The Largest Living Thing on Earth

Before you try to understand the size of this tree, a data point: when this tree germinated from a seed roughly the size of a rolled oat, Hannibal was marching his army across the Alps toward Rome. That was approximately two thousand two hundred years ago.

The General Sherman Tree stands two hundred seventy-four feet tall. Its base diameter is thirty-six feet. The single stem contains fifty-two thousand five hundred eight cubic feet of wood, a number that the National Park Service measures and re-measures because visitors require the credential of precision before they will accept what their eyes are already telling them. No tree on Earth contains more living wood in a single stem. Not the coastal redwoods, which grow taller. Not the Tasmanian swamp gum, which can also grow extraordinary. By volume, this particular tree, in this grove, is the largest single living organism on the planet.

It survived because an eighteen ninety boundary line was drawn to include it. That is not a metaphor. The park boundary was drawn with this grove on the inside and vast tracts of sequoia forest, including what had been the largest sequoia grove on Earth, on the outside. The trees on the outside were logged. The trees inside the boundary stood. The grove you are walking through exists because of a political cartographer's line.

Giant sequoias do not die of old age. They die of fire, root competition, or bark beetle infestation. When they fall, they fall over centuries, decaying slowly enough that John Muir found specimens still intact that had been on the ground since before the Mariposa Battalion. The tree in front of you will likely outlast the park service, the nation, and most of the institutions you consider permanent.

That thought is either comforting or unsettling. Both reactions are appropriate.