Sometimes, reading the Times Chronicle makes me sick, especially when I read of the continuing campaign by the Town of Osoyoos to chainsaw as many of the town’s largest mature trees as possible.
This new outrage concerns $200,000 of taxpayer money allocated to destroy a row of amazing old American elms behind the old museum site.
These trees anchor the foreshore incline and store tons of carbon. Two of the trees reveal an incredible phenomenon of merging roots, now above ground.
Mature trees that have reached full root, bark, and canopy development deal with climate variability better than young trees. Older trees also store more carbon and provide great shade relief during our sometimes merciless summers.
Tufts University website tells us that half of a tree’s stems, branches, and roots are composed of carbon.
Live and dead trees, along with forest soil, hold the equivalent of 80 percent of all the carbon currently in Earth’s atmosphere. But local town officials would rather not deal with such inconvenient facts.
Osoyoos has a shameful history of choosing not to protect our older trees with a tree protection bylaw and destroying these valuable community assets with the “invasive species” label.
If only town council would educate themselves about the immense value researchers have discovered about trees in the last decade or so.
While other regions plant trees (which take many decades to capture the amount of carbon dioxide that large trees inhale), Osoyoos has shown no interest in protecting our fragile environment. It can never claim to be a “green town” while ignoring rudimentary environmental practices.
It should not be “business as usual” with rapid climate change upon us.
With a developer-friendly town planner and a rubber-stamping council, one would never imagine that we are talking about Canada’s premier desert town with increasingly arid conditions at the outset of climate change. Heat domes, anyone?
All this mindless destruction is occurring while our tree canopy, already woefully inadequate, is further depleted every fall by hundreds of acres going up in sweet smoke, making way for subdivisions and vineyards.
Future residents will never know how much clean air, how much shade and beauty has been sacrificed because of short-sighted growth-at-any-cost policies that no one on town council has had the foresight or courage to object to.
Damn the conflicted arborists and tree-cutting companies and save our large trees!
David Yanor, Osoyoos
