Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, and I want to talk about trees: the thousand-year-old trees that push nearly three hundred feet in the air and stand in an imposing cluster in Sequoia National Park. Five of the largest living trees grow here. And the most massive living thing on earth exists in the grove, the giant General Sherman. The little sapling that would become the General started growing around the time Homer is said to have started composing The Odyssey, nearly 3,000 years ago.
I first saw the grove of the Giant Forest at dusk, after all the other tourists had left. Orange, dusty light filtered through limbs the width of most normal trees, and shadows filled the deep, red, wrinkled bark. The air still smelled of sun-baked conifer needles from the July afternoon. My wife and I stood in silence looking up at these amazing living things that had survived millennia. Even as darkness settled in the grove, and the trees slipped into the night, it was hard to leave.
It's hard to believe these awe-inspiring giants easily could have been felled for timber or simply to make way for grazing land. One giant sequoia was cut down simply to make a rather stupid-looking house from its stump to amaze gawkers at the Chicago World's Fair, perhaps after taking a ride on world's first Ferris Wheel.
John Muir, who would have celebrated his 182nd birthday yesterday on April 21, worked relentlessly to preserve the massive trees he encountered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. He knew they were vulnerable to the greed of lumber companies who looked at these enormous trees and saw only potential money. As Muir said, "Nothing dollarable is safe," and these dense stands of potential kitchen tables and floorboards and firewood were certainly dollarable. His beloved Yosemite Valley was preserved primarily because Congress was persuaded that the steep glacially carved valley walls and gushing waterfalls were "worthless" - at least their worth was not easily dollared. Senator John Conness of California introduced the bill to create Yosemite National Park by reassuring his fellow senators "that this bill proposes to make a grant of certain premises located in the Sierra Nevada mountains, in the State of California, that are for all public purposes worthless." Sadly, the clear monetized worth of the sequoias made them vulnerable.
Here, loggers stand proudly alongside an ancient giant. It took centuries, maybe millennia, for this sequoia to grow and an afternoon to topple.
The US Army was in charge of protecting the parks, and of course the trees living in them. In the late 1800s, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada were still remote and mostly inaccessible, and tree poaching on public lands was profitable then as it is now. The spring of 1903, Colonel Charles Young received orders to take his troops from San Francisco to the thirteen-year-old Sequoia National Park becoming the first African-American superintendent of a national park. Through the summer, he oversaw construction of a road to the Giant Forest and beyond to Moro Rock, the same road we took that first dusk encounter with the trees. And on our way out of the park, the same road we idled on for hours, stuck in summer road construction traffic.
Colonel Young's work was admirable, and helped open the park to what would become over a million visitors each year. They approach the Giant Forest, not on horseback like Colonel Young, but in a car, belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Collectively, we have released so much carbon dioxide into the air, that these giants, survivors for thousands of years, are beginning to die.
Since I last visited, at least twenty-eight died. While there are probably a number of coalescing reasons, at the heart is climate change and the unprecedented burden we are thrusting upon the planet and the life striving to flourish on it.
I watched the award-winning author of The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert, in a streamed Seattle Arts and Lectures event for the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day. She warned from the beginning that she did not plan to end with hope, but she did say that at the very least, this moment in time shows that we, collectively and across the globe, can choose to live differently. And the choices we have made individually to travel less, eat less, buy less have resulted in noticeable change. What is the worth of a crystal clear view of the Cascades, of a child inhaling fewer particulates in Delhi, of blue skies in Beijing, of a three thousand-year-old tree living another five hundred years beyond our own death? Are they worth less (worthless?) because they aren't dollarable?
Two years before his death, reflecting on the worth of Yosemite Valley, Muir said, "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike."
We need places where nature may heal. Nature can make us feel more whole in fractured times. The green spaces around our home have been essential for my family. We have watched the trees leaf and birds nest and flowers bloom, all reminding us of the rhythms that have not been interrupted by the pandemic. We also need places where nature can heal from us. The natural world is resilient, but we humans are relentless. This seems like an opportunity for a virtuous cycle of healing, if we let it be.
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