In Portland they recently started cutting trees down to widen the road for extended bus and bike lanes. That spawned a conversation that we've lost a third of our tree cover due to various things and the city hasn't kept up. That week I started burying cones from my Douglas Firs, which aren't nearly as big as the Mountain Ashes you planted, but are fairly large. With any luck I'll have five in my yard.
Sorry to tell you that this wont work to start a Douglas Fir. The seed is not the cone but they are wing-equiped and sit underneath the bristles in pouches of the cone.
As they are tiny it is in indication that they do not like to be burried but instead germinate on top of bare soil.
> I started burying cones from my Douglas Firs, which aren't nearly as big as the Mountain Ashes you planted
Just want to note, this is definitively not true. Coastal Dougs routinely reach 100m in height, and there's some anecdotal evidence[0] of a Doug which would likely have been the tallest tree ever recorded, if we believe the measurements putting it at 142m in height (and 10m in circumference!).
I've learned two things today. First is the seedlings note above, second is this. I'm still learning a lot about these trees. There's many of them at a park by my house and I have four in my yard, but they're probably 40 years old. They're very large to me, but they look nothing like the pictures of those Ashes.
It's not a "tree fail" to remove some trees if it means a substantial conversion of passenger car to bus and bike use which reduces CO2 consumption.
If the bike lane causes one person to give up their car and commute by bike, that's worth hundreds of trees per year.
The same is true for solar. There are a lot of cases where cutting down a few trees for a solar array means a substantial increase in CO2 offset, more than the cut down trees would have provided.
I wish uninformed people would stop trying to "gotcha" environmental progress. Believe it or not, the people planning these things are much more educated in the subject than a bunch of software engineers and "entrepreneurs"
Instead of chopping down trees to build a bike lane, they should simply take lanes away from the road and make those into protected bike lanes. This has multiple benefits: 1) leave the trees alone, and keep the street looking nice, 2) not waste more space on vehicles, 3) make biking safer, 4) discourage people from using cars by making it more inconvenient for them.
The other thing they can do is to restrict parking: replace parking lots with parks (and more trees) and more buildings.
> Instead of chopping down trees to build a bike lane, they should simply take lanes away from the road and make those into protected bike lanes.
Most of the roads this happened on are 2 lane roads in Eastside Portland. They're expanding the road for "bus lanes" which are hybrid turn lanes and lanes for buses to travel in as well as protected bike lines that are usually joined with a sidewalk and bust stop. Point being, there's no lane to take away.
Waging war on cars is waging war on the economy. The economy is our life support system.
Aggressively pushing bikes as the only future of transport is kind of ableist. Fine for healthy young people, in flat areas, on dry days. But not for the elderly, disabled, or unfit.
And public transport options need to be safe and comfortable. That doesn't fit with currently-trendy soft on crime policies.
> Aggressively pushing bikes as the only future of transport
Nobody is doing that.
> But not for the elderly, disabled, or unfit
Fortunately, when the roads are far quieter because more people are biking or on public transport, it becomes much easier for the people who need to drive, to drive! Everyone wins!
> And public transport options need to be safe and comfortable. That doesn't fit with currently-trendy soft on crime policies.
I live in the UK and our public transport is by-and-large safe and comfy (although I'd like more of it). And given our prisons are overcrowded, I don't think "soft on crime" policies dominate.
Evolution's an actual thing, you know, both for living forms and for technology.
The circulation of resources, goods, and energy is our life support - the economic assumption that growth is unlimited and GDP is a good metric is just a fad of the last century or two.
Nobody's trying to ban cars. The elderly, disabled or unfit would actually find it easier to drive with less traffic and bikes having better separation from the road.
The planning might be very detailed and considerate, but the execution is often botched. The people doing the surveys and consultations are not the people who end up doing construction. Because of pressure the people doing construction often have a "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" approach to non-structural things like flora. If I had a dollar for the amount of times I've seen mudslides or embankments that eroded away because the workers on site chopped down unnecessary amounts of trees to store equipment closer, I'd be able to buy a movie ticket. Which, y'know, it's only like fourteen dollars. But that's still too many times.
> If the bike lane causes one person to give up their car and commute by bike, that's worth hundreds of trees per year.
Where they did this is by my house, so I think I can speak to this a bit. It was not good planning, not that you can only have one or the other. Trees are also huge fighters of climate change heat casualties. The tree coverage keeps the ground and, specifically, the asphalt cooler: https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/06/07/a-major-investment-in-...
Without the trees "heat islands" have developed and surprise, surprise they're in places where people have less money to throw at making the city to keep both a priority in their neighborhoods. The lack of tree coverage is also necessitating the purchase of cooling systems which many people can't afford (and yes, in Portland we do have people dying in their homes from high heat) - so the trees being missing necessitates subsidizing AC units for folks, which is a tangible cost now associated with lack of tree coverage vs proper tree coverage.
> I wish uninformed people would stop trying to "gotcha" environmental progress. Believe it or not, the people planning these things are much more educated in the subject than a bunch of software engineers and "entrepreneurs"
Not to "gotcha" you or anyone else, but it was the city planners themselves who came out with this mea culpa and did a study on the heat islands. Our government is very unique and not very cohesive so it is actually reasonable to investigate whether PBOT and the people who contract tree coverage in the city actually talked.
In Washington, DC, there is an organization named Casey Trees, which is dedicated to restoring the tree cover. There are community plantings now and then, and it will kick in $50 toward the cost of any sapling (I assume conditional on type) that you plant.
The trust in charge of the grounds will dig them up again, people have already done this. Which by the way makes the trust look both stupid and tone-deaf.
It's a UNESCO world heritage site and Hadrian's Wall (a few metres away) is a Scheduled Monument. So the National Trust can't legally allow anyone to just plant anything they want there. Apparently there are plans to do something sympathetic at the site.
> Which by the way makes the trust look both stupid and tone-deaf.
People who are informed on the subject don't feel this way. It's a UNESCO world heritage site and no one wants the area to be littered with an assortment of "tribute" trees.
I wish the tree had not been felled. A very sad and poignant act.
Also, as I pointed out in another conversation here, and in the name of reciprocal repetition will do so again here, it is quite easy to find reports of equally heartbroken locals, the world over, lamenting the deliberate felling of any number of special, beloved, prominent trees, in the name of the routine building of a new road or factory or housing development in humanitys continual march of progress.
With one single tree evoking this much emotion, it is little wonder that in general we struggle to view mass environmental destruction as anything other than an abstract, distant notion. How could we mentally handle it, otherwise??
At least felling trees to build things serves a purpose. Are those things worth the cost? Debatable, but at least there’s some attempt at justification.
This one is particularly heartbreaking because you can’t even apply that cynical utilitarian logic to it. It seems like a completely wanton act of vandalism.
> At least felling trees to build things serves a purpose. Are those things worth the cost?
I spent a little time in Finland a while back and although I didn't look deeply into it, my impression was they had a healthy relationship with trees. The country is heavily forested and they harvest many trees but they also replant diligently. One of the guys I spent a little time with there was also researching plant-based alternatives to plastics (in the vein of the infamous paper straws, plant-based wrappers instead of plastic wrappers, that kind of thing).
Deforestation is absolutely a problem in some areas of the world, but tree farming can be done responsibly. They're an endlessly renewable resource if we only give them the space and time to grow.
I once decided it would be a cool idea to walk in straight line across England and began wondering how I would plan it.
For some reason I noticed and realised my half way mark was a few meters away from this tree. As in if you look at a map the tree sits in the center of England where its diameter is at its narrowest - check it out. An odd thing.
Looking at the topography from google maps and I remember thinking what an oddly beautiful tree in the middle of nowhere.
I even noticed it had a Wikipedia entry.
It was a few years ago and I never got round to trying to walk it.
Now a couple years later I hear it’s been destroyed and I grow more concerned for the future of man.
If you're still interested in this, Tom Davies (Geowizard) has done the straight-line crossing in a couple of different countries and posted videos, both of some of the planning and logistics and of actually doing it.
Two of the most relevant are walking all across Wales in a straight line (which did involve trespass on some farms) and dribbling a soccer ball the entire length of the Hadrian's Wall path.
He calls these "straight line missions". Maybe it will inspire you to try some form of this sport, or maybe you'll just enjoy Tom's experiences.
I really appreciate your comment. It was during a particularly hard time in my life so I saw my cousin and then just thought right I’ve got a few days left and the only thing I had in my head was well I don’t know much but I do know I will feel accomplishment if I cross Liechtenstein in a straight line. I found perhaps the only way to do it. Funnily enough I realised I had screwed up when found out first hand what exactly the Alps were and that they were not intact “thumb sized” as they appeared on google maps. As I stood at the bus stop with a mountain towering above me well I gave it my best shot but sheer cliffs behind bushes put an early end to my “straight” yet vertical line.
It was a good laugh tho the locals took me out for drinks.
> sits in the center of England where its diameter is at its narrowest
Seems like a good place to put a wall to split the land in two then. I wasn't aware until just now that the modern border of scotland is a good bit north of where Hadrian's wall is.
Hadrian's gets all the recognition, and that's probably mostly because it is still recognisable, but the Romans built a second wall 20 years later, just to the north of where Glasgow and Edinburgh are now - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Wall
It was built mostly of turf and wood, so time has erased it much more completely, and apparently they retreated back to Hadrian's wall after only a few years.
That might be another reason that Hadrian's Wall is more remembered - It's one they held for a reasonably long time (generations) whereas Antonine's was far more ephemeral in that way too.
The Berlin Wall is almost gone, but I don't think anyone will forget it in a hurry.
I wonder if they knew they were coppicing the tree, rather than killing it. Thankfully the tree will continue to grow, I think the land managers have chosen to leave the tree there. Many of the oldest trees around (at least in the UK) have signs of coppicing and pollarding. Those who cut the tree have unintentionally extended its life (e.g https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-203131...). The only issue is it wasn't done at the best time of year.
"The Ténéré Tree (French: L'Arbre du Ténéré) was a solitary acacia (Vachellia tortilis) that was once considered the most isolated tree on Earth, the only one for over 150 kilometres. It was a landmark on caravan routes through the Ténéré region of the Sahara Desert in northeast Niger, so well known that it and the Arbre Perdu (Lost Tree) to the north are the only trees to be shown on a map at a scale of 1:4,000,000. The Tree of Ténéré was located near a 40-metre deep well. It was knocked down in 1973 by a truck driver."
> Unlike other members of the genus Acer, it did not put on a blazing autumn display. Its big five-lobed leaves, with their irregular notching, merely turned a crumpled brown. No one minded.
As someone who lives next to a neighbor with an enormous old sycamore--I mind! :P The leaves are gigantic and they fall late into Nov, so my entire property gets blanketed with sheets of brown cardstock! Alas it is worth the effort just to be able to see that awesome tree throughout the year.
I recommend chopping them up with a mower (but don't bag them; leave them in place). The shredded leaves make a really great mulching layer just before winter, when grasses and other plants need that extra insulation, and then they break down and nourish the soil in spring when everything starts actively growing again.
Do this process year after year, and you will have an absolutely gorgeous garden before long. It's a really good reason to plant deciduous trees (especially those that shed a lot of leaves that are too heavy to blow away). But they take such a long time to grow; you are super lucky to have a mature one over your garden already!
To summarize, the 69-year-old man who was arrested (in addition to a 16-year-old boy) is a former lumberjack who had been in a legal battle to continue leasing land that had been in his family for many years, and lost the case just before the tree was cut down.
The motive behind many crimes is never found out. Turns out that even if the accused did have a logical motive for committing the crime, they tend to not reveal it to investigators to have a better chance at not going to prison.
Regardless of conviction, does having a motive for a crime typically increase the sentence? I would have thought it would be more likely to be the other way round.
Not a lawyer, but I would expect sentencing considers at minimum the details of the conviction. Maybe at that stage a lack of explanation under pressure presents as a lack of remorse.
But before conviction, not having a motive furthers certain defenses, and those possibilities can be useful in the context of plea bargaining.
In the old days young people (mostly boys) would to stupid things to make their friends laugh; i can help to feel like that social networks elevate that behavior up to eleven.
People now a days do all kinds of stupid shirt just to get views. I think the destruction of this tree was an example of that.
people have been doing shitty things for a very long time.
people have been talking about how "things are worse nowadays" also for a very long time.
not much to do now other than try to science it back into existence, replace it with a similar one, plant a new one and wait or declare it done and move on.
I mean, stupid shit finds a much larger audience pretty quick now a days. Harassing a police officers horse, bother the royal guard, eat the tidepod, planch in a dangerous place, those stupid YouTube pranks...
Those are the mild ones, i saw a video of two teenagers who hit a police retired officer who was riding his bike. The whole thing was filmed. People have been evil from the beginning I give you that, but it seems young people are being drawn to that kind of behavior for likes and views now a days
oh jeez, i almost forgot the most important option: create a new british detectives television series around the event where they drive around in small cars across the english countryside while discussing the case and making prodigious use of their mobile phones.
include use of gen z messaging platforms and a lovable geriatric millennial character who plays the role of the senior inspector.
It's wild to me how sentimental people can get about a tree or incensed by, say, someone kicking a dog (neither of which are good, for the record) yet be completely indifferent to completely preventable human suffering. Worse, that suffering is often painted as a moral failure by those who are suffering, almost like they deserve it. They can even cheer it on.
> yet be completely indifferent to completely preventable human suffering.
A lot of human suffering is self-inflicted. There's also the point that humans have a higher bar for being able to take care of themselves.
A human can and should defend themselves. A tree or a dog cannot. (and before someone decides to ackshually correct me, we've been breeding dogs for docility for over 10,000 years)
> I will never not find that bizarre.
You find bizarre that people have different value systems? Huh?
>and before someone decides to ackshually correct me, we've been breeding dogs for docility for over 10,000 years
Some breeds were specifically bred for fighting, so I don't agree with this at all. Also, some breeds are bred for hunting, some for herding, etc.; these are not "docile" tasks. I think it's more accurate to say that dogs have been bred to be subservient to humans for 10k years. But even here, there's plenty of dogs specifically trained to be violent with humans: German Shepherds are notorious for this, as well as Rottweilers, which is why they're used for military/police work.
But I completely agree about humans having a higher bar for taking care of themselves, and also we expect them to have a conscience and "do the right thing" and not cause needless destruction, and to work for the greater good.
Just because dogs can be trained to do tasks that involve violence, doesn't mean they aren't super-docile and will try to avoid confrontation with their handler to the best of their ability.
Well, one of the synonyms listed on Wiktionary is "meek", and that is definitely not what I think of when I see pitbulls attacking people and causing lifelong injuries. And considering this frequently happens to children in homes with such dogs, it seems that the other definitions of "docile" don't really apply either.
Basically we'd feel unbearably sad all the time, if we'd care about things unfiltered. So filtering must go on. After all, the existence of feelings is to support a social cohesion, which in turn enhances the chance of survival. It doesn't make evolutionary sense for feelings to not have bounds. So, there are bounds - feelings usually intensify with close proximity, and there is a bunch of mechanisms that quell feelings and empathy, like dissociation. What you're seeing is just these mechanisms in work. The very concept of fairness, and so unfairness, also only exists in humans. And we don't even agree on what that entails, just that all of us feel this to a degree.
In my community: I love the cutsie pootsie Victorians everywhere, the time-capsule 1910s look. Some people want to make it easier to demolish this stuff and build whatever house you want - the rule is you have to keep the facade or whatever - and I sympathize with that.
But nobody gives a fuck about the brutalist structures being torn down, like the VA in Chicago or the Federal Building in Boston, because they're ugly. I mean they are of significantly greater historical significance than some random dilapidated Victorian home in San Francisco. So the law protects the local community's most mobilized opinion of what's pretty and cute, not what's significant.
People's definition of meaningful or sentimental, when it relates to a past that isn't personally theirs / belonging to their family... it's a very mainstream notion of beauty or awe. It sucks for this tree, those kids should not have chopped it down, whatever, nobody needs to have that conversation. But have you personally ever given a fuck about a sentimental something outside your family that is also ugly?
It's notable that this tree was probably a few hundred years old. That's not especially old by European or tree standards, and this tree was of no real historical significance. But it's older than any of those structures you describe.
The brutalist structures might one day be beloved. Perhaps a few centuries from now. They're certainly built for it; one problem with them is that they're hard to demolish. (And often lousy air flow, which is hard to retrofit because the walls are literally artificial rock.)
Ugly things can get some sentiment once you see it as "yours". Time can do that. Notions of beauty change, and things go in and out of fashion. Even trees have been seen as ugly at various points, when what people wanted was to tear it all down and build things.
Brutalist does not have to be ugly. The Washington, D.C., subway system is brutalist, but Harry Weese's design for the system is beloved by locals and visitors alike.
There are ugly buildings of every architectural style.
This is a great feature. I had a fantastic private office with a view in a brutalist building when most of the staff, far more senior than I, had to use open workspaces, because this particular building was not able to be retrofitted.
> nobody gives a fuck about the brutalist structures being torn down, like the VA in Chicago or the Federal Building in Boston, because they're ugly
In the UK we have listed some of our most famous brutalist buildings for protection. This includes the Barbican Centre in London and the Corbusier inspired Park Hill in Sheffield - the largest listed building in Europe. It's not without controversy though.
I find it amusing and mildly horrifying when people tried to start movements to save buildings like the Tricorn centre in Portsmouth.
The Barbican seems like a good candidate to keep around, because it has some thought gone into it, and people seem to like it, use it and like the accommodation.
Most of the rest seem to fall into the realm of "sad, cheap city-centre retail blocks" and "places to warehouse poor people". Both of which suffered from being soul-crushing, and seemed to just court anti-social behaviour of various forms.
I suppose there's also London's South Bank area. As someone that used to work in the middle of it, the thing we always said was the best thing about working in South Bank was that we could look across the river at basically anything else...
You may not have noticed, but objects literally have no value beyond what people think of them. If a community thinks a building is significant, it is.
And why should we? We value beautiful things and want to preserve them; yes, we put a higher priority on something beautiful but insignifcant than on something significant but ugly. What's wrong with that? Buildings are made by humans for human purposes; if humans value beauty we should make them beautiful.
People have to live in and around those places. Concrete monstrosities make that less pleasant. Brutalist architecture (for the most part, I know there are a few exceptions but they are exceptions) feels impersonal, oppressive, monolithic. It also for the most part feels and looks drab, as the materials dull and stain, and make everything a sad grey-beige. It's the stuff of dystopia. It's the human spirit being relentlessly ground under the weight of impersonal mediocrity.
The whole ethos of 'form follows function' is oxymoronic - making people feel good, making spaces warm, welcoming, decorative, these are all part of 'function'.
So yes, lets tear down the brutalist crap. However well-meaning its proponents were, it's been a failure and it's time to move on.
People still make brutalist buildings. The replacement VA in Chicago is not technically brutalist, but it still blends in with the neighborhood. https://www.mmarchitecturalphotography.com/chicago-architect... No one is going to replace an old Victorian with something similar.
"Opposition to felling ancient trees is a peculiar cause because it seems to unite progressives and conservatives. There is something about taking the life of a being far older than the span of any human life, which has taken many centuries to reach such a size and whose roots and branches support entire ecosystems in miniature, that seems morally repugnant to many. [...]
"It may well make no logical sense, as many have pointed out, to be more upset at the felling of one picturesque tree than at the destruction of whole rainforests. Yet, that is how humans are, for better or worse: we connect emotionally with individuals. The capacity of trees to embody a sort of individuality — to be anthropomorphised, if you like — may go some way towards explaining why our ancestors held them sacred. It is surely the reason why in our own day trees are amongst the most potent symbols of humanity’s unbalanced relationship with nature: dumb victims of our rapacious disregard for living beings with a much longer life cycle than our own."
> There is something about taking the life of a being far older than the span of any human life
I see this with myself, not just with living beings but with anything historical. I noticed myself getting much more upset with ISIS' destruction of ancient sites than human lives, which was quite shocking.
I'm reminded of meme about cross political quadrant synergy that when auth-right and lib-left both wants to conserve nature (because of "conserve" and "nature" respectively), auth-left and lib-right couldn't care less about it (because progress > established things).
It makes me feel some solace that this tree was just a tree. We, humans, gave it significance. But that significance was imaginary. It was just a sycamore. It was only special because we told ourselves stories, and decided it was much more than a sycamore.
Strangely, even though the tree isn't actually dead, we pretend it is, because it won't look like it did when we assigned it significance. So really, nothing of value was lost. All that's happened is our own vanity and need for meaning was injured. And we'd never realize that unless it was felled.
We aren't commemorating a tree. We're commemorating our own need to find meaning in the world.
First of all, feelings are not imaginary, even though they are non-physical, and despite many people not getting them, or having a bad relationship with some of them.
Second, the tree was a landmark. This significance gave it tangible value, as it would attract tourism, which will now be lost.
We will always look for meaning. But when we find it, even in something entirely imaginary (which I don't think it was here - natural beauty has a verifiable positive effect on humans), that's value. And trying to be reductive about it mostly harms your own ability to find meaning and see beauty.
Have you ever been there? The land in that area is rock with about an inch of soil on it, like most moorland - it would not support a forest, it never did(within the last couple thousand years anyway) . Romans didn't build the hadrians wall through a forest after all, the area was already barren then.
And no one is directing me to feel angry - the tree did hold a special place in my heart, I've been to it with my dad shortly before he died, I've been there with my wife(then fiance), with my friends and family, it always felt like a pilgrimage to anyone living in the North East - and the fact that it was destroyed for literally no reason whatsoever makes my blood boil.
I have never been there and it makes me pretty angry as well. The coward(s) that did this probably never suspected the kind of blowback this would create, if they're ever identified they'll have a hard time moving around the UK without meeting people that would like to have a word with them.
> The land in that area is rock with about an inch of soil on it, like most moorland - it would not support a forest, it never did(within the last couple thousand years anyway) .
Most deforestation around Hadrians wall started because of the massive wall construction efforts (it was the HS2 of its day, the largest project the Romans had ever done) and to clear land so it could be defended easily.
> The solution in Germany was a series of forts and fortifications, called limes, which used timber from the great central European forests and ditches to prevent tribal incursions. In contrast, large forests did not exist in Northern England and a great wall was built using stone...
That suggests there couldn't have been that many trees to fell in the first place. The terrain simply doesn't support it up here, about all it's good for is grazing, which is why you'll see field after field of sheep in Northumberland and not a lot else.
It was built of stone but the thousands of soldiers and others required huge amounts of wood, also from the article:
> Using modern day scientific studies of the region and inferring likely effects of the occupation, we can look at the environmental impact of this conflict. There were several major consequences to the environment. First, the area had massive deforestation, which has been confirmed by scientific studies and can be inferred from the increase of population on this frontier. One study indicates that, “it was not until Romano-British times that man had much effect on the forests of the area. Organized clearance and farming in this marginal frontier zone of the Roman Empire was on a scale unparalled in history until recently”
> The land in that area is rock with about an inch of soil on it
Because people abusing of wildfires and a spiral of overgrazing = more wildfires required, that is apparently a behavior as infectious as it was yesterday.
Lack of soil is not an unsolvable problem. Soil can be moved from A to B so we can trow technology at this (and a lot of big shrubs can deal with poor soil, leading the way to bigger trees). The problem is the lack of will, and the never ending presence of criminal activity. If there is cattle in the area, there is a dictatorship of cattle.
>>Lack of soil is not an unsolvable problem. Soil can be moved from A to B so we can trow technology at this
Ok, so no offence but that tells me pretty clearly that you've not been there, moorlands are MASSIVE, the idea that you could move soil there to plant forests is firmly within some very poorly written fiction.
>>The problem is the lack of will
No, it's not. Again, go to Blanchland and Haltwhistle, spend a few days walking the paths and tell me again that this seems like a doable project.
>>and the never ending presence of criminal activity
What are you on about, what criminal activity. It's literally the most sparsely populated region in England, who commits these crimes and what are they? The grouse?
>>If there is cattle in the area, there is a dictatorship of cattle.
There isn't(or there's very few of them), sheep are the preferred animal to graze there, the sheep didn't shape the geological process that created this area though.
I feel like I'm arguing with someone who says that the only reason why there's no forests in the Sahara is the lack of will and not the physical conditions that dictate what the area is.
I don't want to to replace the valuable moorlands by Acer pseudoplatanus or plant trees in an archeological site, but a few thousands years ago there was more tree cover here. Having space for just one tree is in itself a problem that should be fixed. We could put 100 trees in the same location, multiply the number of suitable places to nest by 100 and the ecosystem of moorlands would still have lots of space to exist, plus the bonus of boosting the local biodiversity
This type of tree seeds itself very generously, if we don't see regeneration is because the return of the forest is blocked forever by grazers (aka cattle).
There is a long history of human activity destroying the quality of land, and therefore ruining anything they hoped to get out of it.
The Céide Fields[0] in Ireland are the example that sticks in my head the most. Both because something like it is included in Irish mythological cycles, and because of how it came to be known to the archaeological community.
Much of the UK was deforested at a minimum hundreds of years ago, and often thousands of years ago. Today, England is about 13% forest, and back in 1086 when the Domesday Book was written it was about 15%.
They went around to every single village and town and asked them. The Doomsday book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book) is fascinating because of its thoroughness and completeness at such an early time.
Besides this being ridiculous, I can't make sense of what "balance the prejudice" means. I'm not seeing evidence of prejudice against trees here, nor do I know what that would mean. Someone prejudged that the tree was up to no good and murdered it?
This is almost definitely vandalism, and likely has nothing to do with the conflict between modernity and nature, or with SUVs. The crime wasn't committed by Chevy or Ford, or by an SUV of theirs.
A thousand years ago (and with about a fortieth the population) England had similar forest cover to what it is now. If anything, modern industrial civilization is what enabled the reforestation of the UK.
Do you know anything I can read on the subject? My parents grew up in Norwood in south London which is named for the Great North Wood, which doesn't exist at anything like the extent it used to. I guess the numbers you're using are an average for the whole country, and that some areas that were not forested before now are?
As part of the project they had to cut down a long row of giant pine trees in the park next to the train line.
So when the railway project was complete I took my 8 year old son to the native nursery about bought ten mountain ash seedlings.
Together we planted them in a long line in the park.
Here's pictures of how big mountain ash gets:
https://wilderlands.earth/stories/mountain-ash-the-giants-of...
https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-envir...
https://weareexplorers.co/australias-tallest-tree-joins-100m...
My theory is if you are angry about trees being cut down then take revenge by planting giant trees everywhere.
Sadly I think only one or two of the seedlings have survived - I'll have to replant them.
The point being: where the Sycamore Gap Tree was - go there and plant a forest of the same type of tree. Plant 1,000 of them.