Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Our Wednesday Pick...Giant Tree Hunting.





This film focusses on the old growth trees of Edinburgh Mountain near Port Renfrew on southwestern Vancouver Island.

Unfortunately, since the video was made a portion of the area has been clear-cut.

The folks at the Ancient Forest Alliance are trying to engage us all to help stop that kind of thing.

As the film points out, at least one of the reasons is economic.



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3 comments:

North Van's Grumps said...

Scotty on Denman said in 2018...
We were developing some timber on private land on an island near Bella Bella. Part of the job was to recognize what used to be called "Indian Trees"---now called "Culturally Modified Trees" or CMTs --- western red cedar trees, usually still alive, from which planks or bark were periodically harvested. For us it affected road location and cutting boundaries: if a CMT was pre-1864, we had to stay 300 metres away from it, and post-1864 only 100 metres away. We'd note the CMTs on the map and give it to a team of ethno-archaeologists to determine the date of "modification", that is, the removal of bark or planks, and often holes burned into the bole to test for soundness---these were being considered for canoes. We had occasion to wonder why exactly we were developing timber in an area where you literally couldn't find a spot where at least one CMT wasn't visible.

It occurred to me one day, high up on a mountain, eating lunch beside a skinny, twisted red cedar, that the pattern of CMT distribution illustrated proprietorial working of the forest: why would anybody come all the way up here, maybe a kilometre of steep, broken ground to the water, to strike a plank off a shitty little pecker-pole cedar when there were (and still are) plenty of much better candidates down by the water's edge? The answer is because the trees down by the water were owned by somebody else; the poor guy who had to crawl all the way up there to get a difficult, twisted plank wasn't allowed to harvest lower down---it didn't belong to him and he didn't have permission from the owner(s). .................... Snip

John's Aghast said...

And thereby starts the growth of entitlement! Ask Jimmy Patterson how that works!

Scotty on Denman said...

I can’t forget the American Champion Tree field inspector who’d been called to verify what somebody thought was the biggest Sitka spruce tree ever—in Oregon, I think. After careful measurement it turned out the big spruce, though very big, was not the biggest ever recorded. Disappointed, the field crew packed up their equipment and were ready to hike back out when somebody just happened to notice what they must’ve thought was a big-leaf maple close by was actually a vine maple—four feet in diameter!—easily the biggest vine maple ever recorded.

I once told a compass-man about my observation that trees sometimes try to disguise themselves as other species—such as a grand fir anomalously sporting heavily fissured bark like the Douglas firs nearby. Not really a theory (because I have no clue as to why this happens here and there) but something the compass-man told me he never noticed before I’d mentioned it—and now can’t stop seeing examples wherever he goes. This over many, many years.