Tree Equity: The Bonfire Of The Inanities
“In its new 20-year urban forestry management plan, the City of Ottawa has committed to combat a growing problem: tree inequity.”
CBC translating a new city plan
Tree equity.
Just to get this straight, this publication is in favour of trees and equity in all their good forms.
We are not anti-tree. Few dogs are anti-tree. We are not anti-equity. We are not anti-bike. Why The Bulldog’s proprietor has even been accused of being anti-dog. This is true. One wonders what the term is for someone who names a website after a dog and is accused of being anti-dog. Confused perhaps. Just as trees are people, too, so too are dogs.
So now we have tree equity. This term is a triumph of process over substance.
Mayors have been promising to plant a million or more trees in Ottawa for years and yet, surprisingly, we have a shortage of tree equity. The horror.
But only at the City of Ottawa would they come up with the term tree equity, tie it to a social theme and develop a “plan.”
In a simpler time, when this puppy was younger, a municipality would address a lack of trees in a neighbourhood by planting more trees there. You know … dig hole, plant tree, fill hole. Thus more trees where they are needed. The planning took two minutes (at least that’s the estimate, perhaps your agent will be accused of a lack of planning equity) and workers spent the time not-planning and instead planted trees.
That way you get tree equity without the bureaucracy, formal plans and usual city ideology which virtually no one cares about except the ultra politically correct.
Just a note to the ideologues out there appalled by the above argument and frivolous concern for tree equity.
If you took some of the scientists behind tree equity, cut their planning to two minutes and gave them a shovel, faster tree equity could be achieved … though digging the hole would be slowed by the discussion of how to dig a politically correct hole and what grubs and worms would be killed in the process. Or is the project favoring maples over pines? It’s so hard to know.
Sometimes there are too many cooks in the kitchen and too many arbourists in the compost heap.
Ken Gray
For You:
City Hall Fails To Understand Ottawa: BENN
City Bullies Seniors With Massive Transit Fare Hike
Hiking Transit Fare ‘Counterproductive’: CULLEN
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– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
The key way the city seems to be equalizing the number of trees throughout the City is by allowing more and more of them to be chopped down in mature neighbourhoods in order to replace single family homes with as many units as possibly cover the site while sacrificing most of our mature trees. Their other way is by encouraging apartment/condo towers, which at one time were built on large lots allowing for some recreational space and tree cover, to be built right up to the sidewalk whether the building is going in downtown or in a suburb. Try comparing today’s apartment/condo towers or townhouse complexes (particularly those outside of the downtown) with those built in the 1970s to see the total lack of any open green space required today.
Andrew, you are pointing out what is obvious to everyone save those who populate innumerable silos at city hall.
The silos that house planners accept that trees are collateral damage to their ideologically driven agendas of intensification and densification. Then there are the silos that house the employees that think solely in the context of how to save the city from excessive heat pockets due to a lack of shade, save and except for that which is cast by the high rise forests.
These silos are populated by people who are ideologically and culturally distinct from each other. The individuals who populate the silos see no need to communicate outside their silo. The senior managers are too busy protecting their silos to be bothered with even considering thinking about how the objectives of the silos are counter productive to each other.
Ergo, my recurring theme about the culture that permeates city hall is what needs to be changed first.
The city’s actions regarding tree policy are a hypocritical farce.
The city claims to want to plant more trees, BUT
– then cuts down hundreds of mature trees on the Central Experimental Farm to make room for new buildings for the Ottawa Hospital – instead of building at the recommended location at Tunney’s Pasture
– and allows Taggart to get away with cutting down hundreds of trees on the pretense that this action was something like a farmer cutting down a tree on their farm and therefore not needing to get the city’s permission to do so
@Sharon Katz, next they will be cutting down trees to erect sprung structures. What a beautiful city we live in.