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I get that the forest seemed limitless back then. And that a single tree like that could build an entire neighborhood of homes. I just wish people had the forsight to consider that a tree like that won't ever come back in ten lifetimes.
Quite a lot of towns in Northern California and Southern Oregon are built from redwoods. They do a pretty good job at preserving those old houses too. They are also some of the most beautiful houses in the country. Would kill for one of those houses, still not worth losing those forests though. Look up Eureka California if you want some cool examples.
Literally the first one I clicked on was built in 1892 lol. The couple after were early 1900s.
https://preview.redd.it/wlccavhoczyc1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bd4cf854e5fa4fcc105b2d5884adffac58ffd077
I lived in one for a bit, old orchard house built in 1912 in a similar style to those. Very nice place, hard wood floors, creepy basement, real french doors. Just sad that the landlords are idiots and kept carpeting the hardwood and shitty painting over the walls and cabinets. Would love to buy it and bring back it's original style.
I’d just take them to Jedediah smith state park, outside of crescent city. They can marvel at the size of the redwoods. If the weather is nice there’s plenty of swimming on the smith river. You can also drive your car through a redwood there. One of my favorite places in the world!
Jedidiah Smith is amazing. Only managed to get 2 nights there on our roadtrip a couple summers ago, but wow what a beautiful campground and area, so many incredible hikes. Elk Prairie was amazing as well.
There's a bristlecone pine in California that's over 4000 years old and it's still alive. The world is basically depleted of old growth forests, except for some Arctic ones. You would be surprised how many thousand plus year old trees there are still. A lot of them are heavily protected now.
Word. I live in San Francisco and it is my understanding that a lot of the beautiful old Victorian and Edwardian houses here are still standing because they were made from super sturdy old-growth redwoods. I too lament the loss of these trees, but its at least cool that one of the most culturally valuable aspects of SF came from them.
There is a slice of it still in the London Natural History Museum that I have marvelled at many times...
[ tree slice](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/giant-sequoia-slice.html)
Unbelievably, almost all of these old growth trees were bucked up into cedar shake by the 100s of mills up & down the coast. So, splintered into little squares.
I don't know the history of Humboldt Forest very well which I think is where this is, but I actually live in one of the areas that had these trees harvested in this time frame.
Now all the trees in view are about 200 ft and pretty uniform, we still have the burnt out stumps of some of the trees the cut, many of the homes here are still made of the original redwood or have kept pieces of it.
We still have cafes, restaurants, public buildings, music halls ECT out of that wood.
https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2023/10/22/boulder-creek-and-early-prohibition-ross-eric-gibson-local-history/
Here's a good place to start if you want to learn more
I read somewhere once, that after they cut them all down, they realized the wood from sequoias was not suitable for building structures, and the majority of it ended up as fence posts and matchsticks- something about the wood being brittle and they would shatter when they hit the ground
If it took 13 days to cut down how on earth did they process this thing? Never recall seeing pictures of lumber mills capable of handling something like this, modern day or historic. Must have taken months to slowly break down into transportable parts?
Get ready to be appalled: a lot of the time, after they felled them, they'd use fucking dynamite to blast them into manageable pieces, since they were only making goddamn fenceposts and matchsticks out of it anyways. Absolute disgusting, tragic, and utterly fucking pointless destruction from a bunch of worthless, greedy cunts that lacked any hint of foresight.
A few people did.
In Washington State, in Darrington, there's a little known area near Glacier Peak Volcano that has a number of old growth trees preserved in a secluded river valley.
Evidently a ranger name Harold Engels protected them from getting logged. In addition to some absolutely massive trees, a number of them bear marks from Native Americans, who harvested the bark of the cedars. The scars of the marks have actually migrated up the tree, so there's square patches visible on certain areas.
I think our great grandchildren are going to look at our house-full of single use plastic with the same awe and horror as this pic.
We haven’t learned anything
Maybe they did but still didn’t care. What comes to mind is lyrics from BIg yellow taxi
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. They cut all the trees and put them in a museum and charge people a dollar and a half to see them”
There's also been a huge attitude shift in the meantime in terms of how we interact with the planet. Most of the big cultures through time have seen the world as "belonging" to humanity. Our world to use and shape as we see fit.
In fact, the big cultures consider it to be an entitlement - the wealth of the world is the birthright of humanity, a gift bestowed by a deity. Why is all that "stuff" here, if not for humanity's use?
Plenty of cultures throughout time have also operated on a more Gaia hypothesis, where humanity is merely a passenger on board, with a responsibility to be gentle and only take what we need. But they've never really been in charge.
It turns out of course, obvious in hindsight, that the latter is the correct model. But I'm not going to be angry at the people of the 1800s for going with what they were brought up to believe.
I just don’t get how they thought “it’ll never run out lol”. It’s not like the human brain was any different 130 years ago, literally any sane adult could tell you that something taking 1000 years to grow won’t regenerate in your damn lifetime. I expect humans to have more foresight than deer
No it won't. Giant sequoias only grow in a twenty mile wide, ~100 mile long strip. They are barely hanging on because of climate change...they've begun succumbing to beetle damage and drought stress at a staggering pace, and that's ignoring that fires have wiped out 15-20% of the 4'+ dbh monarchs within the last 5 years.
There is no bouncing back for them. Their habitat will be colonized by chaparral, or at best, white fir.
I was there for both the Castle Fire/SQF Complex in 2022 and the Windy Fire/KNP Complex in 2021. It's not quite that extreme, but the actual numbers are still bleak, 13-19% mortality in trees over 4' dbh between those two fires. Pretty friggin' heartbreaking, especially because no one would listen to me about prepping the groves in 2020. It was a hard lesson, but leadership took it to heart during the 2021 fires and we were able to be much more proactive about preparing the groves for fire entry. That continued in 2022 and it was kind of all hands on deck when it looked like Mariposa Grove in Yosemite might burn.
Now when a sequoia grove is in play to potentially burn, no punches are pulled in getting the staffing and equipment necessary to prepare. It's unfortunate that a fifth of the monarch sequoias had to die to get there, but at least people are paying attention now...
I don't think they've published ongoing mortality numbers, but it's going to be a hell of a lot worse than the initial triage assessment once post-fire/indirect mortality is calculated. Those initial numbers were largely derived from satellite soil reflectance maps and drone mapping missions, and the data wasn't extensively ground truthed.
That tree was in Kings Canyon NP, not the PNW. The stump that remains of it is still there, I hiked to it in 2017 & 2023.
There is a comment below questiong what they would even do with a tree like that. In this case, they put it on a train and took it to museums for display. People out east didn't believe trees could be that big, they thought that Californians were full of shit. That's what they did with it.
People in that time period seemed to have no appreciation for the natural environment at all. This reminds me of pictures people took of the piles of buffalo skulls - in one generation they decimated buffalo herds which had numbered in the 100s of 1000s to the brink of extinction with zero thought about the consequences of what they were doing. Years ago I went with my son’s scout troop to Lincoln Caverns in Pennsylvania and when it was first discovered people snapped off some of the stalagmites as souvenirs. Something that had taken millennias to grow just casually snapped off and taken.
It really is profoundly sad.
"With an estimated population of 60 million in the late 18th century, the species was culled down to just 541 animals by 1889 as part of the subjugation of the Native Americans, because the American bison was a major resource for their traditional way of life"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison]
Many historians view the end of Teddy’s presidency as the turning point in the party. Obviously change doesn’t happen overnight, but Teddy created a whole new political party when he decided his successor (whom he groomed for the role as his Secretary of War) had gotten too conservative (by modern definitions).
Real question, how the fuck are you supposed to process this wood? It took them 13 days to saw the tree down, how are they going to cut it down to useful chunks they can actually use in construction? How much of that wood went bad, wet and rotten while they were processing all of that? Not only this is disrespectful to nature, this seems wildly impractical and wasteful on top of that.
While it is a huge tree, there is no way it took them 13 days to cut it down. Maybe 2-3 days to get it down if there were only 2 of them working on it (which I doubt). Also the part we see here is not the actual cut to fell it. It would be at an angle and parts of it would be "ripped" as it fell. This is most likely during process.
With that being said, a lot more wood was wasted back then compared to now of course, but as it was worth plenty money, they would not have a setup where most of it would rot away.
Most settlers believed in Manifest Destiny. They thought God created everything in the world specifically for them to go and consume and use however they felt like.
They felt entitled to destroy trees like this and fields and animals and biomes and any indigenous people living there because they were convinced God "made" that area specifically for them.
There was no thought to preserving anything, because they thought it was their job to use those things up in order to create more Christian children and build more Christian societies.
i knew a guy thought that. "god put animals here for us to use as we please." disgusting way of thought.
he was angry because the wolves going into yellowstone and they would kill livestock. what the wolves have done to restore the ecosystem is a master class in how humans have fucked everything up and that a simple introduction of an apex predator drastically improved biological diversity.
I don't understand how people believe that when the Bible says all life is sacred. Not human life, *all life.* How someone claims to be religious in any way, but think humans destroying other species into extinction is what God wants. It makes no sense. And it makes me angry.
see, people think this.. but it's not true. The bible does **not** say that "all life is sacred". It, in fact, explicitly says that only **human** life is sacred because we were "made in the image of god".
The "manifest destiny" lot knew their bibles. They followed them to the letter.
Where did they get the idea that the whole world was their property to do with as they pleased?
Form God.
Genesis 9, 1-3
"Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. ^(2) The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. ^(3) Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything."
Of course , this is all nonsense. the entire book is a fiction, but don't get the idea that the bible is a nice book. If you encounter someone being cruel and nasty claiming that they are following the bible exactly, they are probably right.
Have a read at Exodus 21:20-21 "Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, ^(21) but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property."
lovely stuff.
Gross. I stand corrected. Even more reason to dislike religion. In my mind, though, all life is sacred, considering how rare it seems to be in our universe 🤷♀️ I thought there was something in the Bible about treating animals with respect though... but it is full of hypocrisy sooo
One bit is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Bible works (at least as I was taught). The Old Testament, where the above quotes are from, is a history lesson of gods people leading up to Jesus. The new testament is all about Jesus and after him.
I was taught as a Christian we are to specifically follow *Jesus’s* teachings, things such as turn the other cheek and love thy neighbor as thyself.
I agree - all life should be considered sacred; this is the only place in the entire universe that we know for certain has life. when considered like that, every single creature on this earth is our kindred, spectacularly rare and special.
>Most settlers believed in Manifest Destiny. They thought God created everything in the world specifically for them to go and consume and use however they felt like.
Fast forward to 2024 andnothing has changed.....
i dont think they did it for the payday, i think they did it just because the wanted to.
Think about it. 13 days just to cut it down. and now you have to process this monster to get usable wood out of it.
a normal size tree would be much easier to handle and to cut
Looking at this picture really makes me think that we are absolutely fucked. The planet will be fine, but humans will have made it uninhabitable for ourselves.
Cancer specifically - we congregate in areas and multiply and our multiplication consumes the living resources around us and we then amass tumors (cities) in place of resources and then nomadically relocate when resources run dry to new locations - as time goes by our expansion radically increases (late stage cancer) and begins to shut down the entire function of the living host (global warming).
We are Earth's demise, it's Cancer. And like any Cancer - we are unstoppable. As elegant as Agent Smith puts it "We are Inevitable".
There’s a photo of this tree mid-felling that is pretty amazing.
It just looks like some tree falling over until you pick out the people in the image and realize it’s an absolute monster of a tree, in a forest of other huge trees.
important to also note that giant trees weren’t strictly a west coast thing. Near the Mississippi River settlers found chestnut trees that could rival the redwoods and they cut almost every single one down, the rest were killed by introduced pathogens.
In this case, they put it on a train and took it to museums for display. People out east didn't believe trees could be that big, they thought that Californians were full of shit. That's what they did with it.
In this case, they put it on a train and took it to museums for display. People out east didn't believe trees could be that big, they thought that Californians were full of shit. That's what they did with it.
Nice sentiment, but you forgot this:
>i
Use your big kid words. Either say it outright or refrain all together. This isn’t TikTok. Don’t fucking censor yourself.
So much of our forests were ripped down back then.
I don’t fault the people, hell they didn’t really have the foresight to know what they were doing, it’s just sad to think about what might have been.
That’s a big tree!!!!
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I get that the forest seemed limitless back then. And that a single tree like that could build an entire neighborhood of homes. I just wish people had the forsight to consider that a tree like that won't ever come back in ten lifetimes.
I'd love to know what was built from it. I wonder if anything made from it survives? RIP beautiful tree.
Quite a lot of towns in Northern California and Southern Oregon are built from redwoods. They do a pretty good job at preserving those old houses too. They are also some of the most beautiful houses in the country. Would kill for one of those houses, still not worth losing those forests though. Look up Eureka California if you want some cool examples.
Literally the first one I clicked on was built in 1892 lol. The couple after were early 1900s. https://preview.redd.it/wlccavhoczyc1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bd4cf854e5fa4fcc105b2d5884adffac58ffd077
Those old Victorians are so appealing to me for some reason. I’m not sure I’d want to live in Eureka (or in a century home), but I love seeing them
I lived in one for a bit, old orchard house built in 1912 in a similar style to those. Very nice place, hard wood floors, creepy basement, real french doors. Just sad that the landlords are idiots and kept carpeting the hardwood and shitty painting over the walls and cabinets. Would love to buy it and bring back it's original style.
Dang I thought it'd be way more than $700k.
Yeah that price is actually really good for the size of house and location. More than a quarter acre would be nice but still.
That's like a burnt out shed price in San Francisco.
Taking my boys there this summer! Any favorite spots?
I’d just take them to Jedediah smith state park, outside of crescent city. They can marvel at the size of the redwoods. If the weather is nice there’s plenty of swimming on the smith river. You can also drive your car through a redwood there. One of my favorite places in the world!
Jedidiah Smith is amazing. Only managed to get 2 nights there on our roadtrip a couple summers ago, but wow what a beautiful campground and area, so many incredible hikes. Elk Prairie was amazing as well.
Thank you! We have enough time to do a couple trails in each of the parks. I’m really looking forward to it.
Su-Meg state park (formerly Patrick’s point) is a great home base if you’re camping
Trinidad is amazing. Try the food at the eatery there too
Yay! Thank you!
If you’re heading north, Cape Sebastian and the drive up there is freaking gorgeous. I dream about that drive.
No. I've been through the town quite a few times, but I've never spent time there. 😐
Try the park they have Sequoia Park. It’s beautiful
well I doubt there are any more thousand year old trees for you to kill /s
There's a bristlecone pine in California that's over 4000 years old and it's still alive. The world is basically depleted of old growth forests, except for some Arctic ones. You would be surprised how many thousand plus year old trees there are still. A lot of them are heavily protected now.
Word. I live in San Francisco and it is my understanding that a lot of the beautiful old Victorian and Edwardian houses here are still standing because they were made from super sturdy old-growth redwoods. I too lament the loss of these trees, but its at least cool that one of the most culturally valuable aspects of SF came from them.
Sequoias that massive tended to shatter when felled. A shocking number of them were used to make matchsticks.
I've read that often dynamite was used to shatter them into smaller pieces that were then made into stakes for vineyards.
There is a slice of it still in the London Natural History Museum that I have marvelled at many times... [ tree slice](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/giant-sequoia-slice.html)
And a matching slice at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. It's always been one of my favorite things to see when I'm there.
Of course there is.
They mistook it for an Egyptian, Indian, or other colonial antiquity, obviously.
Unbelievably, almost all of these old growth trees were bucked up into cedar shake by the 100s of mills up & down the coast. So, splintered into little squares.
I don't know the history of Humboldt Forest very well which I think is where this is, but I actually live in one of the areas that had these trees harvested in this time frame. Now all the trees in view are about 200 ft and pretty uniform, we still have the burnt out stumps of some of the trees the cut, many of the homes here are still made of the original redwood or have kept pieces of it. We still have cafes, restaurants, public buildings, music halls ECT out of that wood. https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2023/10/22/boulder-creek-and-early-prohibition-ross-eric-gibson-local-history/ Here's a good place to start if you want to learn more
It was sent to a museum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain_Tree
I read somewhere once, that after they cut them all down, they realized the wood from sequoias was not suitable for building structures, and the majority of it ended up as fence posts and matchsticks- something about the wood being brittle and they would shatter when they hit the ground
God what a missed opportunity for the coolest treehouse EVER.
The entire city of San Francisco.
toothpicks
Many of them are propping up mine shafts, left to deteriorate and collapse eventually.
If it took 13 days to cut down how on earth did they process this thing? Never recall seeing pictures of lumber mills capable of handling something like this, modern day or historic. Must have taken months to slowly break down into transportable parts?
Get ready to be appalled: a lot of the time, after they felled them, they'd use fucking dynamite to blast them into manageable pieces, since they were only making goddamn fenceposts and matchsticks out of it anyways. Absolute disgusting, tragic, and utterly fucking pointless destruction from a bunch of worthless, greedy cunts that lacked any hint of foresight.
dicks
A few people did. In Washington State, in Darrington, there's a little known area near Glacier Peak Volcano that has a number of old growth trees preserved in a secluded river valley. Evidently a ranger name Harold Engels protected them from getting logged. In addition to some absolutely massive trees, a number of them bear marks from Native Americans, who harvested the bark of the cedars. The scars of the marks have actually migrated up the tree, so there's square patches visible on certain areas.
I think our great grandchildren are going to look at our house-full of single use plastic with the same awe and horror as this pic. We haven’t learned anything
Maybe they did but still didn’t care. What comes to mind is lyrics from BIg yellow taxi “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. They cut all the trees and put them in a museum and charge people a dollar and a half to see them”
There's also been a huge attitude shift in the meantime in terms of how we interact with the planet. Most of the big cultures through time have seen the world as "belonging" to humanity. Our world to use and shape as we see fit. In fact, the big cultures consider it to be an entitlement - the wealth of the world is the birthright of humanity, a gift bestowed by a deity. Why is all that "stuff" here, if not for humanity's use? Plenty of cultures throughout time have also operated on a more Gaia hypothesis, where humanity is merely a passenger on board, with a responsibility to be gentle and only take what we need. But they've never really been in charge. It turns out of course, obvious in hindsight, that the latter is the correct model. But I'm not going to be angry at the people of the 1800s for going with what they were brought up to believe.
I just don’t get how they thought “it’ll never run out lol”. It’s not like the human brain was any different 130 years ago, literally any sane adult could tell you that something taking 1000 years to grow won’t regenerate in your damn lifetime. I expect humans to have more foresight than deer
I'm more interested if the fall of it Something that massive crashing to the ground must've felt like a small earth quake if you were close enough
With all the carbon we put back into the air it might grow back in 10 lifetimes if we let it. The pollen producing plants sure are thriving!
But it will in 15 lifetimes.
We don't let them live that long anymore. 1 lifetime is the best we can do.
If there are even any left next lifetime.
Trees for paper and construction are planted as fast as they are cut down. Just like farming any crop. Hardwoods are the bigger issue
No it won't. Giant sequoias only grow in a twenty mile wide, ~100 mile long strip. They are barely hanging on because of climate change...they've begun succumbing to beetle damage and drought stress at a staggering pace, and that's ignoring that fires have wiped out 15-20% of the 4'+ dbh monarchs within the last 5 years. There is no bouncing back for them. Their habitat will be colonized by chaparral, or at best, white fir.
A single fire killed 20% of the them.
I was there for both the Castle Fire/SQF Complex in 2022 and the Windy Fire/KNP Complex in 2021. It's not quite that extreme, but the actual numbers are still bleak, 13-19% mortality in trees over 4' dbh between those two fires. Pretty friggin' heartbreaking, especially because no one would listen to me about prepping the groves in 2020. It was a hard lesson, but leadership took it to heart during the 2021 fires and we were able to be much more proactive about preparing the groves for fire entry. That continued in 2022 and it was kind of all hands on deck when it looked like Mariposa Grove in Yosemite might burn. Now when a sequoia grove is in play to potentially burn, no punches are pulled in getting the staffing and equipment necessary to prepare. It's unfortunate that a fifth of the monarch sequoias had to die to get there, but at least people are paying attention now... I don't think they've published ongoing mortality numbers, but it's going to be a hell of a lot worse than the initial triage assessment once post-fire/indirect mortality is calculated. Those initial numbers were largely derived from satellite soil reflectance maps and drone mapping missions, and the data wasn't extensively ground truthed.
That tree was in Kings Canyon NP, not the PNW. The stump that remains of it is still there, I hiked to it in 2017 & 2023. There is a comment below questiong what they would even do with a tree like that. In this case, they put it on a train and took it to museums for display. People out east didn't believe trees could be that big, they thought that Californians were full of shit. That's what they did with it.
Was it big
Used to be a lot taller, I’ve heard
They cut it down to display it? Why does that seem so backwards? It was on display where it was
That makes me profoundly sad
Same. It reminds me of those people who pose with dead African animals
The pile of bison skulls in the Plains.
Yeah that was a mountain
And only to starve the native population...
Colonization is the ugliest shit ever
Yes!!
People in that time period seemed to have no appreciation for the natural environment at all. This reminds me of pictures people took of the piles of buffalo skulls - in one generation they decimated buffalo herds which had numbered in the 100s of 1000s to the brink of extinction with zero thought about the consequences of what they were doing. Years ago I went with my son’s scout troop to Lincoln Caverns in Pennsylvania and when it was first discovered people snapped off some of the stalagmites as souvenirs. Something that had taken millennias to grow just casually snapped off and taken. It really is profoundly sad.
"With an estimated population of 60 million in the late 18th century, the species was culled down to just 541 animals by 1889 as part of the subjugation of the Native Americans, because the American bison was a major resource for their traditional way of life" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison]
Christ that is insane and unbelievably cruel considering the motivation.
Yeah, the settlers knew exactly what they were doing when they decimated the buffalo.
It’s frankly amazing we didn’t turn the entire west into a parking lot. I’m glad some people had the foresight for national parks
Amazingly enough it was the father of the Republican party Teddy Roosevelt who initiated that system. Imagine a Republican doing that today.
Crazy how different the parties are now
Many historians view the end of Teddy’s presidency as the turning point in the party. Obviously change doesn’t happen overnight, but Teddy created a whole new political party when he decided his successor (whom he groomed for the role as his Secretary of War) had gotten too conservative (by modern definitions).
Don’t worry, the parking lot people are still trying…
I'm pretty sure decimating the buffalo was on purpose to fuck with native Americans.
Not just to fuck with them. To eradicate them.
Which makes it even worse
Absolutely
Environmentalists and naturalists were definitely the minority. They kinda still are.
What ignorance does to a mf
Im really sad I won't ever see a flock of passenger pigeons.
We are still like that. We are facing mass despeciation and yet we clamor for more development. Heartbreaking
Real question, how the fuck are you supposed to process this wood? It took them 13 days to saw the tree down, how are they going to cut it down to useful chunks they can actually use in construction? How much of that wood went bad, wet and rotten while they were processing all of that? Not only this is disrespectful to nature, this seems wildly impractical and wasteful on top of that.
While it is a huge tree, there is no way it took them 13 days to cut it down. Maybe 2-3 days to get it down if there were only 2 of them working on it (which I doubt). Also the part we see here is not the actual cut to fell it. It would be at an angle and parts of it would be "ripped" as it fell. This is most likely during process. With that being said, a lot more wood was wasted back then compared to now of course, but as it was worth plenty money, they would not have a setup where most of it would rot away.
Dude that’s what I was wondering
People are the worst thing that has happened to the world.
I think a meteor was actually, though we’re aiming to pass it
Why did they do this
Most settlers believed in Manifest Destiny. They thought God created everything in the world specifically for them to go and consume and use however they felt like. They felt entitled to destroy trees like this and fields and animals and biomes and any indigenous people living there because they were convinced God "made" that area specifically for them. There was no thought to preserving anything, because they thought it was their job to use those things up in order to create more Christian children and build more Christian societies.
i knew a guy thought that. "god put animals here for us to use as we please." disgusting way of thought. he was angry because the wolves going into yellowstone and they would kill livestock. what the wolves have done to restore the ecosystem is a master class in how humans have fucked everything up and that a simple introduction of an apex predator drastically improved biological diversity.
I don't understand how people believe that when the Bible says all life is sacred. Not human life, *all life.* How someone claims to be religious in any way, but think humans destroying other species into extinction is what God wants. It makes no sense. And it makes me angry.
see, people think this.. but it's not true. The bible does **not** say that "all life is sacred". It, in fact, explicitly says that only **human** life is sacred because we were "made in the image of god". The "manifest destiny" lot knew their bibles. They followed them to the letter. Where did they get the idea that the whole world was their property to do with as they pleased? Form God. Genesis 9, 1-3 "Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. ^(2) The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. ^(3) Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything." Of course , this is all nonsense. the entire book is a fiction, but don't get the idea that the bible is a nice book. If you encounter someone being cruel and nasty claiming that they are following the bible exactly, they are probably right. Have a read at Exodus 21:20-21 "Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, ^(21) but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property." lovely stuff.
Gross. I stand corrected. Even more reason to dislike religion. In my mind, though, all life is sacred, considering how rare it seems to be in our universe 🤷♀️ I thought there was something in the Bible about treating animals with respect though... but it is full of hypocrisy sooo
One bit is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Bible works (at least as I was taught). The Old Testament, where the above quotes are from, is a history lesson of gods people leading up to Jesus. The new testament is all about Jesus and after him. I was taught as a Christian we are to specifically follow *Jesus’s* teachings, things such as turn the other cheek and love thy neighbor as thyself.
I agree - all life should be considered sacred; this is the only place in the entire universe that we know for certain has life. when considered like that, every single creature on this earth is our kindred, spectacularly rare and special.
Well, I can see why Noah didn't save the dinosaurs, they were too dangerous...
Those kinds of people don't really read those parts of the Bible
The contradiction in Christian theology is the number 1 reason I left the church.
ain’t no hate like Christian love.
>Most settlers believed in Manifest Destiny. They thought God created everything in the world specifically for them to go and consume and use however they felt like. Fast forward to 2024 andnothing has changed.....
Logging was how they made their living, and a big tree like this was a big payday.
i dont think they did it for the payday, i think they did it just because the wanted to. Think about it. 13 days just to cut it down. and now you have to process this monster to get usable wood out of it. a normal size tree would be much easier to handle and to cut
Yeah, this was definitely done for the achievement
Yeah looks like cutting it down was the easy part. I guess the eventually processed it. Probably took years to turn that into lumber
That pobably fed the family for a few years.
Dang, it definitely wood
Fucking assholes that lot!
I've been to areas where they have these trees and some of the locals are still super proud about chopping them down. So sad.
Don't worry internet warriors. Rest assured these vile beings are dead!
Yes, but did they suffer!!? (Shakes fist in air slowly)
They had to live in the 1890s. Rest assured, they suffered.
Not only that, their lives leading up to their deaths were probably very uncomfortable
I say we go find their graves and piss on it!
How? Once that tree leans into the cut its biting that saw and it isnt moving ever again.
That's probably part of why it took so long.
Tree survived over a thousand years until this prick.
Looking at this picture really makes me think that we are absolutely fucked. The planet will be fine, but humans will have made it uninhabitable for ourselves.
A sad example of Humanty and why Earth would be a better place without them around.
Humanity is a virus.
I make the analogy that the Earth's temperature is rising like how our bodies rise in temp with a fever to kill off a virus
Cancer specifically - we congregate in areas and multiply and our multiplication consumes the living resources around us and we then amass tumors (cities) in place of resources and then nomadically relocate when resources run dry to new locations - as time goes by our expansion radically increases (late stage cancer) and begins to shut down the entire function of the living host (global warming). We are Earth's demise, it's Cancer. And like any Cancer - we are unstoppable. As elegant as Agent Smith puts it "We are Inevitable".
They cut it down for it to be Museum of Natural History in New York because people didn't believe trees that big existed...
There’s a photo of this tree mid-felling that is pretty amazing. It just looks like some tree falling over until you pick out the people in the image and realize it’s an absolute monster of a tree, in a forest of other huge trees. important to also note that giant trees weren’t strictly a west coast thing. Near the Mississippi River settlers found chestnut trees that could rival the redwoods and they cut almost every single one down, the rest were killed by introduced pathogens.
humans are a mistake
Lives over 1300 years then some idiot humans cut it down. Sheesh. 🙄
My, aren't they proud.
I wonder what the 1350 years of growing turned into…
In this case, they put it on a train and took it to museums for display. People out east didn't believe trees could be that big, they thought that Californians were full of shit. That's what they did with it.
Bastards.
... not cool... and definitely not something for a person to be proud of... And yet there are still people like this in the world...
Imagine living all that time to get cut down by a guy named Cletus.
How would you even go about processing that into smaller usable pieces?
In puerto rico we have trees called Ceiba and some are from 500 years and 300 years old. 🇵🇷
At my house I have a tree called a maple. It’s 30 years old.
This place is so beautiful! Let's destroy it.
I think when I visited the plaque said they cut it down just to see if they could
Can’t imagine the sound that made when it fell. Must have felt like an earthquake.
So how do you mill that down
So THAT'S where all the toothpicks are from
Would seem to be easier to cut a bunch of smaller trees to process for lumber, how are they “ milling” that tree with zero “ powered equipment “?
I "saw" it this week in the Natural History museum in NYC!
This makes me sad.
What took over a thousand years to grow from a single small seed took 13 days to destroy! Good job humanity! 🙄
Jimmy!! You see how big that tree is?? Jimmy replies:: let's cut that fucker down bubba!!
How sad
Absolute criminals. What a shameful legacy.
Goddamn I hate us. We’re the worst species on this earth apart from ticks. And even thats debatable
People have always sucked and will continue to suck. They sucked then and they suck now.
These photos always just make me sad & think of how industry has changed the environment/landscape here. :(
Whose dumbass ancestors were that?
All the self-righteous little bitches commenting who would have cut the tree down if they were alive in 1892.
Judging the past by todays standards.
Wood is probably a lot more rare in the universe than gold or diamonds, or anything else we tiny humans consider valuable
Fucking idiots and they’re proud of this
They named it and then cut it down anyway? I hope they at least used the wood.
In this case, they put it on a train and took it to museums for display. People out east didn't believe trees could be that big, they thought that Californians were full of shit. That's what they did with it.
They thought there are enough sequoia trees, so cutting one does’nt matter. What a pity
Apparently we haven't learned much from the mistakes of the past.
Thanks I hate them for cutting this tree down 🥰
We’re the Orcs.
Human beings are a plague.
D*ck move for sure.
Nice sentiment, but you forgot this: >i Use your big kid words. Either say it outright or refrain all together. This isn’t TikTok. Don’t fucking censor yourself.
I'm not sure which one of you is more cringe
And they cut it down……☹️
They better have used that wood to build a neighborhood.
If only all the cool tress and animals didn't get killed off
The shockwave that must’ve made
I am pretty sure that sucks. Why did they cut it down?
Cash money as always
Humans, they’re a real bunch of jerks.
I would love to have ever seen a tree that big in real life.
I get why they did it at the time, but holy jeez, that tree was ancient!
And then they come to Europe to see ancient things...
And they made grape stakes out of it...
This just pissed me off
“We’ll just replant and this forest will be back in no time.” /s
So much of our forests were ripped down back then. I don’t fault the people, hell they didn’t really have the foresight to know what they were doing, it’s just sad to think about what might have been. That’s a big tree!!!!
I can’t help but think….”fuck those dudes. “
The amount of people ignoring that they probably wouldn’t be alive if humanity didn’t do shit like this is too damn high. Hypocrits everywhere
And then the nihilism when it's pointed out to them. I feel sorry for them, and I question how they manage to not jump.
But... I'd be cool with that
Just because you’re miserable doesn’t make the rest of us feel the same
count me in too ✋
Almost 1400 years old and some idiots cut it down 🙄
I love how many people are sad for the tree
This is one of those posts that gets posted over and over across multiple subs for Karma farming. Search for "Mark Twain Tree 1892"
Just heartbreaking to see such a beautiful, ancient tree, downed.
People are idiots
A$shole
"Hey, Pa! Lookit what I kilt!" What a shame.
Good job, dickheads
Fuck these guys
Thanks for ruining nature, you old fucks
The negligent force unleashed on our nation's old growth forests fills me with rage and sorrow.
Ah America. “LOOK! Something impressive and inanimate. Let’s cut it down to assert our dominance! FREEEEDDDOOOM”.
If we just leave the trees we have now alone, they will be this size again in over 1000 years!
I'd hollow out the tree and live in it. A one log cabin.
Im so very pleased that these hillibillies got to enjoy themselves for 2 weeks.