(Roughly) Daily

Confronting ancient redwoods can be a transformative experience, helping us appreciate both our place in a larger scheme and the transitory nature of our lives.

The earliest redwoods showed up on Earth shortly after the dinosaurs – before flowers, birds, spiders… and, of course, humans. Redwoods have been around for about 240 million years, and in California for at least 20 million years, compared to about 200,000 years for “modern” humans. – source

But redwoods also play a key role in our ecosystem…

The coast redwood and giant sequoia forests are home to the tallest and largest trees on the planet. They represent the original face of nature, embodying a beauty millions of years in the making. These forests store more carbon from the atmosphere than any other forest ecosystem, and they support communities of life found nowhere else on Earth.

The redwood forests are the greatest forests on Earth.

But the redwood parks and private lands we have protected over the last century still need help. The primeval forests today resemble islands of disconnected old-growth stands — pinched at the edges by clear-cuts, development and agriculture. They depend on streams choked by sediment, and they are cared for by parks organizations that are under-funded and under-resourced… – source

* John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

###

As we prioritize preservation, we might spare a thought for Charlemagne; he died on this date in 814.  A ruler who united the majority of western and central Europe (first as King of the Franks, then also King of the Lombards, finally adding Emperor of the Romans), he was the first recognized emperor to rule from western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire three centuries earlier; the expanded Frankish state that he founded is called the Carolingian Empire, the predecessor to the Holy Roman Empire.

Committed to educational reform and extension, he began (in 789) the establishment of schools teaching the elements of mathematics, grammar, music, and ecclesiastic subjects; every monastery and abbey in his realm was expected to have a school for the education of the boys of the surrounding villages.  The tradition of learning he initiated helped fuel the expansion of medieval scholarship in the 12th-century Renaissance.

Charlemagne is considered the father of modern Europe, the first of the Holy Roman Emperors, and thus the forerunner of the Holy Roman Empire. At the same time, in accepting Pope Leo’s investiture, he set up ages of conflict: Charlemagne’s coronation as Emperor, though intended to represent the continuation of the unbroken line of Emperors from Augustus, had the effect of creating up two separate (and often opposing) Empires– the Roman and the Byzantine– with two separate claims to imperial authority. It led to war in 802, and for centuries to come, the Emperors of both West and East would make competing claims of sovereignty over the whole.

We might note that as Charlemagne’s life unfolded, the oldest (officially-recognized) living Redwood was already 400 years old (though some foresters believe some coast redwoods may be as much as 1,000-1,500 years older).