Lumber can be harvested from living cedar trees without killing them.

Evidence

The wood split so readily that, in skilled hands, dimensional boards could be made without a saw. Sometimes trees were felled for lumber, but planks were more often split from naturally fallen logs. Remarkably, Mother Cedar also yielded planks from her living flanks. When a line of wedges of stone or antler were pounded into a standing tree, long boards would pop from the trunk along the straight grain. The wood itself is dead supportive tissue, so the harvest of a few boards from a big tree does not risk killing the whole organism—a practice that redefines our notions of sustainable forestry: lumber produced without killing a tree. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1054

Categorization

• CANDY: A genuinely surprising, tweetable micro-fact: first peoples split boards off living cedar trunks without felling the tree.
• XREF: Directly parallels ch. 39 and ch. 40 on sustainable harvest of sweetgrass and maple — taking from a living organism without killing it — an emerging core ethic.