Protect COLORADO'S Constitution

We protect 100-year-old buildings as historic treasures, then cut down 500-year-old trees for furniture. That's insane. An old-growth tree isn't just some big tree. It is a living carbon bank, seed source, cooling system, water filter, fungal network, bird nursery, insect factory, and archive of centuries of weather, fire, drought, and survival. The older it gets, the more jobs it does. Big old trees store enormous amounts of carbon, and research has found they can keep adding carbon faster as they grow larger. Some ancient trees add more carbon in a single year than an entire mid-sized tree contains. They also make habitat younger trees can't cough up. Cavities for owls and bats. Broken limbs for nesting birds. Dead wood for beetles and fungi. Mossy bark for lichens and invertebrates. Cool, damp microclimates for salamanders and seedlings. Fallen logs that feed the soil for decades. A thousand-year-old tree is not 'renewable' in any meaningful human timeframe. Cut it down for furniture, flooring, paper, or profit, and the ecosystem it carried does not come back when someone plants a replacement seedling. We already protect old churches, courthouses, barns, bridges, and battlefields because they connect us to the past. Old-growth trees do that too.