Editor,
The article describing the roadside mechanized practices of tree trimming reminds me of having surgery with a buzzsaw and without sutures or wound care. It happened on my County Road several years ago, and the sight of grotesquely wounded trees is sad.
Transportation corridors are destructive scars on the landscape, be they highways, dirt roads, power lines or pipelines. The fragmentation of our forests by destructive corridors has been described as causing “fractured forests.”
The disrupted soil margins of these corridors provide access to sun, erosion, and invasive plants which damage and disconnect the native habitat. Bite-by-bite, we produce an environmental cutting board upon the land. The margins of managed or destroyed zones become sick ecotones – transition zones between the natural world and the used land.
The ecotone needs to be managed not only to our selfish benefit but also to the healing of nature. To take a buzzsaw to the trees invites pests, mold and infection that can further invade and degrade the health of the forest.
It is true that natural hazards like wildfires, tornadoes, landslides and volcanic eruptions can have equally disastrous impact on undisturbed forests. Who can forget Mount Saint Helens? However, the scars of natural disasters are healed by nature over hundreds or thousands of years. The scars that we create are not healed, but maintained.
We need to invest in careful, biologically informed, and seasonally scheduled maintenance of the margins of our corridors, and also for agricultural, industrial and urban developments, so as to minimize the relentless degradation of the scarred and disconnected ecosystems of our planet. Taking the forest, we must now give back.
To paraphrase Albert Schweitzer, until mankind extends his accountability to all living things, we shall not find peace. Nor shall the planet.
James Helwig