Death and Trees

I came across a couple of research articles about stress and aging in trees. They read surprisingly well for articles about tree physiology. One on stress proposed that trees die from disease, predation, cold, wind, etc. when they lose vigor due to stress. The other on aging showed some evidences that trees don’t age. Apparently we know very little about how trees die. Trees are long-lived (the oldest known tree is close to 10,000 years old) and that makes them hard to study. Much more data exist on mammal aging and death, especially on human beings. But do we really know how we die in the way these articles tried to understand tree death? They were looking for a defining characteristic. The accumulating data on human death and aging on the other hand seems to just accumulate without revealing anything defining. It might be because death and aging are so intimate and central to our existence as human beings. I think about it a lot, and I’m pretty sure everyone does too. I feel my death ultimately determines who I am as a human being. Most of my decisions can be traced back to me dying, but I just don’t know if I’ll ever be able to understand it. Trees may be harder to study, but their death is certainly easier to comprehend.