In your example, the likely outcome depending on the jurisdiction would be some kind of fine (neglecting some kind of physical confrontation). Just because something negative would happen to me (maybe more parties as well if one includes the trees, the neighbor, anyone/thing else that tries to be involved in such), doesn't really change the longer scale. We kill plenty of things in our daily lives without a second thought with every breath we take, to favor some killing over others is arbitrary. Some will manage to survive in some form (maybe even unrecognizable to humans today) is such an end state where all trees are gone, most who are dogmatic about others trying to do so, will not.

Many eukaryote's from billions of years ago died out, and some went on to become humans. If one could imagine that those eukaryote's that died out then could ponder the future, no doubt plenty would have sought to be comforted by some kind of pause in their development for some kind of eukaryote safety net to avoid such far future couplings in the form of humans.