TID Walking Path May Become Treeless – Think About This – More to Come

Citizens need to know that a proposal to underground the Ashland Canal will have a huge impact on the trees near the canal and almost 300 are scheduled to be removed. Please put this project on permanent hold and tighten up your budget strings on everything else. The net water conservation gain versus the impact on our tree allies and the beauty many of us feel walking this path is just NOT worth it. Please not another City of Ashland Tree Massacre! Two miles of the TID through Ashland will be effected.

I believe every single person who works for the City of Ashland and every single elected official needs to read and thoroughly grok this book: ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ by Peter Wohlleben. Once a person reads this scientist’s 40 year investigation into the lives of beech trees in Germany, it is my belief that no thinking individual will ever look at trees in the uneducated, arrogant, human-centric, dismissive way many humans do now. Wohlleben’s research revealed, for example, that trees are collective beings and share information and sap sugars through a fungal network and they have systems to adjust their inner chemistry depending on the day, the season, and the year. Not that different from you and me, with our own bodies and our exterior network of friends and family. But trees are shown on maps as objects, and that’s exactly why you are able to consign so many to their doom. Trees are not objects, they are living beings. As long as we think of trees as objects instead of as living beings who share the love of life that we do, then we will treat them as we wish. Along the arc of civilization, we have made many mistakes by thinking of other humans as less than human. Now we see trees as less than human, so we do what we want with them. We need to grow as a species and realize we are not above Nature, but in fact we ARE Nature and that trees are the lungs of our planet and our allies in keeping it healthy .

Bryan Holley, Ashland