Trees Under Threat Across The Country

This year has seen an huge inten­si­fi­ca­tion in the bat­tle to save Sheffield­’s trees as the coun­cil push­es for­ward with a plan to fell 17,500 out of 36,000 trees on Sheffield­’s streets by 2037. The pro­gramme is part of a Pri­vate Finance (PFI) con­tract with pri­vate firm Amey PLC. The result­ing res­i­dents led cam­paign, which has includ­ed a sig­nif­i­cant amount of direct action, has tem­porar­i­ly halt­ed felling but the coun­cil seems hell bent on restart­ing as soon as they can get away with it. The bat­tle to save Sheffield­’s trees appears to be the tip of a very large ice­berg. More than 110,000 trees have been chopped down in three years by coun­cils across the UK, with Sheffield only com­ing in at third place behind New­cas­tle (8,414 trees in 3 years) and Edin­burgh (4,435 trees). Felling of trees on pri­vate land is cer­tain­ly an even larg­er prob­lem but there are no sta­tis­tics and very lit­tle scruti­ny.

There are reports that Net­work Rail is plan­ning an “enhanced lev­el of clear­ance” of trees from 2019 to 2024, threat­en­ing the 13 mil­lion trees along 20,000 miles of rail­way track, in a ‘scorched earth’ pol­i­cy. There are fears that an Oxford to Bices­ter line upgrad­ed in 2015/2016, which has been described as ‘eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter’ and ‘bar­ren waste­land’, is a ‘pathfind­er’ for this aggres­sive future pol­i­cy to be rolled out across the coun­try. The High Speed 2 (HS2) planned new ultra-high speed rail line would also result in the felling of a sig­nif­i­cant but undis­closed num­ber of trees, as would the gov­ern­ment new road build­ing dri­ve (see New Roads Threat: The Express­way To Hell)

This comes at a time when the coun­try’s trees are already threat­ened with being dev­as­tat­ed by a wave of new dis­eases brought by cli­mate change and the glob­al trade in plants. Dis­eases such as “ash dieback” are already killing sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of trees and are also being used to jus­ti­fy even more tree felling. This short-sight­ed war on trees is being pros­e­cut­ed in the face grow­ing evi­dence of the direct pos­i­tive impact of trees, includ­ing removal of pol­lu­tion which saves 27,000 life years and the NHS around £1 bil­lion in med­ical costs in a year.

Tree Campaigns

A small selec­tion of promi­nent tree cam­paigns across the coun­try includes:

Street Trees, Sheffield

Ongo­ing coun­cil push to fell 17,500 out of 36,000 trees on Sheffield’s streets by 2037 as part of PFI con­tract, which is meet­ing sig­nif­i­cant resis­tance. Felling has been tem­porar­i­ly paused due to protests but could restart at any point. Cam­paigns: Sheffield Tree Action Groups — STAG, Sheffield Tree Action Groups — STAG (Face­book), Save Sheffield Trees (Twit­ter)

Street Trees, South Tyneside

Inspired by actions in Sheffield local res­i­dents are organ­is­ing to resist tree felling and the revok­ing of Tree Preser­va­tion Orders which are threat­en­ing the pre­cious street trees of South Tyne­side Cam­paigns: South Tyne­side Tree Action Group — STTAG (Face­book), South Tyne­side Tree Action Group — STTAG (Twit­ter)

Cemeteries, Southwark

South­wark Coun­cil is push­ing for­ward with plans to bull­doze the wood­land in its ceme­ter­ies and and exca­vate all graves over 75 years old, to cre­ate new bur­ial space. 2.5 acres of woods have already cleared, and anoth­er 10 acres is threat­ened with destruc­tion of beau­ti­ful inner-city woods and her­itage. Cam­paigns: Save South­wark Woods, Save South­wark Woods

Stoke Park Woods, Bristol

Bris­tol City Coun­cil has plans for cut­ting down parts of the beau­ti­ful and wild Stoke Park Wood in Bris­tol and replac­ing it with cat­tle and graz­ing areas, destroy­ing impor­tant habi­tat and deprive peo­ple who live in the city access to a beau­ti­ful, nat­ur­al wood­land. Tree felling could begin as soon as Sep­tem­ber. Cam­paigns: Save Stoke Park Woods

Whitmore Wood, Staffordshire

Whit­more Wood faces the sin­gle largest amount of loss to ancient wood­land across the entire High Speed 2 (HS2) route. The HS2 line will plough straight through the mid­dle of the wood result­ing in the destruc­tion of six hectares of this pre­cious ancient wood­land.