Trees are prone to anthropomorphism

Empires rose and fell; wars raged; people were enslaved and freed; and the tree from 2500 B.C. continued its implacable slow-motion existence, adding about two-hundredths of an inch to the diameter of its trunk each year.
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In 1957, Edmund Schulman, a researcher from the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, in Tucson, determined that this eccentric senior was older than any other tree on earth which had been dated. He named it Methuselah.
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What is most astonishing about Pinus longaeva is not the age of any single organism but the collective oldness and otherness of its entire community. No two super-elderly trees look alike, to the point where they have acquired the characteristics of individuals. Trees are prone to anthropomorphism; we project our dreams and our anxieties onto them. Bristlecones have been called elders, sentinels, sages. The possibility that climate change will cause their extinction has inspired a spate of alarmed news stories, although tree scientists tend to discount the idea that the bristlecones are in immediate danger. They have survived any number of catastrophes in the past; they may survive humanity.

Bristlecone pines thrive at high elevations and live for thousands of years.Photograph by John Chiara for The New Yorker

Bristlecones can’t be monumentalized in the same way. They have the look of survivors, not conquerors. Fittingly, they found fame during the Cold War, when atomic tests were taking place not far off, in the Nevada desert. Bristlecones are post-apocalyptic trees, sci-fi trees. They can be seen as symbols of our own precarious future. Michael P. Cohen, in his 1998 book, “A Garden of Bristlecones,” deftly anatomizes this latter-day bristlecone mythology, writing that the trees “always reveal the motives of their observers.”

Bristlecone pines have survived various catastrophes over the millennia, and they may survive humanity.
By Alex Ross