A hundred yellow ribbons
Old, giant trees have great mana, writes David Slack. Then along comes some clown with a chainsaw.
The older I get, the more I believe that great age should be the preserve of oaks and kauri.
Where have all the trees gone? Have they gone at all? On Twitter, where I spend so much of my sad and disconnected life, no-one can say for sure.
Someone from the Tree Council suggested one in three trees had come down in Auckland since the previous Government simplified tree rules and let a thousand chainsaws boom. Other people on Twitter suggested that was nonsense. Polite discussion ensued.
All I know is that almost every day I go for a run and almost every day there’s a new stump somewhere in the neighbourhood, and I really don’t like where this seems headed.
It can take more than half a dozen cycles of property boom and bust for some trees to grow to maturity, but never mind, a property owner has the absolute right to ignore that.
What he likes is the beauty of the neighbourhood, with all those lovely trees. What he doesn’t like is the one in his garden that’s blocking his view.
Perhaps you should be entitled to do whatever you fancy with your two million-dollar property. But what would the neighbourhood look like if we all thought that way?
At a rate of one in three, it shouldn’t take too long to find out, and what a shame that it will take so very long to put it right again.
More rights for trees, please, and thank you to the Urban Tree Alliance New Zealand, who met the other day in an Auckland park to exhort everyone to adopt trees and undertake to take care of them, to water them, to show them some love.
Let me cite an Oxford study. A century ago an entomologist took a close look at the mighty oak beams of an Oxford college dining hall and found they were full of beetles. How would they find the replacement oak they’d need? There might might be some growing on college lands, someone thought.
They called in the college forester, because naturally Oxford had lands and a forester, and sure enough, he told them he’d been waiting to hear from them, as had the forester before him and the one before that, all the way back to the 14th century.
When the college was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted so that when the dining hall beams inevitably became infested, there would be timber to replace them.
This ‘study’ is in fact a sermon from the internet and I have no idea of its veracity, but what it says about foresight and the sweep of time is sound as oak. How solid it feels in an age of just-in-time management; and corporations tyrannised by quarterly results; and oceans awash in plastic.
I have reached that age where your greyness can make you invisible. Friends tell me I’d be altogether more conscious of this by now if I were a woman. I do not doubt it. If society discriminates against you in at least one way, it tends not to stop just there.
In a fancy Auckland restaurant this week, my friend, who is a few years younger than me, arrived early, took a seat and waited for the rest of us to arrive. For half an hour she sat unnoticed as staff came and went andnever cast her a glance. I joined her and for 10 minutes we were both of us grey ghosts.
Perhaps it was poor service; or perhaps nature was simply doing its work.
It was unnerving but actually, I’m already reconciled to what this means. I tweeted about it, but merely because I was anxious to reunite with my old friend liquor (and thank you everybody on Twitter, and no I don’t think I’m Aaron Gilmour).
We clever humans continue to make advances in the science of eternal life. It would be just my luck to be still alive for it and thus become the oldest, crankiest person on earth forever. Three thousand more years of Toto, singing about the rains in Africa! Hold me back.
The older I get, the more I believe that great age should be the preserve of oaks and kauri, because honestly, look at the state of the planet. We just haven’t done enough to earn it yet.
@DavidSlack