I have a dream. It’s all about the day on which the first of Sydney’s antisocial tree vandals cops a truly punitive fine or, better still, prison time as they more likely would if they’d so cynically destroyed private property or public infrastructure just for the sake of a water view.
The next best thing, for the time being anyway, is hearing that another stolen view for which hundreds of native trees were wilfully lopped has been retributively denied to one more narcissistic environmental felon.
The epidemic of illegal tree felling to enhance views, especially around Sydney Harbour, is perhaps the ultimate in “FU society” acts of wealthy entitlement. So when a local council responds with a sucker punch (as Lane Cove council has, like others, to an appalling act of environmental terrorism last year by obscuring the view with a giant banner), the many of us who are fond of urban trees can’t help but spontaneously cheer from the cheaper seats.
Sydney is a city of sea and vivid light. Any of us with the bodily ability and access to public transport can walk by the sparkling ocean or the azure harbour, just as we can delight in the majesty of the national parks surrounding the place or in the maze of copses of ancient figs, eucalypts and casuarinas on our public suburban spaces.
But Sydney is also a city of glaring social, economic and housing inequality, a place of startling rapacity and greed as evidenced by its long history of widespread alleged and established corruption involving developers and authorities. It is the Australian city that wears the disproportionate wealth of its few more ostentatiously than any other.
Such exclusive conspicuous wealth is manifest in many ways, not least in cars and boats – but particularly in waterside property where the sea is visible from the house. Just a mere “glimpse’’ (forgive the real estate agent parlance) of Whiteley-esque harbour or bridge from the corner of the upstairs dunny window can bring enormous extra value to a Sydney house, while an expansive view can literally add millions to a waterfront palace. Trees just get in the way even though they were there first – often by hundreds of years.
But such is the avarice of some developers that they apparently arrogantly bake in the piddling cost of any modest potential fine and reputational damage for felling publicly owned trees. They know they are unlikely to be caught and if they do the fines will be a pittance against their obscene profits. Jail? Don’t be ridiculous. They’re just trees ...
Councils can issue on-the-spot fines for illegal tree removals of $3,000 for individuals and $6,000 for businesses if they can prove culpability. But prosecutions in the New South Wales land and environment court, where the maximum fine for tree removal by an individual is $220,000, are notoriously hard to achieve.
Aside from their aesthetic beauty (who doesn’t marvel when looking up the trunk of a towering eucalypt or wonder at the life of an ancient, giant Ficus macrophylla with its cephalopod roots and resident birds, mammals, reptiles and insects), trees are a hugely undervalue public asset. Were they afforded a higher cultural, historical and monetary value (remember, some in and around Sydney are precolonial), the bastards who fell them to enhance views would be more vigorously criminally pursued in line with those who vandalise public monuments and buildings.
As I’ve written previously, too little mind is given to the physical, psychological, community, environmental, spiritual, historical and climatic benefit of trees (not to mention their sentience) that are being sacrificed in an epidemic of disgraceful small-minded, deep-pocketed, arrogant water-view-lust all around this city and elsewhere.
As arboricultural scientist Greg Moore points out: “People think of trees in gardens and streets as essentially being decoration. They don’t think of them as being functional … but the impact of illegal vegetation removal in terms of the urban heat island effect and local temperatures is enormous.”
A particularly ugly form of cold and calculated psychopathy – extreme narcissism if you like – impels those who so contemptuously steal from the community to better their exclusive water views and, therefore, bolster their wealth. But some people, it seems, also just seem to hate trees.
I see it in my neighbourhood. In some very old and beautiful street trees that are home to an abundance of wildlife, and which do not impede anyone’s water views, whose trunks have been drilled and injected with poison so that now their boughs are slowly dying. I see it just up my street where council recently planted new trees on nature strips only to have the saplings snapped off at their bases within days. Who would do this?
Legislators need to rethink the value of trees and how to better protect them – in line with community expectation and interests – from some of society’s most wealthy and craven vandals.
Impeding the stolen views of tree vandals with giant banners is the least they deserve for such arrogant offences against society. Bring on the criminal convictions and the truly punishing fines. That’s my dream.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
