It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.
In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.
Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.
The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.
When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.
It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.
That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.
I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?
That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.
You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.
The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.
Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.
But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.
Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.
Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.
And where does that silt come from?
Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.
The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.
You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.
All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.
Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.
I live right next to a state park that has some of the oldest forest stands in the Eastern part of the country, with the tallest trees in the state. I grew up with stuff like this basically in my backyard:
It was shocking to me to grow up and realize how few old-growth forests are left. It was very easy for me to feel like there are no truly natural places anymore outside these few protected parks, and that was depressing to my forest-loving self.
But like the previous person said, we can have this again! In a couple hundred years, all the forests that were clear-cut 200 years ago will be mature as long as we protect them. People in the future will get to experience huge trees and spongy fertile soil and carpets of moss softer than blankets, because nature will always regenerate. The world is not a desolate echo of what once was. The world is still full of beauty and magic and it will continue to be in the future.
OK, I've seen this post like a dozen times this week and feel the need to add something. I absolutely agree, conservation is a huge issue and we need to stop destroying ecosystems, but. BUT. This isn't what the issue with repairing Notre Dame is. (And also, screenshots aren't sources and neither are twitter rants, which I'll get to in a sec.)
The main issue with the wood for rebuilding Notre Dame is that it needs to be green oak and the beams need to grow straight. This significantly narrows down the choice of trees that can be cut. When the cathedral was first built, it took a whole century (97 years, from 1163-1260). Building methods were much slower than today, so the current reconstructors are processing wood for it much faster than when it was originally built, which means less time for other trees to grow in their place and a more significant impact on the environment.
The carpenters helping with this process have been participating in the experimental archaeology project of Gueleon Castle, and are approaching Notre Dame repairs the same way as the original builders, with 13th century techniques. Why is this significant? Here, from the article linked:
“After the fire, there were a lot of people saying it would take thousands of trees, and we didn’t have enough of the right ones, and the wood would have to be dried for years, and nobody even knew anything about how to produce beams like they did in the Middle Ages. They said it was impossible. “But we knew it could be done because Guédelon has been doing it for years.” . . . Florian Renucci, the Guédelon site manager and a philosopher turned master mason, has already been asked to oversee training of artisans expected to work on Notre Dame.
“All we heard over and again after Notre Dame burned was that it was not possible to reconstruct the roof as before. There was no wood, no savoir faire – it was an argument used by those who wanted to modernise. We showed that it can be done and we know how to do it,” he says.
Épaud is on the scientific committee at Guédelon and the committee overseeing the reconstruction of Notre Dame, as well as a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France’s national research body. He says that going back to build the future is not just nostalgia.
“I have studied the 13th-century technique for many years and, if we respect the internal form of the tree, the beams will last for 800 years. Guédelon is the only place in France, and I believe in Europe, where they build this kind of roof structure in wood. All those who didn’t think it was possible didn’t know about Guédelon.”
The issue with Notre Dame was not that there was no wood, but that there was no wood in France that met modern repair designs. The original builders used wood that was locally available, which there is still plenty of. So this isn't necessarily a conservation issue, but an issue of modern architects not considering how to use what's local and sustainable instead of demanding that nature provide for their invented needs.
This doesn't mean that there is no environmental issue, because like I said, the current reconstruction is going through trees at a faster rate than the original due to the speed of their work. But they're using the same kinds of trees as they did in the 12th and 13th centuries.
This means it's more likely that the main problem at the root of the tweet in OP's post is that what they learned in archaeology class seems to be outdated and from before the experts at Guedelon got involved in the process. It's unclear if "Trey the Explainer" is a current archaeology student or if they're referring to something they learned several years ago that is no longer accurate or fully informed. Their bio states they're "A W-Grade Internet Celebrity whose main goal is sharing information about paleontology, biology, anthropology, history, and science. I make Youtube videos" which, frankly, doesn't mean any of their posts researched or verified. I'm also enthusiastic about history and post about it online sometimes, but as you can see I link articles and references because 1. I'm not an expert 2. if I was, then I'd be linking even more sources.
The photo that the tweet was retweeting, meanwhile, is of a felled giant Sequoia tree from c. 1910 cited as being in the collection of the Library of Congress on Wikimedia Commons. Sequoias grow in California, which is where that photo was taken. This image has nothing to do with the trees originally used to build the Notre Dame cathedral in France in the 12th and 13th centuries, it's just meant to illustrate the OP tweet's point (inaccurately) and evoke a reaction.
(Also anyone who knows about wood knows that the screenshot of the tweet from Ains Proclaims above that claims to show wood from 1918 and wood from 2018 is absolute bullshit, those are two beams from literally different trees and if you thought about it for even just a few seconds you would realize that both are brand new cuts of wood and it makes no sense that one of them would be from 1918 yet look so freshly cut. Different woods have different grain densities. It's honestly unclear if the photo is implying that this is what wood cut in these years looked like or this is what wood from trees planted in these years looks like and doesn't say what year the cuts were taken.)
