The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts
economist.com
economist.com
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.
It would be nice to see more government collaboration where citizens can assist in ways that will actually stick.
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"
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.
The other thing they can do is to restrict parking: replace parking lots with parks (and more trees) and more buildings.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
It had been a local landmark for centuries.
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??
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.
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.
Try cutting down your mayor's favorite tree in his yard. See how he feels about that.
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.
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.
The Berlin Wall is almost gone, but I don't think anyone will forget it in a hurry.
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.
It was a good laugh tho the locals took me out for drinks.
Not quite a straight line nor the shortest, but a well known route. Someone posted about it on HN within the last couple of weeks.
You can read more about coppicing on the national coppice federation: https://ncfed.org.uk/public/coppicing/
"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."
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!
But before conviction, not having a motive furthers certain defenses, and those possibilities can be useful in the context of plea bargaining.
(One of the first few images is of a ninja turtle raping a pokemon.)
https://www.perthnow.com.au/travel/europe/sycamore-gap-was-t...
(that's an Australian site but I've yet to see a UK one with the same level of balance and detail)
"Mr Renwick was quick to protest his innocence. “You’ve got the wrong feller,” he told reporters."
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 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.
include use of gen z messaging platforms and a lovable geriatric millennial character who plays the role of the senior inspector.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itIFlQaIAIQ
https://apnews.com/article/bicyclist-killed-teens-vegas-murd...
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.
I will never not find that bizarre. And sad.
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?
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.
Look up what docile means.
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?
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.
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.
There are ugly buildings of every architectural style.
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.
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.
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...
"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."
— https://thecritic.co.uk/sycamore-gap-and-britains-sacred-tre...
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.
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.
Second, the tree was a landmark. This significance gave it tangible value, as it would attract tourism, which will now be lost.
Basically, this isn't new. At all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This tree used just a tiny part of them.
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
That would be cheap and perfectly doable
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).
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.
> 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”
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.
(Yes, I know they arguably sucked. But still)
Industrial civilization may not make it to 300.