And Mount Albert’s trees come down
tranquility is what you get.
We belong to a small group that looks after rat traps, so we’ve had a little bit to do with the authority. They are positive, enthusiastic, eager to make things work, eager to see a mission realised: to honour a sacred place, to make it a place everyone can enjoy.
Earlier this year they announced they’d be taking down 50 elms affected by dutch elm disease.
How was this going to look? What kind of sad barren emptiness would this create? It made no appreciable difference, really, probably because 50 trees on the maunga amounts to not all that much. Certainly not a third.
The authority is working to a longterm plan. This perhaps bewilders some people because here in Aotearoa New Zealand we do tend to feel more at home with your short-term ad hoc, sort-her-out-later, she’ll-be-right approach.
On O¯ wairaka what this entails is taking out about 300 exotic trees to make room to regenerate thousands of native plants.
But cutting down a fully grown oak tree can’t be a good thing can it? No. And yes.
If your long-term plan is to restore a maunga to its earlier state and that involves generating thousands of natives plants and trees, expert opinion – from arborists, from the Tree Council – is that the best time to take out existing trees is now, rather than trying to extract them some years further along when it’s harder to do without harming the growing plants and trees.
What we will end up with is more than we have now. That can’t be a bad thing, can it?
Maybe, according to some people – especially the Hobson Pledge crowd who know a hijackable opportunity when they see one.
Never mind the fact that this arrangement is the outcome of a treaty settlement, out of which has come a generous sharing arrangement. Never mind that the Tu¯ puna Maunga Authority has a statutory right to make these decisions, even if they prove to be, as we see in this instance, er, generous and far-sighted.
Every time this sort of thing happens, all the old objections take another trundle around the circus ring and the same sad old clowns who can’t seem to settle into a content retirement put on their outsize shoes.
Will it one day dawn on them that these settlements, these efforts to right wrongs, to mend the damage of colonisation, have actually been a force for good, a step towards making this place richer?
For now, they’re saplings, these efforts. But they grow a little each day.
Cutting down a fully grown oak tree can’t be a good thing can it? No. And yes.