Scientists Climb a Sacred Tree to Save it
WAIPOUA FOREST, New Zealand — Two arborists, chest-deep in underbrush, secured a rope slung over a branch in the Waipoua Forest, close to the northern tip of New Zealand.
Scott Forrest pumped his fist. “Yeah, great stuff,” he said. He recently won the world championship for tree climbing.
But the job this day was a special privilege.
He was about to ascend a 148-foot-tall, 2,000-year-old kauri tree known as Tane Mahuta, a tree so sacred to the indigenous Maori people that even touching it is taboo.