Nearly immortal

Zach St. George from Anchorage, Alaska, who studied at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, is currently wandering without aim through Europe, has written for High Country News, The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, and other publications, has a Guernica article about the redwoods:

In the fall of 1891, Samuel David Dill wrote a letter to his boss: “I saw Mr. Moore. He says he will go right to work and cut the specimen and have it hauled out,” he wrote. “He will have to get a saw made to order about 23 feet long.” In the accompanying photo the tree hangs at a fifty-degree angle, felled but still falling. The land around it is mostly cleared already, just a couple other giants remaining in the coppiced wood. Two men, employees of the lumber barons Austin D. Moore and Hiram T. Smith, stand beside the stump, watching eight days of hard work come crashing down.
Dill was a collector for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The Mark Twain Tree (photo, top; stump, photo, bottom), as that giant sequoia was known, “was of magnificent proportions, one of the most perfect trees in the grove,” wrote George H. Sherwood in a 1902 piece for the museum, “symmetrical, fully three hundred feet tall, and entirely free of limbs for nearly two hundred feet.” Moore and Smith donated the tree, and the museum covered the cost of labor and transport. Once they’d felled the sequoia, lumberjacks cut a four-foot-thick section of its trunk, then split it into pieces. They loaded the pieces onto wagons to get them down from the Sierra Nevadas, then put them on train cars for the journey cross-country.
Another segment of the tree was eventually sent to the Natural History Museum in London, England, where it sits like an altarpiece at the top of a flight of stairs at one end of the main hall. The reassembled section is an almost perfect circle more than sixteen feet across, measured inside the foot-thick bark. Visitors stand far back, trying to get a full view, or move in close to peer over the railing at its close-packed rings. The tree is annotated in small white letters matching dates and events to the years of its life— 1850: Darwin publishes The Origin of Species; 1500: Leonardo da Vinci invents flying machine; 1000: Leif Ericsson reaches North America; 600: Start of Islam; 557: the sequoia is a seedling. The tree was 1,341 years old when it was felled, which, as Dr. Karen Wonders has noted in a piece on logging big trees, makes it a contemporary of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian.

There's a lot more; read it here...

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