The regional council did stop work at the site, and the logs were left on the side of State Highway 1. Records obtained under the Official Information Act show Jones then asked MPI for approval to mill the logs, but the ministry turned him down. MPI says it has no control over logs that are not milled, but Furrell believes the Jones logs should have been impounded, and the landowners made an example of.
So you can break the law, destroy something, and make money from it, and there are no serious repercussions? For strategic reasons, environmental protection society members have so far focused their activity on the export side of the process, reasoning that if they could reduce the amount of swamp kauri getting out of the country, they might have a chance to ease the pressure on wetlands.
The case was heard as a judicial review in July this year, and basically tested whether the right process was followed with regard to swamp-kauri exports.
Furrell is unequivocal. Why would you report it? Furrell searched overseas websites and found examples of swamp kauri being advertised as raw timber. It says it assesses potential exports case by case, and has rejected considerable numbers of them. MPI says when the Ancientwood foot kauri slab was exported in , the exporter provided images of similarly rough slabs being used in art galleries in Italy.
The ministry says that based on the information available at the time, its approval was appropriate. As we went to press, the judge in the High Court judicial review was still deliberating. But whatever he decides, the environmental protection society has arguably already had a significant influence on public opinion and policy.
This story is not as simple as a battle between environment and industry, though. These ancient trees also happen to store within them critical scientific information, found almost nowhere else, that promises to shed light on the fluctuations of past climates and the timing of key events in human prehistory, and may even help us to prepare for the future.
Out on the endless mudflats near Auckland International Airport, the dead-low tide reveals long lines of soft salty wood, the clear outlines of huge trees just breaking through the cockle-strewn surface.
What were once giants of the forest now hold pools of water, reflecting low-flying planes in a stormy spring sky. From down here, the sea seems to recede all the way to the Manukau Heads in the far distance. Lorrey points out a dozen trees, arrayed in different directions like a handful of dropped chopsticks.
The layout of the logs tells scientists something about how such deposits take place, he says. In the northern hemisphere, many of the temperate forests and peat bogs were destroyed as ice sheets ploughed across the land during the last glacial maximum, between 26, and 19, years ago. For scientists, that wood is a mine of information. Kauri trees can live a very long time—a millennium or even two—and each one of those years is recorded in the wood in the form of annual growth rings.
Scientists can measure the chemistry of each ring, too, which tells them about the humidity and vapour pressure that year. And for the more recent sub-fossil kauri, they can also pinpoint the exact calendar date a particular tree ring was formed. If you know what year a long-lived modern tree died, you can count back through the rings until it was a sapling, and find out the year it sprouted.
By matching the overlapping ring patterns with those from slightly older trees, you can extend the tree ring record back further again, and so on. Boswijk and colleagues have taken cores from living trees dating back to They have also sampled historical timber from 19th-century buildings and archaeological sites, which stretched the chronology back to —early enough to cross over with the youngest swamp kauri.
They now have a continuous sequence of tree rings extending out to BC—a span of four and a half thousand years. Why is this so important? And so the tree rings, these natural archives, allow us to reconstruct environmental history. Out beyond the end of the tree-ring chronology, scientists use radiocarbon dating to establish the approximate age of sub-fossil kauri.
Pollen records show there were kauri in New Zealand at this time, but no specimens have yet been found. Sea levels were at least metres lower than they are today, so perhaps the kauri were all growing out on the continental shelf, and are now covered in water. Around 26, years ago, the swamp kauri appears again, scattered through the millennia all the way out to the limits of radiocarbon dating at 60, years. He sees himself as a steward, taking care of a precious resource.
We know there were wildly oscillating climate variations at that time, changes in ice sheets, changes in sea level—and we are the only ones that made it out of that period. The more we understand how those things are interconnected, the more we can forearm ourselves and prepare for future changes. Unfortunately many of their forests were felled by English colonists on arrival to obtain timber or land for farming.
All the remaining trees are now under governmental and legal protection and their cut is strictly forbidden. About Its noble strength, its historical value, its timeless charm. From the heart of the Earth, a 50, year old wood. Find a Store. My Account. My Cart. Go to Home Page. Mobile Navigation. Same Day Shipping Find a Store.
Search Go. Topics Cabinetry. Choosing Hardware. Dust Collection. Friends of Woodcraft. Getting Started with Woodworking. As a start, they can help scientists determine the ages of other plant, human, and animal artifacts, from as far back as tens of thousands of years ago. Read the rest in bioGraphic , an online magazine about nature and sustainability powered by the California Academy of Sciences. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
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