Excessive Tree Removal After Bushfire
If you love trees as we do, which is why we chose to live in the bush, prepare yourself for an emotional roller coaster ride after a bushfire comes through your area. It is nearly 1 year since the bushfire passed through our area and the chainsaws were still going just last weekend. The sound of the chainsaw brings such pain to our hearts, then BOOM……. the loud thud as another home (a large tree with hollows) for wildlife hits the ground. This is followed by many more hours of noisy chainsawing as the tree is chopped up into smaller parts. Feel the serenity!
The weird thing is when the bushfire event happens you are so relieved that it is over that you don’t realise the emotional ride you need to go on after that. After the bushfire we were actually looking forward to the new biodiversity that was going to re-appear spurred on by the fire event which re-invigorates our indigenous plants. If only we realised how many other people did not feel this way and were so traumatised that they took out the blame on our” indigenous plants, the “bush” and in particular trees of which most are eucalypts.
Trees have been felled almost constantly since the bushfire. Mainly in the 3 months immediately after when people just went crazy with bulldozers and chainsaws taking out their anger on trees, removing in minutes what many took over 50 years or so to grow to their size (last bushfire around here was about 50 years ago). Around spring another heavy time for ”cleaning up” in preparation for the next bushfire season. This year must have been especially bad as the Royal Comission into the Black Saturday fires announced that local government laws were no longer valid and that people could remove trees within 10 metres of there house without getting any kind of permit.
It has been a really stressful and emotional ride. We felt the pain for each tree that was toppled by surprise or by being tagged with a ribbon for future removal, so we had longer to feel distressed about it. We understood that there were some dead trees (which still can be animal homes) and dangerous trees that need to be removed, but what we observed was clearly outside these boundaries and a clear disregard for the beauty of that tree or it’s potential as a home for our wildlife.
We will never understand why people chose to live here if they have removed all the trees – it just becomes another suburb and there are already plenty of them so why not go and live there if you don’t’ like the trees. If the trees are all cut down from here, then we ask ourselves “where can we move to where the trees are safe and the wildlife have homes as we don’t want to live in a suburb?” It is a classic case of NIMBY syndrome – they like the trees but “not in my back yard”.
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