If a Tree Falls in a Forest, 364 Days a Year, Does Anyone Hear It?
One day a year we celebrate Arbor Day by planting trees. But there are 363 days - we'll disregard Christmas, the sort of a pro-logging holiday. The zeitgeist of the world, you'd think if you followed the news, is plant trees, trees to keep the cities shady, to keep the forests thriving, to provide shelter and food for birds and bugs and animals, and to capture CO2 that helps reduce global warming. Saving trees is the word of the day, the much ballyhooed choice. However day in and day out, people find all sorts of reasons to cut trees.
We all hear about the Amazon deforestation. Brazil's rate of deforestation increased last year despite efforts to stop illegal logging. For perspective, the rate of deforestation in the 1990's was 7,000 square miles per year. Starting in 2000, the rate increased to ~9,500 square miles per year. The rate decreased for a couple of years until 2007, when in the last 5 months, loggers cut a whopping 7000 square miles of forest. What happened?
The environmental minister told the Financial Times last week, in "Brazil takes battle to the Amazon", that the rate of deforestation had temporarily decreased because the government started arresting corrupt officials. But others say that public policies and populist local politicians still encourage logging. Perhaps the rate simply correlates with commodity prices, and the recent rise of illegal logging occurred when cattle ranchers cleared land to meet the beef demand and profit rose. So. arguably, rising food prices might be a reason to cut down trees.
But there are many other reasons why people fell trees besides for food. In each case there's a logical, rational reason. Here are some recent examples:
- To Protect Your Truck: A mailman in Vancouver, Washington hacked at more that 30 fruit trees along his route because the city wouldn't trim them and he wanted to protect his truck.
- For Your Solar Panels: For six years two neighbors in Sunnyvale, California engaged in a legal battle to resolve whether a resident who wanted solar panels could force his neighbor to cut down some redwoods. The 30 year old Solar Shade Control Act outlines the rules governing neighbors trees and solar panels.
- For Aesthetics: Every so often a corner estate gets sold and the new owners begin refashioning it as their home. First the old toilets get discarded curbside. Last, despite the opposite trend in places like Miami and LA to replace non-native palm trees with shade trees, in some neighborhoods in California quixotic homeowners replace shade trees with exotic palm trees. I've seen this happen ALL over.
- To Confront the Rebels: The president of Chad cut down "centuries-old trees" so that the leader could "be adequately protected". Said one bicyclist watching the trees fall: "When I was a child, soldiers used to stop us touching the trees...[n]ow they are being destroyed."
While Chad acted in the name of terrorism, the US for some reason didn't deploy that reasoning when it moved forward to develop its national forest areas. Last week the state of California sued the U.S. Forest Service, that wants to open more than 500,000 acres of California national forest for roads and oil drilling. The state wants to keep these forests free of roads.
State Attorney General Jerry Brown told the Los Angeles Times "I find it kind of ironic that the federal government won't let us clean up our cars and they now want cars going through these forests." California accuses the Forest Service of violating the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act by moving ahead with development plans and disregarding the state's laws. California enacted a moratorium on road construction in "pristine areas of its national forests" in 2006, according to the LA Times. But sometimes federal governments make the National Forests earn their keep, come hell or high water.
And so each of 364 new days a year, anyone can manufacture a fine reason to chop a tree.
