A Guest Article on Death of a Million Trees by my wife and I.
Every day, my wife and I go for a walk with our dog in an Oakland Hills park. The entire path is lined with trees, creating habitat for animals, and an idyllic, shady trail for running, hiking or dog walking. We pass literally thousands upon thousands of trees that the City of Oakland and the East Bay Regional Parks District plan to begin cutting down this summer, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of stumps which will then be soaked in chemicals that will poison wildlife and the people and the dogs who visit this park. These chemicals are made by Monsanto and Dow and have been proven to cause severe birth defects when tested on poor animals including rats born with their brains outside their skulls. They are toxic to birds and aquatic species, and cause damage to the kidneys, liver and the blood of dogs. And yet the plan is being proposed by people who call themselves environmentalists.
Environmentalists, however, don’t advocate for the clear cutting of healthy forests. They don’t advocate for the spreading of cancer causing chemicals in public lands. They don’t seek to decimate and poison the habitat upon which wildlife depends. And in a world just beginning to understand and experience the cataclysmic results of climate change, they don’t seek to cut down over 400,000 carbon sequestering trees.
When an agenda has means and ends that are identical to timber and chemical companies, when it is based on methods which the environmental movement was formed to fight against, and when it calls for clearcutting trees and pouring poison on the stumps, you can call such a plan many things: foolish, short-sighted, dangerous, tragic, heart-wrenching, and cruel, but the one thing you can’t call it is environmentalism.
Why are they doing it? They claim the trees do not belong here because they are “non-native,” a false, short-sighted, arbitrarily label that ignores the one constant of life on Earth: change.
My wife and I were asked to write a guest article for Death of a Million Trees, the website of a true environmentalist who is working to stop this and other equally stunning plans to destroy healthy forests in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Read, “Rejecting Arbitrary Labels That Enable Great Harm: Fighting the Oakland, UC Berkeley & East Bay Regional Park District’s War on Nature,” by clicking here.
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