By Gerald Jacobs — University of Manitoba (CUP)

Image by: Christopher Elliott

This year, one of the oldest living organisms in the world caught fire and burned to death. “The Senator” was the nickname given to a cypress tree that had been living in a Florida swamp for the last 3,500 years. It was 38.1 metres tall, and had a girth as wide as two men’s full arms’ lengths. Until that day, it had been considered the fifth oldest tree in the world, and the largest tree of its kind in North America.

Reactions to the event seem to have ranged from, “That’s a little sad,” to “It’s just a damn tree,” to “Worse things happen every day. Why is this in the news?”

What I find sad is just how little attention this story received. I understand that indifferent reactions might be attributed to a lack of reflection on how long 3,500 years is, but the apathy permeating our culture really gets to me. And historical apathy is particularly galling.

So if you’re one of those folk who took time away from your “omg”ing and “lololol”ing on your iPhone to express resentment at The Senator’s appearance in the news, I’d like to take a moment to explain to you why this is a legitimate tragedy.

Three thousand five hundred years ago, the Greeks were just starting construction on the Parthenon, and the Pyramids at Giza were still a relatively new sight. The Egyptians were thanking Anuket for the fertile Nile floodplain and praising Horus for making them the most innovative kingdom on Earth. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, a little sprout took root in the middle of a swamp and decided to stick around for a while.

Fast-forward 700 years, and that little sprout was probably around 16.8 metres tall and something like middle-aged in cypress-years. Back on the other side of the planet, industrious Romans had started building a city. Another 300 years later, the first public law — the foundation for the later Roman constitution — was introduced to the Roman Republic in the form of the Twelve Tables, around the time when Socrates was a young man in Athens. Our cypress had reached its average life expectancy of 1,000 years.

Another 1,000 years later, the ancient Greek civilization had long been swallowed by the Roman Empire, which had only recently collapsed itself. Our tree was now twice as old as it could have ever expected to be, much larger, and frequently used by local Indigenous groups as a landmark for navigation.

Yet another 1,000 years passed. Our tree had survived three millennia of fires, earthquakes and hurricanes. It had witnessed untold ages of American First Nations, and seen the European colonization of America and everything that followed, bad and good — from the impact of colonialism on the First Nations to humans walking on the Moon.

The Senator had been there for nearly every major moment of recorded human history, living out its life in quiet solitude. As old empires died and new ones reshaped the face of the Earth, this tree grew without interruption for three times as long as it ought to have.

Had we awoken to find that the Washington Monument, a national symbol of American achievement, had spontaneously caught fire and collapsed, much of the world would have been in shock. Had one of the Great Pyramids — international symbols of human achievement — suddenly collapsed, we would have collectively wept for the loss. But a 3,500 year-old tree transcends human achievement. It is a natural monument to life itself, a symbol of all the aeons — of a time before man could throw a spear or hammer stone or attach symbolic meaning to the things he or she produced.

This giant passed with just a whisper.

I’m not saying people need to start worshiping trees as gods or change their lives in any appreciable way. I just wish that if all you had to say about this event was, “It’s not news; it’s only a damn tree,” you’d take a very brief moment to understand what it meant, both in terms of nature and history. A monument need not be man-made to be meaningful.