Sorry but I don’t find much beauty in the harvesting of trees that are hundreds of years old. But that’s just me.
I chain sawed my first tree this summer. It was like 20" in diameter or so, maybe 100 feet tall and long dead pine tree. Sort of hazardous as the limbs were breaking off.
I borrowed my dads chain saw that is older than me, and lacks any fru-fru modern safety features or anything like ergonomics. Holy crap is it hard to make a cut parallel to the ground or at an angle.
I read how to do it, sized up my tree and made my cuts. The relief cut was ok, but I was worried my main cut was too low and did it twice. About 3/4 into it I was like, “WTF am I doing. If I screw this up I am going to die. Is it going to fall?”
Finally I saw it start to move, stepped back, and watched it fall right where it was supposed to. My kid even got to yell “timber!”. Who else besides Ke$ha gets to say that this day and age?
Obligatory
Agreed. Nothing beautiful about destroying something beautiful like a hundred year old tree. Surprized the editors at boing boing would disagree.
Meh, if you are harvesting big trees at least do something practical with them. Make furniture, real solid wood furniture that will last generations. I’ve got a few pieces of IKEA in the house, but I’ve got way more Stickley than anything else.
I just love the smell of a properly tuned 2 stroke and fresh wood chips…
If you really want to get the willies while feeling one look up the term barber chair.
Isn’t this kind of like trophy hunting for lions?
Ah yes, the childhood memories of going into the woods and cutting firewood with my father. That piss smell from the oak, ah yes…
I’ve never actually seen anyone chop with a chainsaw, sounds dangerous.
I’ve lived near a logging community.
You meet lots of men with missing body parts or remnant body parts in their name.
Like “Three-fingered Rick” and “One-Eyed Joe”
We cleared a lot of junk and dying trees at our family farm in the 1960’s after my folks built a house on the property. Mostly to allow other trees room to grow and clear old fence lines. My dad always took the wedge that was cut out of the tree and laid it on the ground 20 - 30 feet out from the stump to see how close the tree landed to where he wanted it. That became a bit of a competion among he, my brother and myself. Tho’ we didn’t have any trees as big as the one in the video. When I bought a house there was a small wild cherry tree in the back yard (40 feet tall 2 foot diameter) that had to come out. I laid the wedge I cut out on the ground where I thought it would drop and it landed exactly where I planned. My then 15 year old daughter was very impressed with her dad. I will say the guy in the video was very good at dropping that tree. The thing is that we couldn’t see anything but the bottom of the trunk the top may have been dead or broken up by a lightning strike. Sometimes you need to take out a tree for a lot of good reasons but you can saw it up for many uses afterwards. I always try to put another tree in an appropriate place to atone for my cutting unless the tree I cut allows another tree room to grow.
I imagine all your furniture is made out of plastic of a kind that’s not made from oil? Or perhaps metals that were mined sustainably?
Good point, why bother attempting to live sustainably at all.
What was it that Palin said? I’m sure you know.
Lumber is a sustainable, renewable resource.
It can be, kind of.
Besides that wasn’t my point. Insinuating someone who dislikes environmental destruction is a hypocrit in the first world for having oil products in the home is like dismissing an OWS protester for holding a Starbucks cup.
But it isn’t necessarily “environmental destruction”. The logging industry isn’t the same entity it was in say 1900. Now you can find exceptions, especially if they are clearing land to develop. But in general logging now includes replanting trees.
Remember too mother nature is awesome at environmental destruction with forest fires, which is actually part of the natural cycle.
Our problem now is that we’re not allowing those mild to moderate forest fires to happen, so when they do happen they’re sterilizing infernos that don’t grow back for a long time.
The US Forest Service serves Ag, not the people.
I’d show this to my wife, but she’d likely panic and tell me in detail everything he was doing wrong. Oh, his technique is fine. But his lack of proper safety equipment is something else completely. Granted, she’s a state park manager who takes chainsaw training every year and has to make sure all of her employees follow the proper procedures.
I have felled a decent amount of trees, all with good reasons. And I’ve planted more biomass than I will ever destroy. Felling an old tree is hardly like trophy hunting, and is enormously more dangerous.
Also, who here has planted a tree in the last year? What are the pros and cons of clearcut vs. selective harvest? What trees have seeds that only germinate during light fires but are obliterated by out of control wildfires caused by unnecessary conservation?
As an aside, I really miss this tree.
This guys still with us.
And while it is on private property, a friend has the second or third largest maple by diameter in the state. It is gnarly
