When I lived in the city, I had some sad looking trees on my street that often ended up covered with trash on the weekends (making them look that much more sad). One day a public utility truck backed up into one across the street from my apartment and left it there, broken and dying. The city never bothered to replant it. It’s all just a bad memory now – or was.
Moving to Cape Cod it was so wonderful to be suddenly surrounded by trees. All these trees create oxygen and filter the air making it a lot easier to breathe here. The trees also provide shade which lets me survive without air conditioning every summer. And it’s no coincidence that there is more wildlife here, trees provide many animals with food and a place to live. Aside from all of their economic and health benefits, their very beauty gives me a sense of peace.
This winter that peace was disturbed when I saw the telltale orange ribbons around several trees on historic route 6A. I am no tree expert, but none of the trees looked sick – nor did any of them hang over the road or impact driving in any way. If anything, I would like to see people drive slower on 6A, not faster. It should not be treated as a speedway; it is a historic, predominantly residential road. There is no need for wildlife to be routinely killed every day by people speeding off to nowhere important. And it’s not much safer for people; although some drivers are extremely polite, others will zoom by even when you’re in a crosswalk.
I did a little online research and found the facts around who is responsible for this tree removal, and why it was done, to be unclear. One article mentioned that there there is a committee set up to get rid of the sick trees on 6A. That committee is supposed to plant trees in their place. Another article mentioned it was Mass Department of Transportation that was getting rid of trees, and that the 6A Tree Committee was actually trying to protect them. With this misinformation out there, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the project was mismanaged. And the residents of the area are losing out, as are the tourists who come here to relax and enjoy nature.
I thought we were in an economic crisis, aren’t there better things to spend money on now than this? There are buildings you can’t replace on 6A, not sure why trees are not seen as historically important. They are their own ecosystems, with years of history and hundreds of organisms and microorganisms relying on them for food and a place to live.
It turns out the people who were supposed to decide what trees were sick were asleep on the job. Mass Department of Transportation needs to check their arborists’ resumes, because it turns out that several of the trees chosen to cut down were not sick. Here are some disappointing facts from the Yarmouth Register and Barnstable Enterprise:
- One tree, correctly identified as rotted through and hollow, wasn’t located where the list placed it, but across the street.
- Four were a species called London Plane, which has an exfoliating bark which said leads people often to mistake the tree as dead or diseased.
- A few healthy trees were marked for removal because they created sight hazards, many with scars in the trunk where people had repeatedly smashed into them.
- The historic district committee told the Mass Department of Transportation that the committee wanted to see trees planted to replace those cut down. Mass Department of Transportation replied that they do not get funding for such endeavors. They recommended the committee try elsewhere in state government.
A few were saved thankfully because: “the committee noted that only a few branches were rotted and needed removal, or that a diseased tree would likely crash into the woods, and not the road, if it fell.”
To me this whole mess has been less an exercise in protecting public safety, than in one of utter carelessness. I think the money used to cut these beautiful trees down would have been better served to buy some cautionary road signs for 6A to protect wildlife, trees and me. Like this photo below taken by Oscar Voss – we need some like these.
Leave a Reply