Sunday, September 6, 2015

An Arboreal Barometer

Some of them are mute witnesses to over three thousand years of history. Towering and majestic, some as tall as the Statue of Liberty, the giant sequoia, native to a limited area of the western Sierra Nevada, California, is now under severe stress due to California's deep and protracted drought.

As the following report makes clear, although they have withstood millennia of insect infestations and droughts and will likely survive this current crisis, they are being challenged in ways that perhaps they have never been in their long history. And while they may continue to stand, lesser trees around them are dying at unprecedented rates. Just one more reminder of what we continue to do to the earth by our collective indifference to climate change.

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