One of the biggest mistakes that you can do in this digital world is thinking that hard drives are indestructible and files are forever. If you did not back up your data, then you have a serious data recovery mission to accomplish. If you are a Mac owner, there are several options to recover your data.

Borrow a friend’s Mac computer and utilize a FireWire cable to connect your computer to it. ‘Target Boot’ your Mac and remember to hold down the T key as you start. You are lucky when your files appear on your friend’s computer. In this case, the operating system of your hard drive is still fine but it needs to be reinstalled.

Mac hard drive recovery is also possible by employing good recovery software tailored for Mac OS. Some can be bought from stores and some are downloadable. There are free downloadable recovery software from reputable agents as well. These products often work similarly: install the software, select the source (defective drive) and choose a destination folder where you can safely store your retrieved data.

One of the options for Mac hard drive recovery is using the Disk Utility. You can do this by popping the Mac OS Install DVD into the optical drive. Press the Alt/Option key while you power up the PC. From the top menu, access the Disk Utilities, and then click Verify Disk and then Repair Disk under First Aid. When things are really out of hand, then it’s time to let your sick hard drive see a specialist. Costly as it may be, if your files were your treasured possession, then you’d be willing to bear the crunch.

Of course, the problem is that by using the river as a dump, production costs are lower than if the factory disposed of its waste in a socially responsible way, so the factory owner has little incentive not to pollute. This leaves the people and businesses along the river, who suffer the bad effects, to bear the cost–hence the term “social cost.”

The failure of the market to cover the costs of an externality is taken as an invitation for the government to step in and make private parties deal with the social costs. In this example, the government could promulgate regulations to stop river pollution by making it unlawful for the factory to dump waste in the river, which, in turn, would raise the private cost of production but lower the social costs borne by society.

At any rate, during the 1970s, the “correction” of market failures accelerated the pace of social regulation. In 1970, both the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Clean Air Act were passed. Two years later came the Marine Protection Act, the Water Pollution Act, and the Federal Insecticide and Rodenticide Act. These were followed by the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974 and the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1975. There were also amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1977. A welter of new bureaucracies were created, among others: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The extravaganza continued in the 1980s. In environmental regulation, more than half a dozen laws were passed, including the Radon Gas and Indoor Air Quality Research Act in 1986; the Radon Pollution Control Act in 1988; the Clean Air Amendments in 1990; CERCLA (the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liabilities Act–the notorious Superfund) in 1980; the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments in 1984; FIFRA (the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act Amendments) in 1988.

Nineteen-ninety was a stellar year for regulatory excess. First came the mother of expensive regulation–additional amendments to the Clean Air Act. The law, which covers many businesses from giant utilities and auto companies to tiny bakeries and dry cleaners, could cost as much as $60 billion annually when fully implemented in the late 1990s. Then came the Disabled Americans Act, which requires owners of private businesses, stores, hotels, restaurants, and apartments to make specified physical modifications to accommodate the disabled. The initial conversion costs to bring these establishments into compliance range between $60 billion and $70 billion. There was also legislation requiring food manufacturers to affix labels to products carrying various nutritional information.

A good guide to assessing the growth of regulation is to look at the number of pages in the Federal Register, where all new regulations are published annually. Pages went steadily up during the 1970s, until they reached an all-time high of 87,000 in 1979. Indeed, not until the 1980s was there a respite, when the Reagan administration seriously slowed the trajectory of ever-more regulation; the number of pages in the Federal Register actually declined by 34,000, the number of federal workers involved in regulation fell, and the cost of administering federal regulatory programs was about flat.

Then the great reversal. During the first two years of the Bush administration, regulation got out of hand. The number of pages in the Federal Register increased to 70,000. The number of federal employees busy issuing and enforcing the stuff reached an all-time high of almost 125,000, and the amount of money devoted to administering these programs grew at double-digit rates. It got so bad, in fact, that, in 1992, Bush had to announce a regulatory reform against his own administration–no new rules for 90 days, later extended another 90 days. No matter. In came the Clinton administration and the growth of new pages resumed apace.

There is no one correct and clear way to measure the cost of regulation on the economy. But there are plenty of estimates. One of the most reasonable figures is that in 1992, regulation cost one-half trillion dollars, or 1% of the economy. This figure includes social regulation such as environment, health, and safety; economic regulation like trade restrictions, federal labor laws, and farm programs; and the paperwork involved in filling out forms, keeping records, paying accountants and lawyers.

Who Pays for All This? In general, the cost of regulating is initially expressed as a cost of doing business. Okay, but who pays this tariff? We all do, in one way or another.

Consider a standard situation in which a law requires certain practices to be followed in hiring or procedures to be used to assure product quality. The former will raise costs by forcing employers to expand their job search and fill out forms to prove compliance; the latter will raise costs by requiring changes in the production process. Sometimes, firms can pass these costs to consumers, making them pay more; sometimes, firms can’t pass them along at all, so they will have lower profits, which means that owners or shareholders foot the bill. But, often, employers pass these costs down the line with lower wages and salaries. Other times, when costs cannot be directly passed off to employees, employers will respond by either hiring fewer people or laying off those already employed. Either way, higher business costs from regulation will result in lower wages and/or higher unemployment.

Excessive regulation also discourages investment in domestic business: Why plop a factory down on regulated soil when unregulated opportunities beckon abroad? Moreover, the threat of regulatory changes creates uncertainty, which scares investors, who then demand higher returns, and tends to make planning horizons more short term.

Further, regulation stymies innovation. This has been especially true in the drug and medical-device industry. Long approval periods shorten the effective patent time for the results of expensive research and development and thus diminish returns on discoveries without lowering risk. A larger gap between risk and return renders many research and development projects too unprofitable to undertake.

And last, all of the above make it harder for domestic firms to compete in international markets in which many foreign-based firms do not have to contend with the effects of excessive regulation.

What makes all the direct and indirect costs, to say nothing of the mind-numbing frustration, even more wicked, is that taken all together, these costs slow economic growth. Rather than detailing the many subtle ways in which regulation impedes growth that are so favored by economists, here instead is just one basic example: Innovation requires research, but research might not be undertaken if regulation makes the fruit of that research susceptible to liability action. Innovation requires development, but development might not be undertaken if regulation draws out the period before approval is granted. In other words, firms need a secure environment for innovation before they will commit money, time, and other scarce resources to the process. Lacking that environment, there will be less business innovation, which leads to slower productivity growth, and that creates slower economic growth.

There are, of course, offsetting benefits to regulation, especially those that concern health and safety. People are less susceptible to sickness, injury, and death because of the many workplace and drug and food laws. Ditto for those who fly airplanes and drive cars. And certainly everybody who breathes the air, or swims in rivers or lakes, is better off than they would be if cities still generated dense smogs of pollution or waterways still caught on fire. But no respectable effort has been made to quantify these benefits overall.

It is, however, possible to estimate benefits in specific categories. For example, trade restrictions such as quotas on imported cars or textiles benefit the workers who keep their jobs–so just multiply the number of jobs “kept” by annual salaries to arrive at total benefit. The irony is that often when these benefits are quantified, the costs of the regulations outweigh them. For example, the total figure for the benefits from restricting imports that accrue to domestic car and textile industries, in profits and jobs, is smaller than the costs to consumers in the form of higher prices for cars and clothes.

Then there are regulations that don’t seem to produce any benefits at all. Consider, for instance, the billions of dollars spent to remove asbestos from buildings, although the very removal may be as health-threatening as if the stuff were just left alone, or the billions it costs to clean up hazardous-waste sites, despite the lack of evidence that those sites constitute a hazard. And, finally, there are categories in which regulation actually results in negative benefits–that is, in harm. The Food and Drug Administration, for instance, has delayed approval of many drugs and medical devices that could have saved lives; critics point to long approval times (measured in years) for Interleukin 2 for kidney cancer, for example.

For any readers isolated from the impact of regulatory zeal and therefore of the mind that I am overstating the case, there exists a real world example of the positive impact of unraveling regulation. Consider the move in the 1970s to deregulate large sectors of the economy. This economic event was aimed at freeing a few very basic industries in the country’s infrastructure–some of which had been seriously regulated as far back as the 19th century.

The Benefits of Deregulation. A real breakthrough came in 1975 when President Ford, asking Congress for fundamental changes in the laws regulating transportation–railroads, airlines, and trucking firms–used the word “cost” to discuss regulation. Ford complained that “regulation has been used to protect and support the growth of established firms rather than to promote competition.” And he pointed to the proliferation of commissions, agencies, bureaus, and offices to oversee new programs and the cumbersome and costly procedures to license, certify, review, and approve of new technologies and products.

This spirit continued in force under President Carter: Along with deregulation of transportation, there were major steps to deregulate the financial markets and telecommunications, and to decontrol energy prices. Early in his tenure, Carter was apparently impressed by the argument that an increase in regulation showed up as cost increases followed by price increases and ultimately as wage increases. In the president’s 1978 Economic Report, Carter wrote: “There is no question that the scope of regulation has become excessive and that too little attention is given to its economic costs…wherever possible, the extent of regulation should be reduced.” True to his word, in 1978 came the Airline Deregulation Act and a strong push for similar deregulation in trucking and rails. In 1979, Carter presented deregulation bills for telecommunications and financial services.

Deregulation of these infrastructure industries was the most significant policy event of the 1970s–and surely an important one in providing a long-term boost to the economy in the 1980s. Total benefits to the economy are probably around $40 billion a year. Consumers pay lower prices, enjoy more choices and better quality in goods and services from the deregulated industries, and the rate of economic growth has been much stronger than it would have been absent this effort.

How Far Should We Go? In fact, most of the global experience with deregulation has been so positive that some people think we should deregulate everything in sight. Should we? There are two equally appealing answers: yes and no. Yes, because of all the bad things that regulation does, as argued above. No, because notwithstanding all those bad things, people have already made their adjustments and expect to operate in a regulated environment; a sudden deregulation would create all sorts of new problems.

As attractive as both yes-and-no responses are, however, they don’t offer a good guide for future regulation. Since the yen to regulate things–and to hope for good outcomes–is not going to go away, we should figure out some way to regulate while limiting the damage that will surely result.

Take the category that offers the smallest contribution to social welfare and the largest amount of per capita suffering–paperwork. A good approach would be to cut paperwork requirements in half (at least) and then maintain that number–of pages of forms no matter what. If new paperwork is mandated by some new rule-making outburst, then the same number of pages of old paperwork would have to go. (We could take a giant step toward a reduction simply by changing the federal income tax system to a flat rate system so that the tax form could fit on a post card.)

Second, consider economic regulation–that category that is the most unnecessary and is aimed almost exclusively at cheering up special interests. We could just drop it entirely. What’s the good of having the discipline of the market if we won’t let the market discipline? Minimum wages? Free employers to pay employees based on the value of their work, not on the political calculations of Congress. Trade protection? Let firms and industries fail if they can’t cut the mustard internationally. Farm supports and other forms of economic welfare? Dismantle them.

Finally, what about the most expensive category–the one that, no surprise, turns out to have the biggest, most enthusiastic constituency–social regulation. There are plenty of ideas on how to make social regulation more cost-effective. Two are neat variations on the theme of making the federal government put its money near its mouth: making the government fund mandates to state and local governments and compensate owners for taking property for other uses (for example, by declaring the property inviolate as wetlands or as having historic interest).

Currently, the most fashionable idea for reform of social regulation is something called risk assessment or risk management. It attacks the presumption behind most social regulation, especially for environmental rules–that risk is controllable; that if breathing bad air or eating apples sprayed with pesticide increases the risk of cancer, then decreasing air pollution or banning pesticides will cut down on that risk.

Fine. Except, what if the cost of reducing risk was a million times the benefit derived? Or what if the cost of reducing risk was reasonable, but the risk itself was trivial? Or if the risk itself was grave, but the amount it could be reduced was trivial? Under any of these conditions, would it still make sense to go ahead and regulate?

That’s where risk assessment comes in. Using what its proponents like to call sound science, or good economics, the risk of a particular activity is measured against the cost of reducing it. And presumably, if the costs and/or benefits are way out of whack, the regulation will not be undertaken.

There are lots of problems with this approach–beyond the obvious of defining “sound” science or “good” economics–like how to quantify human life, since human life is what is at risk. But requiring a risk assessment investigation before approving new regulations would be a start toward reversing over 35 years of indulging an attitude most easily characterized as: “Eek! Look, a risk! Let’s regulate it away–right this minute–no matter the cost–hurry!”

Cycle Of The Sun’s Magnetism

The observational record of sunspots begins around 1610 with systematic telescopic counts by Galileo, Christoph Scheiner, and others. In 1843, after 17 years of observing the Sun for evidence of the fictitious planet Vulcan, Samuel H. Schwabe noted roughly a 10-year periodicity in the number of sunspot groups and in the strings of days when no sunspots were seen. Then in 1908 George Ellery Hale at Mount Wilson Observatory found sunspots to have strong magnetic fields of up to several thousand gauss. Thus the historical record of sunspot numbers details the strength and extent of the Sun’s magnetic fields, with their 11-year cycle.

But strictly speaking, the period of the sunspot cycle is not 11 years; it varies from eight to 15 years. Other periods are also present, for instance the 80- to 90-year “Gleissberg Cycle” and a 200-year cycle. A period of roughly 2,200 years is suggested by records of solar magnetism from the radiocarbon abundance in bristlecone-pine tree rings that can be traced over several millenniums.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that satellites measured slight changes in the Sun’s total energy output, or irradiance, associated with the 11-year cycle. Although it may seem counterintuitive, near the height of the sunspot cycle, when the most dark spots are present, the Sun is brighter than at sunspot minimum. Careful study of the surface by several researchers showed that the dark spots are more than offset by larger bright areas of strong magnetism, or plages. Hence the sunspot cycle can be viewed as a curve of the Sun’s varying brightness, making our star a variable with a roughly 11-year period.

The best records of solar brightness changes, however, go back only 20 years, too short to determine whether these variations spur climate change. And the observed solar energy variations – 0.1 percent over a cycle – seem too small to be influential. But since the brightness changes correlate closely with changes in the Sun’s magnetic activity, and records of solar magnetic variability go back several millenniums, we may yet be able to learn something about the effects that long-term solar brightness changes may have on Earth.

Solar Magnetism Through Time

In 1890 Edward Maunder examined the historical records of sunspots and commented on a lull in the 11-year cycle from roughly 1640 to 1720, which had been noted first by Gustav Sporer, Jean Picard, and Gian Domenico Cassini. And William Herschel had written in 1801 that sunspot records from 1695 to 1700 showed that “no spot could be found on the sun.” Thus, the Sun’s magnetic variability has an additional complexity – the potential for diminished magnetic activity over the course of decades.

The long-term record of the Sun’s magnetic activity is deduced from radioisotopes such as carbon-14 and beryllium-10, which form as byproducts of energetic cosmic rays hitting the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The Sun’s magnetic field, carried out past Earth by the solar wind, deflects some of these cosmic rays. With high solar activity, and therefore strong magnetic fields, more cosmic rays are deflected and the formation of carbon-14 and beryllium-10 is inhibited. Some of these isotopes are incorporated in geologic records. They can be measured in the laboratory from tree rings and ice cores, yielding the history of solar magnetism. Both isotope records confirm that the sharp decrease of sunspots in the 17th century, the Maunder Minimum, indeed matched a very low level of solar magnetic activity.

Also, during the 17th century the Earth was globally about 1 [degree] C cooler than today. Especially hard hit was Northern Europe, where glaciers expanded and winters lengthened. In the last several thousand years similar periods of low solar magnetism have occurred every few centuries or so, and nearly all correspond to a cooling of the Earth by about a degree.

The Sun’s history is also marked by unusually high levels of magnetism. The last four sunspot cycles were among the most active in our 350-year observational record, but they were not as intense as the average level of solar activity in the 11th and 12th centuries as indicated by the isotope records. During that time the Earth seems to have been warmer than at present. Vineyards, for instance, grew in areas of Great Britain that cannot support them today. This is more evidence that changes in the Sun’s magnetism can alter terrestrial climate.

Sun-Like Stars

Studies of solar variability can be augmented with measurements of Sun-like stars – those close in mass, age, and magnetic activity to the Sun. We can thus watch a sample of many stars over a short time interval to deduce long-term information on one star, the Sun. But how do we observe the equivalent of sunspots – starspots – on stars too distant for their surfaces to be seen?

In the late 19th century astronomers noted that the spectra of cool stars contain emission lines of singly ionized calcium. Hale and others successfully photographed the Sun in the calcium H and K lines (3968 and 3934 angstroms, respectively), which originate in the Sun’s chromosphere. During sunspot maximum, patches of bright calcium emission dapple the surface; at low activity levels this emission is sparse. Thus, without seeing the Sun’s surface, we can take the presence of bright H and K lines as surrogates of surface magnetic features, Since records of changes in these lines have proved to be good proxies for varying magnetic activity on the Sun, the same is presumably true for Sun-like stars.

Hale built the 60-inch telescope on Mount Wilson in part because he wanted to explore solarlike phenomena that he thought were discoverable on other stars. He wrote: “Thousands of stars, in the same stage of evolution as the sun, doubtless exhibit similar phenomena, which are hidden from us by distance. . . . In spite of the necessity, because of their feeble brightness, of basing our conclusions on spectra a few inches long, representing the combined light from all parts of the stellar disks, material progress could be made in this way.”

In the early 1930s Mount Wilson astronomer Seth Nicholson showed his chart of the 11-year solar cycle as seen in the calcium K line to Olin Wilson, a young astronomer newly arrived from Caltech. From the relatively large changes summed over the Sun’s surface, Wilson reasoned that the calcium emission from the plages changed by 20 percent or more during the cycle. Thus cycles on other stars might indeed be detectable in the varying calcium H and K lines.

Wilson obtained some photographic calcium H and K spectra of about two dozen dwarf stars in the 1930s, intending to reobserve them about a decade later. The follow-up Was delayed until after World War II, but in 1954 he reported no changes between the two sets of photographic spectra.

Undaunted, Wilson bided his time until more sensitive electronic detectors came along. In March 1966, he began a monthly survey of 91 stars on or near the lower main sequence, stars not radically different from the Sun. He used the coude scanning spectrograph of the 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson, which was equipped with a photocell. The stars ranged from spectral type early F to early M and sported weak to strong H and K emission.

Wilson discovered three general classes of long-term variability in lower-main-sequence stars: cyclic variations similar to the Sun’s 11-year cycle; flat, or essentially no variations; and erratic variations, meaning substantial changes with no clear period. Roughly one-third of the stars fell in each group. Wilson’s vision was remarkable in betting that the chromospheric H and K lines would contribute to studies of solar and stellar magnetism.

In 1977, as Wilson’s retirement approached, Arthur Vaughan and George Preston, also at Mount Wilson, built a second-generation instrument to continue Olin Wilson’s program at the 60-inch telescope, where Hale had first envisioned such work 60 years earlier. Since 1980 the HK Project has made observations almost nightly of flux changes that reveal stellar rotation. Wilson’s program has been extended to giant stars, as well as to a large census of solar-neighborhood stars.

In addition to the use of H and K lines as benchmarks of surface magnetic activity, parallel observations are made of associated brightness changes. G. Wes Lockwood, Brian Skiff (Lowell Observatory), and Richard Radick (Sacramento Peak Observatory) obtained highly precise photometry of three dozen Mount Wilson stars. More recently, Greg Henry and Michael Busby (Tennessee State University) collaborated with us to construct 0.75-meter and 0.8-meter Automatic Photoelectric Telescopes (APTs) for cost-effective differential photometry of the entire list of stars. The APTs have achieved the astonishing precision of 100 to 200 millionths of a magnitude over a season. Such measurements allow the detection of brightness changes on Sun-like stars as small as 0.1 percent over a decade – comparable to the solar irradiance change. A comparison of the Sun’s calcium emission and irradiance to that of a solar-type star is shown above.

Like the Sun, solar-type stars brighten and dim as the calcium H and K emission lines trace their starspot cycles. However, the cycles do not repeat themselves exactly – the total brightness change over a cycle is proportional to the intensity of the star’s activity. This, in turn, suggests that the amount the Sun’s brightness varies will change as its activity increases or decreases from one cycle to another.

The observations of Sun-like stars in the Mount Wilson sample say that short cycles are intense. Sustained intervals of short cycles could result in more solar energy reaching the Earth – effecting a global warming. Conversely, intervals of long cycles and continued low magnetic activity should result in cooling:

Climate Response

Our most recent estimates suggest that the Sun changes in brightness by about a half percent between a phase similar to the Maunder Minimum and an active phase. Simulations of the Earth’s climate indicate that changes of several tenths of one percent in the Sun’s brightness sustained over several decades could cause temperature changes of 0.5 [degree] C or so on Earth. Thus solar-brightness variations can explain most of the past record of terrestrial global temperature fluctuations. Our understanding of the climate is far from complete, but one fact stands out: a varying Sun is one of the drivers of the Earth’s changing climate. Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon are scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Mount Wilson Institute. The astronomer Olin Wilson is buried in the shade of the 100-inch telescope.

Illness set the twins apart from other children at an early age, when scarlet fever struck them deaf. Though proficient lip readers, they had the habit of speaking aloud to others but conversing silently between themselves – when talking to each other, their lips moved but no sound spilled from their mouths. It tended to unnerve people.

The twins’ father was enough of a horticulturist to earn the nickname “Cherry” David “Cherry” Brown Sr. had crisscrossed the continent prospecting for gold before settling in southern British Columbia. He made his home on a hill that looked over 90-metre-tall Douglas fir in the Hazelmere Valley, a stone’s throw from the American border. He taught his sons at an early age the delicate art of coaxing a slip into a sapling. On their 21st birthdays, in 1893, he offered David and Peter 32 hectares of southern-exposed hillside property.

The intention was that the boys would plant and operate a modest fruit and nut farm. The land was certainly ready for such enterprise – denuded by loggers three years earlier, a Pacific gale reportedly finished off what little the saws had missed.

Shortly after inheriting the property, David and Peter took a trip by train to northern California to visit a cousin. What they saw on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevadas changed their lives: they were overwhelmed by the majesty of the giant redwoods. When they boarded the train for the return trip to Canada, their pockets were filled with tiny specks of magic, the big tree’s seed.

The experience among the redwoods was the beginning of a worldwide search for seeds. The twins imported them from four continents and are said to have travelled as far as New York for candidates suitable for their burgeoning arboretum. They planted the most prized seeds close to their house. Most bizarre are the monkey puzzle trees. Thick, tangled rope-like branches mingle haphazardly. Sharp, tough, pointed green leaves leave little doubt about why the trees are avoided by small primates.

For contrast, they planted the incense cedar with its dense and narrow pyramidal crown; Japanese cryptomeria, a graceful skyline tree with a columnar trunk of peeling red bark; and Atlas cedar from North Africa.

Moved, perhaps, by some strange botanical premonition, they planted the dawn redwood from China. Years later, drill core samples taken from the hill revealed Tertiary Period fossils of the same tree.

Around the turn of the century three of the twins’ houses burned to the ground. The Brown family – David and Peter had six sisters and three brothers – blamed the losses as much on poor housekeeping as anything else: the twins’ residences were strewn with plants, herbs, drying grass and newspapers. After the third house was gutted, the brothers became convinced that malevolent forces were conspiring against them.

So in 1912, a tree house, built on four-metre posts, went up among the young Douglas fir. Rough-hewn cedar planks kept most of the wind and rain out. A kitchen on the first floor held a stove, a washbasin, scores of house plants and David’s collection of bric-a-brac. The twins slept on the top floor in beds made of newspapers and old coats. Rows of rusted barbed wire circled the base of the house, for by now their property and possessions had become the target of vandals.

A nearby elementary school harboured a few pranksters who thought it great sport to sneak up on the deaf twins. Sometimes the intruders were malicious, stealing tools, raiding gardens and trampling flower beds.To protect their interests, the twins fashioned a crow’s-nest atop one of the large Douglas fir adjacent to the tree house. From there they could survey their domain and, on occasion, fire a shotgun blast of rock salt at intruders. Local constables answered numerous complaints from parents, and the twins were often reprimanded. Trespassers sometimes left their bicycles behind in their rush for daylight, and over the years many rusted frames were plucked from the thick bush. During Prohibition in the United States, word had it that the twins were gun-toting rumrunners, the forest a staging area for booze which they allegedly carted across the border. Others with less imagination simply called them crazy.

The trees grew taller and, as they grew, they shut out the light of the outside world. Over time, the twins lost their trust in family, community and government. In the 1940s, the municipality of Surrey came close to seizing 16 hectares of the hillside in lieu of back taxes. The experience reinforced the brothers’ belief that a conspiracy was afoot to force them off their land.

Although the tree house continued to be their main residence, the brothers would retreat to a shack built on the ground whenever the weather worsened. Eventually, it became Peter’s home quite by accident. When he prematurely ignited a dynamite charge meant to clear roots, he and the roots were launched skyward. He returned to earth with two broken legs, one of which never mended properly. Climbing the ladder to the tree house became impractical, and Peter settled in the shack.

There he lived until the age of 86, reportedly spry and difficult to the end. He died in 1957, surviving David by eight years, his sanity still in question. Historian Stan McKinnon wrote in 1973: “Peter became nuttier than a fruitcake.”

According to surrey officials, Peter had a verbal agreement with them to leave the land to the community to be preserved in its natural state, free of baseball diamonds and soccer pitches. His will said otherwise. In it he left the forest to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Church that he felt shared his basic distrust of government. Surrey sued and the matter was eventually settled out of court. The ribbon to the city’s 30-hectare Redwood Park was cut in 1960.

Two decades later, as Peter and David had long feared, their home aloft was demolished by the city. The tree house was a magnet for kids, Surrey argued, and rotting timbers presented a safety risk. An interpretation centre was built in its place. Where Peter and David Brown had once scrambled down a ladder, shotguns at the ready, park patrons now read brochures and gaze in wonder at the towering redwoods.

The brothers’ dream that took root a century ago survived decades of antagonism and ridicule. As true stewards of the earth – and martyrs too – David and Peter demonstrated that in the end all that matters is the condition in which you leave the land.