My recent column calling for the
re-treeing Springfield – “Something
there is that doesn’t love a tree,” which of course should have been titled
“Someone there is who doesn’t love a tree” – didn’t say quite everything that
might have been said on that topic.
A seldom
unremarked-upon aspect of the history of Illinois is the war long waged by its
people on trees. Millions of majestic mature hardwoods were slain, prairie
groves plundered, bottomland forests cleared.
People later accepted trees in cities but grudgingly, and usually
treated them as if they were unruly shrubs. Urban planner Myron West, describing Springfield in
the 1920s, lamented the “tree butchery” that he saw across the city. (Private
property owners were then allowed to prune, even to cut down trees on public
property as they saw fit.) Still happens. When I lived on the West Coast I seemed forever to be
reading stories about how some rich homeowner had hired a crew to sneak in and
chop down trees on their neighbor’s property (or, once, on state park land) because
they blocked their expensive views.
This article appears in Jun 9-15, 2016.
