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Opinion: When a giant sequoia falls in the forest

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Now we know that when a tree, a really big tree, falls in the forest, it creates a lot of noise. At least, noise among the people who debate what to do with it, as people are with a 1,500-year-old tree that recently fell across the Trail of 100 Giants in the Sierra Nevada.

Good. Probably just 50 years ago -- about 3% of this tree’s life span -- few people would have known or cared. Now, we’re a much smarter society when it comes to the value of old-growth trees. We’re more likely to cherish them for values that go beyond what we can build with them when we cut them down.

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The question is whether we’re smart enough to do the simplest thing -- leave the tree alone, rerouting the trail around it and providing informational signs about the amazing transformations going on in, under and around the tree. Fallen trees have a life beyond death, as it happens, as habitat for birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, mushrooms. They release nutrients back into the soil. It’s a whole circle-of-life thing.

We’ve come a long way, I hope, from the days when we thought it was cute to cut a tunnel for cars or carriages through living giant sequoias. While visitors gasp at the tree’s now-horizontal heft, they have a chance to learn about forest ecology on a mammoth scale. Nature isn’t kind, even to a living thing as seemingly regal as a tree that was 1,000 years old up on its mountain back when the Renaissance began. But it does inspire awe.

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--Karin Klein

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