A woman in Florida has been accused of destroying one of the oldest trees in the world. According to Reuters:
This is the Senator, the largest pond cypress in the U.S. and, at 3,500 years old, the fifth-oldest individual tree in the world. Or anyway, this was the Senator, because on Jan. 16, the Florida tree burned from the inside out.
Authorities initially ruled out arson, saying that friction or smoldering lightning damage may have started the fire. But they’ve now ruled it right back in, arresting 26-year-old Sara Barnes for lighting the Senator on fire while sitting inside it doing meth.
The law doesn’t seem to take the age of a tree into account if it is intentionally destroyed. According to another source:
The Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services arrested Sara Barnes on charges of intentional burning of land, a third-degree felony.
However, it’s unlikely her case would have drawn much attention, or even been prosecuted, had the victim been a sapling or some blackberry bushes. It’s clear from the headline and comments that the gravity of her crime is linked to the age of her victim. As one comment puts it:
I am no environmentalist but even I think she should face prosecution and long, long jail term for destroying something so majestic. Imagine, 3,500 years old. This tree existed when civilization was still a bunch of tribes fighting over resources in the Fertile Crescent. Now it is gone because some junky needed to get high. She is a pretty good argument for the death penalty for drug users. I don’t see that drug users add anything but misery to society.
That comment has 7 thumbs up as of this writing.
The indigenous peoples of Europe have been there continuously for tens of thousands of years. They are being systematically destroyed and those responsible for it are held in high esteem. The genocidal criminals draw bloated paychecks, which are extorted from their victims. Will the perpetrators be punished for their crimes? Not likely – since it’s illegal to even speak of the subject publicly in much of Europe.
The loss of the Senator is indeed tragic, but there will be other senators in the future. Other trees will grow that old or older. But there are no other Europes that can replace the one we’re losing now. Once gone, it will be gone forever.
The loss of the Senator is sad, but what has the Senator done for the human race? Other than serving as a tourist attraction, producing some oxygen and serving as host to other living things, it stood in the same place for thousands of years and accomplished nothing. In contrast, practically every component of modern life hails from Europe (or those whose ancestors came from Europe). From the cloths we wear to the cars we drive to the medicine that prolongs our lives – it all came from European civilization. Even items that were invented, or improved upon, by Asians were inspired by Europe. Asian civilization was relatively stagnant until the Europeans came along and roused them from their slumber. “African” inventors are typically Europeans with just enough African blood to qualify them for an “African History Month” place of honor. All told, I would say that European civilization has done more for us than the individual tree named “the Senator.”
Is it too much to ask for Reuters to publish at least one article decrying the loss of European civilization? I suppose it is; that would be “racist.”
I’m sure Europe version 3.0 would rise again after some 1000 years or so, if environmental conditions and natural resources stay constant. There is this one problem, though: we have been consuming a lot of natural resources to fuel the Industrial Revolution (and its sibling the Scientific Revolution). This might be the only chance for (at least a subpopulation of) this species to rise above the status of mere animal. Another problem is that the Holocene will not last forever.
http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/348-an-imperial-palimpsest-on-polands-electoral-map
It’s the place, not the people.
(Seriously though, sometimes you really wonder if there are “genii loci”.)
I had an «/irony» tag after the first sentence. The blog software ate it
Trees are more important than people.
Your seem to imply that the European white race is responsible for almost all of the most important achievements in human history – because of the fact of European white racial superiority.
The historian Niall Ferguson argues against this view in his book Civilization, which I read at the end of last year. Interestingly he married a certain famous Somali-Dutch woman who is known for her criticism of Islam, and they have even now had children together.
There are some childish lefties, like Johann Hari maybe, that believe that nothing good has come out of white European civilization. Their pathetic wailing can be safely ignored as deranged nonsense, because the far-left’s hatred for everything Western is as juvenile as an angry tantrum.
Is Ferguson right? Would the author of this blog care to comment? Is he being paid to tow a politically-correct line in order to sell his books? Or are people who believe in the idea that white European people are superior to other races in terms of ability and creativity themselves the deranged ones?
Are there any answers?
Anyone who believes that white people are inherently superior to other races in terms of intelligence, ability and creativity need only examine lower-class white people in the UK in order to see that no, not all white people are highly capable.
That being said, even if not all white people are intelligent, there’s something to be said for the idea that the European white race possesses a particular kind of physical beauty. Even amongst the lower classes, you can still find some beautiful women.
Herein lies the paradox: if beauty is to be associated with women, and the white race possesses beauty, then does that make white men feminine in a way?
As I said earlier, are there any answers?
Sorry it took me so long to respond; I must have forgotten about your comment and then it got buried. I’ll be reading the book soon, and then I’ll write a review.
The one thing European civilization couldn’t do, though, is perhaps the most important thing a civilization should do; produce a happy and content people who find life satisfying and fulfilling. All the restlessness and aggression of Europe, the world wars, the fact that modern Europeans despise themselves and yearn for the exotic and the foreign, the whole of modern culture with it’s hatred of Europe and yearning for the “other”, none of this is accidental, it is because there is a fundamental flaw in European civilization that makes people unhappy and despise themselves.
It is worth noting that much of the “stagnation” of China, while perhaps too extreme, was the result of a people who live in a civilization that makes them happy and content. People who are happy are not so restless and agitated. And they certainly don’t develop a philosophy of self-hatred.
And what has Europe balanced this seminal and basic civilizational failure with? Lots of technologies, most of them trivial and even the many that add considerable comfort coming at the expense of true happiness. Comfort is not happiness. Maybe the only truly great technology that really adds to human happiness is modern scientific medicine.
Europe 3.0? I doubt even the Europeans want that. We are so blinded by our religion of endless “progress” that all we can hope for is, 100 years in the future, more technological inventions.
Interesting comment. Perhaps Europeans can learn something from the Orient and have the best of both worlds.