The recent pushback against Mountain View County removing a few trees and improving drainage on a local road as well as remediating a snow trap in the process got me thinking about our relationship with trees.
My own road is well treed, but has sufficient setback for water drainage and snow accumulation. That’s the way it should be on a public road.
First off, aspens or poplars are notoriously short-lived trees that quickly decay and create a blow-down hazard along roadways.
That’s not desirable when emergency response is required after a windstorm that routinely blows across the road; or if you’re lucky, just puts a crimp in your trip to town. Guess who pays the bill to have them removed?
We all have a love affair with trees. In Saskatchewan, when they find one, they apparently put a fence around it and call it a provincial park.
Climate change activists have claimed trees can save the planet via CO2 sequestration, which has resulted in a push to plant sometimes unsuited species or locating them where they don’t have a chance of survival.
Even our own county has restrictions on tree removal.
And in some jurisdictions, it has become almost impossible to harm a tree without dire consequences.
In Europe or even in parts of Canada, farmers are prohibited from removing bushes or trees that are encroaching on their already small, difficult-to-work fields.
Then there was the case of the Lake Louise ski resort fined $2.1 million for cutting down 38 endangered whitebark pines.
Fires in California and Australia are direct results of thoughtless forest propagation and poor management – catastrophic climate change or not.
Some of the fires in California were caused because the state curtailed brush clearing under powerlines, which were in poor repair because of California’s desperate financial situation.
Certainly trees sequester carbon from the atmosphere, but when Mother Nature takes a turn, all that carbon is released back into the atmosphere, causing immense damage in the process.
Trees are good; an essential part of the ecosphere. Without them, our lives would be vastly different – maybe non-existent.
But they need to be managed, or they can easily destroy all we have built, as well as kill us.
It might be a surprise to some, but the Beast, the name attributed to the Fort McMurray wildfire of 2016, is similar to the Big Burn, a name given to a fire in the early 20th century that started in Idaho, burned its way through Montana and well into Alberta, killing 78 firefighters as well as a significant number of others.
These mega-fires were a regular part of the landscape before settlers and loggers arrived.
I can’t help but believe we’re doing our part to bring them back.
Hans C. Ullmann,
Mountain View County
