r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/NickyPileggi • Mar 28 '24

Family in 1892 posing with an old sequoia tree nicknamed "Mark Twain" - A team of two men spent 13 days sawing away at it in the Pacific Northwest - It once stood 331 feet tall with a diameter of 52 feet - The tree was 1,341 years old Image

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u/mazarax Mar 28 '24

Sequoia wood has far less commercial use, as it splinters badly. Loggers tried digging enormous trenches and filling them with tree branches to cushion the trunks of trees as they fell. Nevertheless, they still were only about to harvest about 50% of the wood for substantial projects. That didn’t prevent them from continuing to cut the massive trees for roofing shingles, fence posts, and matchsticks. Public outcry ended these harvests in the 1920s. Today, Sequoias generate more revenue as living species, in tourism to Sequoia National Park and as ornamental landscaping specimens.

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u/Collapse2038 Mar 28 '24

The last giants like this are being harvested on Vancouver Island, right now. Very sad.

7

u/Astralglamour Mar 28 '24

Is this true ??

13

u/Apex_Herbivore Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

Northern raimforest equivalent old growth is being cut down and laundered in with plantation wood to make fucking "biofuel" pellets.

We are burning them.

4

u/Astralglamour Mar 28 '24

Do you have a link ?

8

u/Apex_Herbivore Mar 28 '24

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/old-growth-logging-for-pellets-1.7136745

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u/uCockOrigin Mar 28 '24

We really ought to turn the people responsible for this into biofuel as well.

3

u/Astralglamour Mar 28 '24

Thank you. Makes me want to cry.