This is outside in.

And I'm Sam Evans Brown with producer Justine Paradise.

And today we're starting with a tree,

a tree with a name, Old Survivor.

Oh yeah, it's funny, I was just over there the other day.

So Old Survivor is the name of an old growth redwood in the East Bay Hills that is the single remaining old growth redwood after these hills were logged.

That's Jenny Odell. She's an artist and a writer and she teaches at Stanford.

Justine spoke with her about old survivor, a tree who Jenny has written about.

I mean, of course, there's like second and third growth redwoods here, but that tree was not cut down because

it was considered small by the standards of the redwoods at that time, which were huge because they were old growth.

And it was also a kind of a strange twisted shape.

Before old survivor was rediscovered in 1969, it was thought that all of the old growth

trees in Oakland were gone.

Also known as the grandfather tree, this Redwood is around 500 years old.

Old survivor germinated before the Spanish invasion of South America.

Not long after Machu Picchu was completed in the Inca Empire

and just a few years before Queen Elizabeth the first was coronated at Westminster Abbey.

Jenny writes about how old survivor would have grown alongside generations of

Wallone people living, getting old, dying, and in the 19th century it would have kept growing as

grizzly bears, co-house salmon, and California condors disappeared from the East Bay.

It's a witness, and what I find so amazing about that

is it's not abstract.

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