This is infuriating. You'd hope that the guys with chainsaws in their hands might have had the courage and conviction to protest what they were being told to do. Moral cowards the lot of them! Why was 'incredible' giant cedar cut down, despite B.C.'s big-tree protection law?
I think it could be a fault of some other party, not the loggers. I believe tree protectors are crazy enough to sacrifice such tree for getting support for their fight against logging activities. Let the investigation finds out circumstances of this case, before the firstly pointed suspect is executed by crowd. The trunk of the tree is not very symmetrical. Being so close to the borderline between protection parameter, the diameter could easily have been slightly less than 2.65 m.
"I believe tree protectors are crazy enough to sacrifice such tree for getting support for their fight against logging activities." Yeah, Sulev, believe what you want.
You too, Margot, are allowed to believe what you want. I personally would have left the tree growing, if such a beauty was growing in my forest. It's a pity, there aren't such gigants, trees in my forest are just ca 25 m tall. Then again, I haven't felled a single tree in my forest, although the forest management plan allowed to clear cut half of my forest already in 2002.
I tried to estimate the DBH from the photo in the article. I don't know, how tall this old growth advocate is, so calculated for different values. I guess it is unlikely, that the men is over 2 m tall.