Tourists stand outside the security fence surrounding Stanley Park's famous hollow tree in Stanley Park in Vancouver. The fate of the 1,100-year-old red cedar is back in the news as people continue to try and save it. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)

VANCOUVER — All this over a dead tree.

A group trying to save a hollow, thousand-year-old cedar in Vancouver’s Stanley Park has set up a website, lobbied local politicians and started a fundraising campaign they hope will raise tens of thousands of dollars.

And as it appears increasingly likely the tree will be cut down — perhaps in a matter of days or weeks — supporters of the massive icon are rallying with a fervour often reserved for great tragedies or social injustices.

But it’s about more than just a dead tree, says Bruce MacDonald, a local author who is leading the charge to save it.

“It’s beyond being a tree in the woods,” says MacDonald, of the group Friends of the Hollow Tree.

“It’s a great symbol of the uniqueness of Vancouver. Everybody in Vancouver knows this tree, they love it, they’re proud of it.”

The hollow tree, which is about six metres across at its widest point, sits on the side of a road that winds through Stanley Park. Countless numbers of visitors have posed in front of it for more than a century.

The long-dead tree, now held upright by a growing mess of metal braces and cables, further deteriorated when a powerful wind storm battered the city in December 2006, knocking down 10,000 other trees in the park.

The storm made the tree’s precarious tilt even worse, prompting worried parks officials, who feared it posed a danger to visitors, to fence it off and vote to cut it down — a decision reaffirmed in another vote last week.

The city’s current plan is to split the tree in half and lay it on the forest floor, allowing visitors to walk down the middle of the two pieces as they rot away.

But MacDonald’s group has been urging the city’s parks board to reconsider, arguing the tree can be saved for the same price as taking it down, with private donors picking up part or all of the cost.

MacDonald says he’s trying to preserve an important piece of Vancouver’s heritage. “If you ever go anywhere in the world, if you go to Rome or Bangkok or China, you don’t go there to go to MacDonald’s or Burger King, you go there to see what’s unique about that city,” he says.

“And what’s unique about Vancouver is that it has giant trees, but the bad news is we cut them all down.”

MacDonald says the tree has become a symbol of Vancouver, featured at the B.C. pavilion for this summer’s Beijing Olympics and in promotional material for the 2010 Winter Games.

The latest park board vote has effectively sealed the tree’s fate, says the board’s vice-chairman, Ian Robertson, though it’s not clear when exactly it will come down.

“From the board’s perspective, yeah, this is it,” says Robertson, who voted against saving the tree.

“It is an icon in the city, but it is dead, and they (the public) wanted to see the tree respected in a natural way. At the end of the day, do you want to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on a dead tree? And the answer was no.”

It’s not the first time someone has tried to cut down the tree.

In the early 1900s, it was almost destroyed by a plan to widen the road through the park. A local photographer who based his business on taking photos of tourists posing inside the tree spoke up, and the plan was ditched.

For now, while Friends of the Hollow Tree hopes the parks board will change its mind, members of the group have been taking turns keeping watch over the tree in their spare time in case the city tries to bring it down without warning.

It may confound outsiders that Vancouverites have been moved to action by, of all things, a dead tree.

History professor Bob MacDonald says it’s easy to see the appeal for tourists — it’s not every day they’ll see a gigantic, hollow tree. But for locals, it’s a bit more complicated.

He suggest it might be a combination of nostalgia and the province’s perceived connection to nature — particularly for urban dwellers.

“This is a very urban view — people who live among trees in a world outside the city, they wouldn’t see the trees, they see trees all the time. They wouldn’t give such exaggerated importance to one particular tree,” says MacDonald, who teaches at the University of British Columbia.

In any event, MacDonald says it’s barely a tree any more.

“If you’ve got all these artificial means to prop it up, what’s the point? As much as I’d like to save something that’s a thousand years old, it’s pretty much come to the end of the line.”

Still, tourists and locals alike continue to drop by, snapping pictures of the tree that now sits behind a fence.

Susan Bank, a 43-year-old tourist from Riverwoods, Ill., has mixed feelings about its fate. “I think it’s sad — it is, I’m sure, a part of history that’s going to be lost forever,” says Bank, taking a break from snapping family photos.

Still, she’s not sure it’s worth spending large amounts of money to save. “I think that there’s a lot of other things that the money could be spent on that would make more sense,” she says.