71–80 of 155 posts
Person walks along main roads in London and complains they see no trees. Meanwhile in other news .... :)
London is one of the most tree-ridden cities on this earth, so I dread to think what "main streets" you were walking along.
No because I planted a tree very close to the window, blocking view of other trees.
Singapore here, checking all the boxes. 200m from a neighborhood park with many trees, and ~700m from a GARGANTUAN park, Jurong Lake Gardens, over 4 km in length with many times that in pathways through gardens and around a lake.
One thing that I really really like about living in Amsterdam, is that we have trees and plants everwhere. Also, for 2 years now, city stopped cutting most of the plant growth in parks and on the side of roads. Its so beautiful green and colourful now and insects are having a great time. I counted this year already 6 different sorts of humblebees in my garden.
I like to use wildlife as a proxy for the quality of a location. If you can see things like rabbits and squirrels on a regular basis, you are probably doing reasonably ok. I have to put up fences and other barriers or the deer will eat everything in my yard. I've seen suburban development that would easily satisfy the three tree test from any window on any property, but they still come off as desolate wastes. The age…
@steerpike on HN coined the "time to sheep" metric, a measure of how long you have to travel before you're surrounded by sheep[0], which correlates reasonably well with quality of living. Alas, doesn't work very well outside of britain, but it's a good metric :) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42802744
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For sure, it was one of things that got me about Orkney. Mind you, wars and sheep did have a pretty devastating effect on the Caledonian woodland cover of the highlands. The current population of the red deer aren't helping with natural regeneration. This is one of the reasons for the case for re-introducing predator species. But that's a complex topic with no simple answers and easy divisions.
There is already a predator species that eats red deer. Just up our venison consumption!
As you have pointed out the solution is to eat more venison, but most local butchers stock hardly any of it because of low demand.
One thing that I really really like about living in Amsterdam, is that we have trees and plants everwhere. Also, for 2 years now, city stopped cutting most of the plant growth in parks and on the side of roads. Its so beautiful green and colourful now and insects are having a great time. I counted this year already 6 different sorts of humblebees in my garden.
Also us Dutchies have this thing called "tegelwippen": https://www.nk-tegelwippen.nl It's a competition about which municipality can remove most pavement tiles & replace with greenery. People do this on their own too - guerilla gardening style. It's not uncommon to ride through a city street, and see a strip of pavement tiles removed & some flowers in there. Or some plants dangling from a pot attached to a street lig…
I like to use wildlife as a proxy for the quality of a location. If you can see things like rabbits and squirrels on a regular basis, you are probably doing reasonably ok. I have to put up fences and other barriers or the deer will eat everything in my yard. I've seen suburban development that would easily satisfy the three tree test from any window on any property, but they still come off as desolate wastes. The age…
For this reason, I'd prefer to have compact cities with a good amount of high-rise buildings and city parks dotted in between. As opposed to large sprawling suburban zones.
That leaves more space for natural areas outside cities where people are few & far between.
What struck me is that the "three trees from your window" part sounds almost trivial until you actually test it
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what parts of London you were in, but there's many trees in London on sidewalks. There's even a specific species for it - the London plane (Platanus × hispanica) If you're in the very new, constantly rebuilt, concrete jungle that is the very small part of the city, then OK, greenery is going to be hard to spot. Particularly as they tend to nearly always choose the wrong species to plant and aftercare is…
open Google maps at Monument station, find a tree in the area. all the streets in that region of London (let's say 1 sq km) are quite narrow, I would guess there just is not enough space for street trees.