Showing posts with label urban density. Show all posts
Showing posts with label urban density. Show all posts

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Destruction of a Chestnut Tree





IN MEMORIUM
The horse chestnut tree shown above was cut down this month, after this Oak Bay garden was subdivided and sold for the construction shown at the top.

Presiding over the end of a quiet dead-end two block street, the magnificence of the tree had filled the eye. Its green canopy arched hugely against the sky and almost spanned the lot which is now a construction site. To contemplate its bulk from the road was a pleasure (to grasp the volume of carbon it absorbed from the atmosphere and oxygen it gave off challenged the imagination), and to walk under the tree was another order of experience altogether. It was to enter a shady room, a shrine tree-fashioned, a zone of peace and power, the huge patterned trunk standing stalwartly beside the visitor. It was to feel the protective wisdom of the tree, protecting one from the noisy, contentious, commercialized world beyond the garden. How many seasons of weather -- of storm, drought, rainfall and life-giving sun -- did this tree live through? How many times was it weighed down by snow, whose fall carpeted its feet for peaceful wintry times of rest? How many thousands of birds found shelter in its branches over the decades?

What passed through the minds of the people who came with chainsaws to kill it? Did they pause, unsure for a moment, letting the nobility of the tree into their consciousness?

What did the new owners of the property, who bought it to subdivide it, think about the tree? Did they ever look at it? Did they think about what a felicitous succession of life-supporting circumstances (soil, light, space, climate) must have occurred for an organism of this size and majesty to have developed? Did it occur to them to wonder whether what nature so elegantly constructs, humanity should be destroying?

Did any member of the Oak Bay Council go to visit this tree before permission was given to destroy it? Does Council see itself as a handmaiden of the development industry, or as guardian of the interests of the whole community and the character of the municipality?

Did the tree somehow know what would befall it? It seemed to, it felt resigned and hopeless to people standing under it in its last days. Trees carry energies and pick up thoughts, they communicate with us if we will communicate with them, as shamans and pagans have known since ancient times. Standing under the chestnut tree felt like standing under a weight of shared knowledge, shared grief. Maybe the tree was pulling its thoughts down into its roots, which will live a long time after humanity amputated its limbs and cut it down to a stump. The stump was yanked from the soil but the tree's being will pull back into the roots which extend as far sideways as the tree was wide, and as far underground as the tree was high. The living surface of the garden is desecrated now, it already bears the atrocity of concrete foundations poured where the noble giant had lived. The root cells however will carry on sustaining untold trillions of micro-organisms, worms and insects for many years to come, keeping the soil fertile under the new building, ready for an unimagined future when the land may be uncovered once again, when urban debris may be cleared away and something living may grow anew. Whoever lives in the new “units” will live over a destroyed civilization which still whispers and pulses with bio-chemical energies, holding its knowledge in the underworld until the surface is one day somehow reclaimed for nature: a resurrection.


Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Why Do Victoria City Councillors Hate Gardens? (1082 Richmond)












It's the hottest day of the year so far -- 30 degrees in the shade, and some of the shade on Richmond Street was provided by the grand mature chestnut tree which presides over the garden shown above, and over the public sidewalk next to it, giving walkers a moment of welcome relief from the heat. The owner of this heritage house and garden however has applied for permission to destroy them and replace them by a denser strata development.

Council members discussed the loss of rental units and wondered whether the house could be removed to a Gulf Island, thereby being saved. But what about the garden? The chestnut and other trees, the shade, the green space of Victoria? How can Victoria's green space be saved if gardens are continually paved for "densification"?

Every large tree taken out creates more holes in the urban forest canopy. The result is an urban "heat island" -- another of those which dot the planet as global warming hot spots.

Life on Earth began in the oceans. As plant life forms evolved, the cells they were made of learned to live on land, and as they migrated they enclosed and took their ocean environment with them, cells being 80% mineral-filled water. Now, 84% of life on land lives as or within trees (e.g. the 90,000 fungus species, 900,000 insect species, and so on) -- taking all that water with it. Less tree cover = less life supported = less water = a dried up Earth. Life is Gaia's greatest transformative tool: spreading life forms transform geological landscapes, trees make clouds and rain, plants make oxygen. Imagine how the planet must have looked before all those water-filled life forms spread across it.

Now, humanity is reversing the process, banishing space for natural life forms, extending deforestation and desertification, expanding the heat islands from the cities outward. That is quite a process for a City Council to agree to become part of. There can't be a single gardener among them.


Monday, July 20, 2009

Nature Deficit Disorder Created by Urban Density


"... Researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine-Purdue University and the University of Washington reported that greener neighborhoods are associated with slower increases in children’s body mass, regardless of residential density. One reason that last point is important ... is that it dispels the mistaken assumption that more green equals more sprawl.

We need nearby nature everywhere, especially in the most urban neighborhoods. That principle must be among the central precepts of any planning for the future of urban design, education, and health care – and should be at the forefront of any discussion of child obesity ..."

These statements come from "People In Nature," by Richard Louv, in Psychology Today, Jan. 2009. Richard Louv coined the term "nature deficit disorder," from which today's increasingly obese, sedentary, allergy-afflicted children suffer, because they do not get out into the woods, meadows and beaches which earlier generations had easy access to. Of course, they never will, if we destroy the woods, meadows and beaches in the urban settings in which over half of humanity now grow up.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Big Close Houses Mean Brown Dying Trees

The tree in the middle of this photo has gone brown -- where once it stood near little cottages at Gonzales Bay it is now crowded by monster houses. Damage to its roots during their construction, or lack of water due to the strain on the aquifer may be responsible -- now it is reduced to being an example of how building destroys the urban forest.

The houses on Gonzales Beach have a sea view, but thanks to the cement retaining walls they are built behind, the bay they look over contains ever less marine life. The cement walls cause incoming waves to bounce back, changing the kind of habitat the bay used to be and dislocating seaweeds, sea bottom and associated species like crabs, clams and sea worms.