What’s captured people’s attention about the Washburn fire raging in Yosemite isn’t just its size or scope, but the fact that it threatens a giant Sequoia with a name, Grizzly Giant, and an extreme age: It’s almost 3,000 years old.
The oldest trees have scientific as well as sentimental value. There’s something alarming about the thought that anything hardy enough to live through multiple millennia could now be in trouble. As it turns out, climate change is not even the worst hazard the oldest trees face.
Trees possess a quality that humans had once attributed to gods: They don’t age. Or as forest ecologist Nathan Stephenson puts in a more scientifically accurate way, there’s a growing school of thought that trees don’t undergo senescence, a programmed slide toward decline and death that puts a limit on the lives of animals. “They die from accidents, like getting attacked by bark beetles, getting burned in a fire … getting infected by a pathogen,” said Stephenson, who is a scientist emeritus with the USGS Western Ecological Research Center.
