They must have been talking to some of our City councilmembers
In Some Northwest Residents See Trees Differently After Storm, the New York Times reports on fierce winds that toppled trees around Seattle.
Then came the stunning winds of Dec. 14 and 15. At speeds just shy of 70 miles an hour in Seattle and beyond 110 m.p.h. in the Cascade Range to the east, they knocked the Puget Sound region on its back, leaving more than a million people without power, tens of thousands for more than a week.
In the storm’s wake, some residents apparently felt compelled to chop down trees in a pre-emptive strike of sorts:
“People get tired of the trees falling on their property and on their roofs, and they just want them all cut down,” said Sarah Griffith, the urban forestry program manager with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources.
The storm also provided a convenient opportunity to attack tree preservation ordinances:
It also comes after many cities around Puget Sound have strengthened ordinances against cutting down trees, which some people are now using to accuse the cities and King County of contributing to the storm damage.
Perhaps they heard about the dangers of San Antonio’s tree ordinance. When City Council slashed the ordinance last November, members heard testimony, and even saw videos, about our vicious local trees which poke out children’s eyes with their thorns and crush them with their limbs.
There seem to be countless reasons to cut down trees. But the main reason, which is rarely mentioned, is to increase developers’ profits.
As the Times notes:
There is no count of how many trees were lost in the storm. Whatever the total, it is sawdust compared with the mountainsides’ worth clear-cut over a century of logging in the Pacific Northwest and the development of recent decades…