any old growth forest left anywhere?” I asked a Weyerhaeuser sawyer.
“Oh, we’ll never get it all,” was his solemn reply (you tree-hugging fool).
Later I asked a friend who worked for the state of Washington as a forester if that were true. His informed answer was that as a resource to exploit, the old growth forest was long gone.
We think our actions have no real consequence, that somehow we can drive as many cars as we like, buy as much junk as we’re told to, throw as much trash onto the pile in Coventry as our garbage trucks can carry, and our planet’s inexhaustible resources will continue to supply us with more.
The collapse of that tree in California, and that book of dead trees on my coffee table got me to thinking. It’s hard to imagine human beings will suffer a rainforest to ever reach even 600 years old again, let alone a thousand years. However many truly old trees are left in the world, we will only diminish the stand of them. The fact is, they’re too valuable as coffee tables (and coffee table books) to leave them alone. At the same time, people who really ought to know better still think the supply of 600-year-old trees is unlimited. After all, you can see them on postcards, in YouTube videos, and in your Microsoft screensaver file. We’ll never be able to cut them all down, right?
Wishful thinking is a human failing. We think our actions have no real consequence, that somehow we can drive as many cars as we like, buy as much junk as we’re told to, throw as much trash onto the pile in Coventry as our garbage trucks can carry, and our planet’s inexhaustible resources will continue to supply us with more. We’ll just throw up a few solar panels and a wind “farm” or two, and geez, it’s all fixed.
In Vermont, the fight over our mountains should not be about noise, or roads, or local control; I say that even though those things should concern us all a great deal. The fight ought to be about making people see the perverse logic that we will never destroy the earth, even as we constantly seek to perfect the destruction of it.
The fight is really against the notion that somebody’s immediate gain and our short-term comfort is worth as much as a mountain that is millions of years old. The fight is against the notion that the only solution to climate change is to continue to bulldoze Vermont into submission, in the hopes of creating a consequence-free Eden.
Because one day, like with the thousand-year-old trees, you’ll look around and see there actually aren’t any more mountains left to bulldoze. That point will mark the beginning of publishing books full of pictures of unmolested mountains.
Such handsome books they will be.
