Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [139]
“It looks so sparse,” we said. The Big Tree was all trunk for more than half its height, and the first branches didn't appear until 180 feet up.
“That's because the canopy is so far away,” Suzi said. “If you climbed up to where the leaves are, it would be like a jungle.”
Eucalyptus regnans means the “reigning” eucalyptus tree. Currently, the only trees in the world taller than Eucalyptus regnans are California's coastal redwoods. The redwood champion, the Mendocino Tree, reaches a height of 367.5 feet. But according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the tallest tree in modern history was actually a Eucalyptus regnans. In 1885, loggers on the Australian mainland purportedly felled a Eucalyptus regnans that measured 470 feet.
Next to the Big Tree, a sign put up by Forestry Tasmania read:
Look up! … Due to the natural processes of ageing, the Big Tree is shrinking. Look how the top of the tree is slowly dying back. Storms and strong winds have blown off the upper parts of the crown.
A chart showed that in the 1950s, the Big Tree was ninety-eight meters (321 feet) tall. Now at eighty-six meters, the Big Tree is just above the eighty-five meters that Forestry Tasmania had designated as the minimum height of a tree worthy of saving. Not eighty-four meters, not eighty-three. Once this tree “shrank” below the cutoff mark, we suspected it would be headed for the chopper—no matter if it was four hundred years old and growing when the explorer Abel Tasman had first sighted Tasmania.
Suzi and the Wilderness Society wanted to prevent that from happening. They proposed turning 37,000 acres of the Styx valley into a national park. It would be called “the Valley of the Giants.” Then these old-growth forests would be preserved in perpetuity. But Forestry Tasmania had other ideas.
We looked for a sign that might give us some facts about Eucalyptus regnans trees. What did the flowers look like? How much oxygen did each tree produce? Instead, we found this one:
A single 70 meter [230 foot] tall tree can produce more than a hundred tonnes of usable timber. Carefully graded and converted, this will make enough thinly sliced decorative veneers to panel the walls of a four story hotel plus enough solid wood to make a full set of household furniture, table chairs beds and cupboards plus enough saw and timber for the framing and roof trusses of an average family house plus and after all that enough pulp wood to photocopy the complete works of Shakespeare more than 3000 times over.
It was good to know that the wonders of the world could be of use instead of just sitting there looking pretty. We imagined a sign posted next to Michelangelo's David on the industrial applications of marble:
The by-products derived from taking a sledgehammer to just one of Michelangelo's great works can produce enough tiling to panel the bathroom in every suite at the Ritz-Carlton. And after all that, enough scrap marble will be left over to make 800 six-inch-high souvenir reproductions of David for sale at our gift shop. Don't forget to stop and shop.
From the Big Tree Reserve, it was a surprisingly short drive to where Suzi took us next.
“This was Olivia Newton-John's coupe,” she said. For a brief moment, we imagined Olivia dancing in black leather pants, hugging a big mossy eucalyptus, and singing “You're the one that I want. Oooh-ooooh-ooh, honey!” The pop singer had filmed a TV spot in the coupe (the name given to areas designated for logging) to advocate its preservation. Since then, the loggers had gotten physical with her forest. The area had been cleared and burned, and it was covered in huge stumps that looked like rotted, black teeth.
Alexis sucked in his breath. “Look at the size of those.”
We walked across charred ground, past chunks of smashed-up, ashcovered