Status Updates From Elderflora: A Modern Histor...

Dear Author: You only have two pages to say on the entirety of Africa? WTH

Dear Author. I came here to learn about trees, not here you ramble on about the history and politics of countries you know nothing about. I do not trust you as a good source of information on topics this disparate. And even if I did, I am interested in trees, not a random 12-page detour into your Freshman-level understanding of the history of New Zealand.

There is so much stuff I love in this book. But also the authors unrelated opinions on the birth of Nazism and technocrats.

So much dribble that isn't about trees. But the joke is that the author talks about old books and frequently pokes at ancient authors putting non-factual opinions in their books. Some people have no sense of irony.

I love the topic. But so far the writing is a mixture of florid prose and academia, and I am finding it a bit of a chore.

'The more we know of the [paleo] climate and vegetation,' said a state geologist, 'the better we'll be able to assess the oil and gas potential there.'

🙄

"Now and then, the North Pole wanders and, for years or centuries, makes off to Antarctica."

WTF

"There's no globalized aesthetic for not-quite-millenial subdominant medium-sized growers."

"I've never met a landowner who wasn't excited to learn they had a tree older than American democracy." - dendrochronologist Dave Stahle from the University of Arkansas' Ancient Cross Timbers Consortium

"Trees keep on living in place - until something happens, as something will, sooner or later, or later still."

"What would it signal about the planet if its oldest trees died? The postwar history of Schulman's over-overage conifers is the history of ancient trees in modern times, concentrated and accelerated."

"Visitors to Schulman Memorial Grove want to see the oldest living thing known to science, four and one-half millennia old, knowing ahead of time they won't know when they've seen it. Their walk past the tree is an act of agnostic faith."

(Signage had to be removed due to people vandalizing the tree)

Among Bristlecone pines in the White Mountains, "temperature, not CO2, is the controlling factor, and that this recent growth spurt - confined to the upper tree line - has no precedent in nearly four thousand years."

This is depressing