The oldest living tree tells all

"In 1964, a geologist in the Nevada wilderness discovered the oldest living thing on earth, after he killed it." A terrific opening sentence to Hunter Oatman-Stanford's story in Collector's Weekly about bristlecone pine trees, which can live for thousands of years.

By the time of Currey’s survey, trees were typically dated using core samples taken with a hollow threaded bore screwed into a tree’s trunk. No larger than a soda straw, these cores then received surface preparations in a lab to make them easier to read under a microscope. While taking core samples from the Prometheus tree, which Currey labeled WPN-114, his boring bit snapped in the bristlecone’s dense wood. After requesting assistance from the Forest Service, a team was sent to fell the tree using chainsaws. Only days later, when Currey individually counted each of the tree’s rings, did he realize the gravity of his act.

(Image: Inyo Bristlecone Signature Tree, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from usfsregion5's photostream)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Gabriel Morgan

Christ. What. An. Asshole.
- acerplatanoides
  
  Older than Christ. What an asshole.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001443259034 David Davion
  
  Somehow, I don’t find this story quite as bad as this other one here…
  http://gizmodo.com/5889581/meth-addict-accidentally-burns-down-worlds-fifth+oldest-tree
  - Frank Lee Scarlett
    
    I was just about to link to this article. “I needed a fire to see my meth better, so I burned down the 5th oldest tree in the world. And captured the fire on my phone.”
    
    Yeah. That, I think, qualifies her for the title of Huge MF’ing Asshole.
mynonymouse

If you think the guy is an asshole you’ve never been a journeyman in any difficult discipline. It’s a terrible mistake, and one that Currey feels terrible about. I recommend listening to the Radiolab episode where they cover this.
http://www.radiolab.org/2010/jun/28/
- acerplatanoides
  
  If you think it labels his person, rather than his action, that’s on you. He did something that a true asshole would also do. If he learned from it doesn’t mean nothing was damaged irreparably.
  - mynonymouse
    
    If one is trying to label an action, then perhaps it is better to use phrases such as, “what a shitty thing to do” or “what an idiotic act” or even, if you want to label him, and not his action, “what an idiot”. Calling him an asshole seems to totally misread who he is. If reading the comment in question as directed at his person is on me, I’ll take that. I am proud to be capable of parsing grammar.
    - acerplatanoides
      
      I am proud of being able to understand that “Christ what an asshole” is a cultural norm in this setting, often celebrated for it’s clumsy use in a variety of settings to mean what you are telling me, nearly dictating for me, what I should be saying to be clear to you.
      
      I was speaking to the group. Welcome.
      - mynonymouse
        
        My point was to clearly differentiate between action and essential character. When Krakauer first wrote about Chris McCandless in Outside magazine he was surprised by the vitriol that was used to condemn McCandless. He talks about that response as a major motivator for writing Into The Wild. His point, and the one I was and am trying to make as well, is that it is the nature of youth and amateurism to make mistakes that can, depending on the outcome, look heroic and amazing or just amazingly stupid. Krakauer talks about an arguably much stupider solo climb he made as a young mountaineer that earned him enormous admiration in the climbing community. He carefully dissects all the ways in which that adventure could have gone wrong, and knows that he would have been regarded as an idiot for the undertaking if he had died. But he lived. And was lionized. The snide comment I made about parsing grammar may have been uncalled for, but I deeply believe in the importance of making mistakes. It seems to me that this belief is central to the maker ethos. We learn by doing. We learn by making mistakes. It is Currey’s shitty luck that his youthful, amateurish mistake is one for the record books.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        It is Currey’s shitty luck that his youthful, amateurish mistake is one for the record books.
        
        Seems like the tree paid for his bad luck.
      - acerplatanoides
        
        No kidding. I was speaking about only action, thanks for getting that.
        
        I’ve worked hands on with endangered species and accidentally killed them (within federal permit accidental take limits, no crime), however I wasn’t feeling badly about it because someone called them an endangered species.
        
        I was feeling badly because I must have been in a rush,
        
        It didn’t happen to me. It happened to that fish. I did that.
        
        Thanks for the lecture.
  - anansi133
    
    Don’t leave out the part where he called in for authorization before cutting it down. That act wasn’t his alone, it belongs as well to whoever gave him the go-ahead.
    - acerplatanoides
      
      Agreed. That is an important point. He called someone remote from the situation to give legal clearance to clean up a mistake as quickly and easily as possible for ALL PEOPLE INVOLVED. Hope he learned from that mistake too. What could the tree have done differently is the only question left, I guess.
dpamac

That Radiolab episode is fantastic (Radiolab/fantastic is redundant). Currey was deeply upset about what had happened and it plagued him for the rest of his career.
xzzy

So now there’s no more bristlecone pine tree oppression, the trees are all kept equal by hatchet, axe, or saw.
- mark
  
  I see what you did there. I got a little rush from that comment
  :-)
Navin_Johnson

He can be forgiven for his mistake, the loggers and assholes that destroyed whole forests and groves of giant ancient trees that were a thousand(s) or so years old and robbed mankind of a treasure old can’t be. I guess I’m glad they keep the locations of The Methuselah Tree, Hyperion and some other notable trees secret because you know some idiot would be compelled to hurt them in some way…
- xzzy
  
  That’s almost exactly what happened with the giant sequoias and prompted the creation of sequoia national park to save them.. the park was made the same year the service was created.
  
  Even so, thousands of sequoias were chopped down.
  - Navin_Johnson
    
    Yeah I believe the number of old growth coastal trees that are gone is like 96% It’s like filling in most of The Grand Canyon or something. A crime against humanity IMHO.
    - acerplatanoides
      
      a crime against the trees, imho.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1066783769 Travis Berry

What a jerk!
AnthonyC

I’m confused. Why did they cut it down, instead of just drilling another core with a new boring bit?
- acerplatanoides
  
  I believe the word is hubris, followed by very apparent humility. Science!
  - mynonymouse
    
    Science never claims to be perfect. This is much more a mistake of youth than of discipline.
    - acerplatanoides
      
      But scientists make that claim, then they learn or don’t learn that hubris in the face of nature is a mistake.
      
      If they do, THAT is science.
- mynonymouse
  
  IIRC from Radiolab, he broke several all the bits he had with him and his field time to do the research was running out.
  - chgoliz
    
    Though, let’s face it: that should have been a clue that he was dealing with a much tougher, older tree than he thought.
http://trainque.com/ Jarrod

Reminds me of the Arbre du Tenere, once considered the most isolated tree in the world until it was knocked down by a drunk driver

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbre_du_T%C3%A9n%C3%A9r%C3%A9
- Navin_Johnson
  
  Continuing with that theme: In January a Florida meth-head accidentally burned down one of the world’s oldest trees.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senator_%28tree%29
  - http://www.facebook.com/sheri.l.williamson Sheri L. Williamson
    
    I’m not normally in favor of capital punishment, but…
- http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
  
  How drunk do you have to be to hit the only tree within a 400km radius?!
  And it sounds like that was actually the second time the tree was hit by an automobile!
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    It seems pretty natural that you would unconsciously head for the only visible marker in your current universe.
    - http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
      
      It also seems like you’d have more than plenty of room to avoid hitting it.
franko

hey, i’ve been to that tree! it’s in Great Basin Nat’l Park. i can’t even wrap my brain around how old those trees are, and what they’ve survived through so far in their life. it’s amazing. [EDIT]: oh wait, no, that’s not the same tree. the shape and view looks similar. my awe still stands.
- Mark Dow
  
  A large slab of this tree is at the GBNP visitor center, fantastic to look at closely and wonder.
Sam Ley

Every time this topic comes back up I feel bad for Currey – people act like he was some kind of devil, or jerk, or evil guy. He had no way of knowing those trees were that old when he started his survey, they aren’t that big. When he started his survey he was a young scientist working his butt off and rushing, but when he realized how old the tree was that they cut down, it ruined his career and to a large extent, his entire life.

It was a mistake, but cut the guy some slack – he wan’t a trophy hunter, he was trying to better understand the trees in order to better protect them. He fucked up on the first one, but now that we know how old those Bristlecones can be, we haven’t made that mistake again. Before that people regularly cut them down just for the heck of it – if no one had studied their ages we probably wouldn’t have ANY left.
http://profiles.google.com/spacewatcer Marios P.

thats a typical course of action in hollywood (pun intented) movies. Shoot now ask questions later…
Ipo

A geologist doing dendrochronology sounds like a stonemason doing carpentry.
Broke off his bits. Pff

Independent of this tree being the oldest or the hundredth oldest – his need to know how long it had lived was more important than the entire life of the tree.
Dr. Mengele too considered himself a research scientist.
- chenille
  
  Were the tree not the oldest or hundred oldest, most people would not even expect the need to know to justify destroying it. Average trees are killed for more lamentable reasons all the time, and their killers are rarely questioned let alone compared to Nazis.
  
  Let’s be clear what sets Currey apart: of those who have felled most of the ancient trees, he’s one who bothered to figure out that he had done so.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Where’s Treebeard when you need him?
    - http://twitter.com/TimmoWarner Timmo Warner
      
      He was cut down to see how old he was.
    - Felton / Moderator
      
      “There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of men for this treachery!”
http://javver.com/ JC

It is ironic how he got the tree cut down to recover a sample for a tool meant to study the tree without cutting it down.
- NynjaSquirrel
  
  I got the impression he called in assistance, not to recover the bit, but to date the tree via a less respectful method – ie – cutting it down to get his core samples?
DutchS

It may have been the oldest single tree, but clonal plant colonies like some aspens are believed to be tens of thousands of years old.
- Rod
  
  Were you reading Cracked a couple weeks ago?
- http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
  
  The linked article claims up to 80,000 years old, but they point out that no single part of a clonal plant colony will usually live past a few hundred years.