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The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

economist.com

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Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#81

Post by dudeinjapan »

desas wrote: post #78
doctorpangloss wrote: post #10

In my community: I love the cutsie pootsie Victorians everywhere, the time-capsule 1910s look. Some people want to make it easier to demolish this stuff and build whatever house you want - the rule is you have to keep the facade or whatever - and I sympathize with that. But nobody gives a fuck about the brutalist structures being torn down, like the VA in Chicago or the Federal Building in Boston, because they're ugl…

> nobody gives a fuck about the brutalist structures being torn down, like the VA in Chicago or the Federal Building in Boston, because they're ugly In the UK we have listed some of our most famous brutalist buildings for protection. This includes the Barbican Centre in London and the Corbusier inspired Park Hill in Sheffield - the largest listed building in Europe. It's not without controversy though.

There are a few brutalist buildings worth keeping. Just like there are a few shits you are proud of enough to snap a pic on your iPhone.

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#82

Post by Tanoc »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #79
pstuart wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other Portland tree fail was where the city did plant trees they didn't bother to care for them: https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/08/09/trees-planted-by-the-c... It would be nice to see more government collaboration where citizens can assist in ways that will actually stick.

It's not a "tree fail" to remove some trees if it means a substantial conversion of passenger car to bus and bike use which reduces CO2 consumption. If the bike lane causes one person to give up their car and commute by bike, that's worth hundreds of trees per year . The same is true for solar. There are a lot of cases where cutting down a few trees for a solar array means a substantial increase in CO2 offset, more t…

The planning might be very detailed and considerate, but the execution is often botched. The people doing the surveys and consultations are not the people who end up doing construction. Because of pressure the people doing construction often have a "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" approach to non-structural things like flora. If I had a dollar for the amount of times I've seen mudslides or embankments that eroded away because the workers on site chopped down unnecessary amounts of trees to store equipment closer, I'd be able to buy a movie ticket. Which, y'know, it's only like fourteen dollars. But that's still too many times.

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#83

Post by oooyay »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #79
pstuart wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other Portland tree fail was where the city did plant trees they didn't bother to care for them: https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/08/09/trees-planted-by-the-c... It would be nice to see more government collaboration where citizens can assist in ways that will actually stick.

It's not a "tree fail" to remove some trees if it means a substantial conversion of passenger car to bus and bike use which reduces CO2 consumption. If the bike lane causes one person to give up their car and commute by bike, that's worth hundreds of trees per year . The same is true for solar. There are a lot of cases where cutting down a few trees for a solar array means a substantial increase in CO2 offset, more t…

> If the bike lane causes one person to give up their car and commute by bike, that's worth hundreds of trees per year.

Where they did this is by my house, so I think I can speak to this a bit. It was not good planning, not that you can only have one or the other. Trees are also huge fighters of climate change heat casualties. The tree coverage keeps the ground and, specifically, the asphalt cooler: https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/06/07/a-major-investment-in-...

Without the trees "heat islands" have developed and surprise, surprise they're in places where people have less money to throw at making the city to keep both a priority in their neighborhoods. The lack of tree coverage is also necessitating the purchase of cooling systems which many people can't afford (and yes, in Portland we do have people dying in their homes from high heat) - so the trees being missing necessitates subsidizing AC units for folks, which is a tangible cost now associated with lack of tree coverage vs proper tree coverage.

> I wish uninformed people would stop trying to "gotcha" environmental progress. Believe it or not, the people planning these things are much more educated in the subject than a bunch of software engineers and "entrepreneurs"

Not to "gotcha" you or anyone else, but it was the city planners themselves who came out with this mea culpa and did a study on the heat islands. Our government is very unique and not very cohesive so it is actually reasonable to investigate whether PBOT and the people who contract tree coverage in the city actually talked.

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#84

Post by growingkittens »

willis936 wrote: post #63
jjtheblunt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jargon question: what is “the lulz”?

Here is more than anyone should ever know about the lulz. https://encyclopediadramatica.online/Lulz

Posting a link to encyclopedia dramatica without a NSFW tag...for the lulz.

(One of the first few images is of a ninja turtle raping a pokemon.)

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#85

Post by jhoechtl »

oooyay wrote: post #30
andrewstuart wrote: post #29

There was a local project here on the railway lines. As part of the project they had to cut down a long row of giant pine trees in the park next to the train line. So when the railway project was complete I took my 8 year old son to the native nursery about bought ten mountain ash seedlings. Together we planted them in a long line in the park. Here's pictures of how big mountain ash gets: https://wilderlands.earth/st…

In Portland they recently started cutting trees down to widen the road for extended bus and bike lanes. That spawned a conversation that we've lost a third of our tree cover due to various things and the city hasn't kept up. That week I started burying cones from my Douglas Firs, which aren't nearly as big as the Mountain Ashes you planted, but are fairly large. With any luck I'll have five in my yard.

> That week I started burying cones

Sorry to tell you that this wont work to start a Douglas Fir. The seed is not the cone but they are wing-equiped and sit underneath the bristles in pouches of the cone.

As they are tiny it is in indication that they do not like to be burried but instead germinate on top of bare soil.

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#86

Post by helsinkiandrew »

gambiting wrote: post #33
jibbit wrote: post #16

What’s kinda poignant is that there was one tree left where there should be a forest, and you’re directed to feel angry when it is cut down

Have you ever been there? The land in that area is rock with about an inch of soil on it, like most moorland - it would not support a forest, it never did(within the last couple thousand years anyway) . Romans didn't build the hadrians wall through a forest after all, the area was already barren then. And no one is directing me to feel angry - the tree did hold a special place in my heart, I've been to it with my dad…

> The land in that area is rock with about an inch of soil on it, like most moorland - it would not support a forest, it never did(within the last couple thousand years anyway) .

Most deforestation around Hadrians wall started because of the massive wall construction efforts (it was the HS2 of its day, the largest project the Romans had ever done) and to clear land so it could be defended easily.

http://mandalaprojects.com/ice/ice-cases/hadrian.htm

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#87

Post by ajkavanagh »

jacquesm wrote: post #35
andrewstuart wrote: post #29

There was a local project here on the railway lines. As part of the project they had to cut down a long row of giant pine trees in the park next to the train line. So when the railway project was complete I took my 8 year old son to the native nursery about bought ten mountain ash seedlings. Together we planted them in a long line in the park. Here's pictures of how big mountain ash gets: https://wilderlands.earth/st…

The trust in charge of the grounds will dig them up again, people have already done this. Which by the way makes the trust look both stupid and tone-deaf.

It's a UNESCO world heritage site and Hadrian's Wall (a few metres away) is a Scheduled Monument. So the National Trust can't legally allow anyone to just plant anything they want there. Apparently there are plans to do something sympathetic at the site.

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#88

Post by nly »

andrewstuart wrote: post #29

There was a local project here on the railway lines. As part of the project they had to cut down a long row of giant pine trees in the park next to the train line. So when the railway project was complete I took my 8 year old son to the native nursery about bought ten mountain ash seedlings. Together we planted them in a long line in the park. Here's pictures of how big mountain ash gets: https://wilderlands.earth/st…

Nobody gives a shit that a tree was cut down. It was this _particular_ tree that had sentimental value.

It had been a local landmark for centuries.

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#90

Post by gambiting »

pvaldes wrote: post #38
gambiting wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been there? The land in that area is rock with about an inch of soil on it, like most moorland - it would not support a forest, it never did(within the last couple thousand years anyway) . Romans didn't build the hadrians wall through a forest after all, the area was already barren then. And no one is directing me to feel angry - the tree did hold a special place in my heart, I've been to it with my dad…

> The land in that area is rock with about an inch of soil on it Because people abusing of wildfires and a spiral of overgrazing = more wildfires required, that is apparently a behavior as infectious as it was yesterday. Lack of soil is not an unsolvable problem. Soil can be moved from A to B so we can trow technology at this (and a lot of big shrubs can deal with poor soil, leading the way to bigger trees). The prob…

>>Lack of soil is not an unsolvable problem. Soil can be moved from A to B so we can trow technology at this

Ok, so no offence but that tells me pretty clearly that you've not been there, moorlands are MASSIVE, the idea that you could move soil there to plant forests is firmly within some very poorly written fiction.

>>The problem is the lack of will

No, it's not. Again, go to Blanchland and Haltwhistle, spend a few days walking the paths and tell me again that this seems like a doable project.

>>and the never ending presence of criminal activity

What are you on about, what criminal activity. It's literally the most sparsely populated region in England, who commits these crimes and what are they? The grouse?

>>If there is cattle in the area, there is a dictatorship of cattle.

There isn't(or there's very few of them), sheep are the preferred animal to graze there, the sheep didn't shape the geological process that created this area though.

I feel like I'm arguing with someone who says that the only reason why there's no forests in the Sahara is the lack of will and not the physical conditions that dictate what the area is.

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