I've collated several messages below related to
the thread about tree hazards and their management.
David Inouye
originally submitted by [email protected], Sun, 20 Jan 2013 23:51:04 -0500
Ecolog: First off, I wish to say that I am sorry
for Wayne's loss of his friend and for the others
who Wayne has known who were lost in such
accidents. He is absolutely right about to
futility of blaming God. Â The larger issue
touched on by some of the others is the
distinction between populations and individuals.
I spoke of risk in the risk assessment context of
population risk. Certainly, the loss of anyone
close to us tends to cause us to ask "Why?" and
"What could have been done?" Those who pointed
out the data on the risks of other types of
accidents versus the risks of trees are also
right in the population risk context. That is the
point I was making. A similar example is venomous
snakes in populated areas. Eradication screws up
the natural order and leads to all snakes being
slaughtered, making things even worse. The same
with wolves. As Wayne has addressed, a reasoned
discussion of how we do a better job of
identifying real hazards, properly addressing
them, and still preserving the environmental
services generally and broadly provided by trees
is the challenge. There is a war on trees. A guy
driving on Old Georgetown Road was killed when a
tree fell on his car. The rest of the trees along
that stretch were taken down. A child was killed
by a falling branch while the boy was playing in
his yard. You can walk through the woods around
here and pull large sticks out of the ground
where they dropped, heavy end down, and impaled
into the ground. I have been twice hiking in
remote areas when large timber crashed for no
apparent reason. Often, trees here fall days
after storms have saturated the ground and made
things unstable. I saw a Letter to the Editor
which blamed roadside trees for the deaths of
many people who run off the road and die when
their car hits a tree where they might have
survived crashing into an open field. (Roadside
power poles were not mentioned.) We have people
who move into a heavily-treed neighborhood only
to clear-cut the property because, where they
grew up, it was open. Pepco, the local electric
company, has used their poor record of restoring
power during storms to launch a full assault on
trees, paid for by customers through the
cooperation of the state's Public Service
Commission. Trees are the obvious bulwark between
us and climate change and the types of extreme
weather such as Hurricane Sandy. The population
risk from the war on trees is much larger than
the individual risks, although maybe that's not
true either. What is needed is more tree planting
to replace those we must cut for public safety,
more recognition that trees stand for way longer
than our feeble lifespans, and that trees provide
the unique vertical habitat that both helps
buffer other trees and allows for Nature to
continue to function even in urban settings. Â
I'd like to think that better tree ordinances
might have preserved an ancient oak, probably
seen by Lincoln, from being removed from my
neighborhood. More focus on treed neighborhoods,
especially bordering public parks (acting as
buffers for the park), and less paranoia about
the threat of large, looming trees overhead might
translated into smarter management. Â When I was
young and told my older brother of my fear of
snakes, he encouraged me to learn more about
them. I did and come to love the marvelous
capabilities of non-legged creatures. We need to
find ways to better accommodate Nature if we are
to survive as a species and conducting a war on trees will not get us there.
Geoff Patton Wheaton, MD "Nothing so needs
reforming as other people's habits." Mark Twain
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originally submitted by [email protected], Mon, 21 Jan 2013 01:11:05 -0500
Ecolog: [NOTICE: Must be deleted without reading
by those who object to the discussion!]
Again, context is everything.
I don't quite understand how I gave the
impression that I was proposing a "war on trees;"
I didn't propose that a single tree be cut down
when my friend was killed, nor when my other
friend was severely injured. The trees in
question were natural trees, not trees planted by
earth cosmeticians in locations unsuited for
trees. Are there exceptions? Certainly. There may
be instances where evildoers or obsessively
risk-averse individuals and groups commit
arborcide without justification. It happens where
I live. Then there are the for-profit tree assassins, and on and on.
Soon after being hired as a park construction
inspector, I was given a set of plans for a major
street through an undeveloped canyon. The plans
indicated that some native trees were to be
planted, 80 feet apart, on each side of the
street (55 mph average speed, signed at 45), four
feet from the curb (a standard specification). It
turned out that the right-of-way was quite wide,
and there were some "daylight" fills that were
quite barren, being disposal sites for the cuts
that had to be made to the canyonside. I planted
those trees well back from the street, in
irregular groupings. These trees are now
considered to be "natural" by almost everyone,
and even though they have grown quite large, they
have not assaulted any cars or murdered anyone,
as far as I know, in the last 43 years or so.
Soon after being hired as supervisor of
"resource-based" (very large) parks, a supervisor
wanted me to sign a work order to have a tree
(alien species, planted 80 feet apart in the
middle of a ten-foot median) replaced that had
been broken off by a car. I refused to sign the
order, imposing "aesthetic blight" on the street
by leaving a 160-foot gap instead of an 80-foot
one. A small step, but I was feeling POWER,
y'see? In the same park another planted, alien
tree fell on a car, seriously injuring the
occupant. This was not the tree's fault, it was
the idiot who planted it and the incompetents who
continue to plant the wrong tree in the wrong
place and fail to nurture and maintain them--no
wonder they become ill and die, innocently
falling into usually heavy, high-speed traffic.
So these cases, in of themselves, are not the
point, nor are the trees the point. The point is
that the self-proclaimed "arborists," "landscape
architects," some licensed or otherwise certified
to their economic advantage, not to mention the
politicians and ill-informed but well-intentioned
citizens who righteously exercise their POWER
based upon little actual or relevant knowledge,
overpowering those who are aware of hazardous
trees, and preventing corrective action in time.
Were it not for such incompetence, the number of
deaths, the degree of misery, pain, and anguish could be reduced.
What if this and other conditions of modern life
were not determined by POWER alone, but by
reason? Yep, I am dreaming. The concentration of
POWER continues to gain ground on cooperation and
reason. The causal "organism?" Self-righteousness.
WT
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originally submitted by [email protected],
Mon, 21 Jan 2013 06:29:41 -0500
Folks, I am a fan of dead trees and recognize
their benefit for wildlife and local ecosystems.
I teach about how great they are in my backyard
wildlife habitat program and recently bought the
book A Log's Life to integrate it into one of
my early childhood programs. However, to echo
Jesse, hazard trees are deemed so for a reason,
and if a tree is potentially hazardous and in a
public area, then it presents a premise
liability. I also include that info in my programs for adults.
In Maryland, one can sue on the basis of wrongful
death if a person is killed by a tree that a
property owner or manager failed to take down if
that tree shows sign of rot and disease and
presents a potential risk. In 2011, a lawsuit was
filed against the Carroll County government on
those grounds after a rotted tree fell and killed
a young boy at a nature camp. I am not sure if
the case has been settled yet, but after the boy
died, a lot of local parks were prompted to
immediately address any potentially hazardous
trees. Maryland isn't the only state which has
wrongful death laws associated with unstable trees.
While I am an advocate for decaying trees and
their benefits, I have to agree with the notion
of removing hazard trees before they can live
up to their name. If the tree is not within
striking distance of a trail or another area
frequently used by people, then leave it up. If
it is, then take it down and leave sections of it
to decompose. However, one preventable injury or
death from a tree far outweighs the potential
wildlife and ecosystem benefits, even if the
hazard probability is small. This is not a war
on trees. It is a common sense approach to a preventable problem.
K. Wixted
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originally submitted by [email protected], Mon, 21 Jan 2013 09:59:59 -0500
You guys have taken a far too hypercritical
position regarding this matter, and prolonged
discussion yourselves. A person asked a question
about dead tree removal on a property he has
responsibility for. Another suggested leaving as
much of the tree as practical for bird habitat. A
third pointed out the risks inherent in that
practice. A handful decried one or the other
position. The original poster will make his own
judgement and act accordingly. Let it go, and get
on with what you think matters.
David McNeely
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originally submitted by [email protected], Mon, 21 Jan 2013 12:02:17 -0500
I have found this conversation useful, and food for thought. I work in a
heavily used urban open space preserve, and we had dead trees after a fire.
Although my preference would have been to retain the trees as wildlife
habitat, we removed the trees closest to the trails and most likely to fall
on the trail. Since then, most of the trees further out from the trail have
also fallen.
Danielle
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originally submitted by [email protected], Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:28:48 -0500
Well, this issue came up in a discussion of a very practical question of
hastening the decomposition of a stump in a populated area. Not
earthshaking, but even hugely important projects are going to run into
details like this.
More importantly, this conversation has provided a wonderful opportunity of
discussing a mistake that those of us educated in the sciences are
particularly prone to making: substituting statistical knowledge for causal
knowledge. Only causal knowledge can tell us what effects an intervention
(removing or not removing dead trees from urban areas) is likely to have.
The problem is well-illustrated by this XKCD comic: http://xkcd.com/795/ .
Jane Shevtsov
