Last week, Peterborough City Council cut down a 600-year-old oak tree, the context for which -- if it can be said to have one -- is just so baffling and infuriating.
Campaigners said the tree - which appears on the Woodland Trust Ancient Tree Register - is one of the last standing oaks from the original Grimeshaw Woods and dates from the 14th Century. ... "Six hundred years it's taken to grow and I've been here for an hour and they've destroyed half of it already. ... He said although the council understood the residents' point of view, "all options to save the tree could have cost the council hundreds of thousands of pounds in repairs and legal fees" if homes were affected by it.
My initial reaction to the story and the reason for its destruction was a string of expletives, the upshot of which was 'wouldn't it just be better to let the bloody houses fall down'. But that's also the wrong way of thinking about it -- those are people's homes, meaningful places to them. It stings, thinking about how those may well not make it another few hundred years, in contrast to a tree, but still: it is meaningful to recognise this.
So the council should have found another way to protect both. But, in one of the articles, I found a quote indicating that even pursuing those options would wipe out the arboreal budget for the year. Doing this one thing would mean doing no other things like planting new trees that year. Zero sum.
And in this is the perfidy of the thing. I truly don't believe that anyone is sat there, twirling a moustache as their plan to kill a six-hundred-year old being comes to fruition. This is not just the outcome of individual decisions, but systems.
And what does that say about our systems? This is practically the definition of an externality problem -- the existence of the tree is not something neatly recognised by any of the human systems at work here, and it is the being in the loop that has no agency nor any 'standing' or material power. By the same token, destroying it -- killing it -- doesn't come with any real, manifest penalty in the contexts of those systems. So, through that lens, it makes complete sense that this is the outcome -- it's one that's essentially all upside with no downside from the point of view of the system -- and the blame is spread thinly, with everyone thinking like they've made the 'correct' proximal decision based on the situation that was presented to them.
It makes me so angry. Even if you just think a tree's a tree and don't see it as a form of complex being -- a life, a whole and complete thing.
But it's okay though, they say, because they'll be planting a hundred sapling oaks to make up for it.
A single 400-year-old oak ... [is] a whole ecosystem of such creatures for which ten thousand 200-year-old oaks are no use at all.
—Oliver Rackham, Woodlands (2006). Quote via an epigram from Wilding, Isabella Tree (2018)
It's not the damned same.