you “What did you do today?”

me “I spent the day killing trees.”

you “Why the hell would you do that!? I thought you loved the environment?”

me “I do, sometimes killing trees is the right thing to do.”

And so it goes. Today I did in fact spend my whole day killing trees, mostly pines, and some oaks. Why? Because we were trying to maintain an open coastal grassland (sometimes called heath land) habitat. Coastal grasslands are some of the rarest habitats on the planet. The place where I live happens to have a lot of them. They are perfect breeding grounds for several species of endangered birds, including piping plovers. If humans had never colonized the edge of the water coastal grasslands would naturally be created by a process of forest fire, and flooding by salt water. Because most shore line is no longer allowed to have this happen the coastal grasslands we have left are slowly being destroyed.

If deprived of fire or flood these areas become slowly covered with woody plants (aka: trees). Because we humans have altered the flood fire cycle its necessary to go out and cut these trees down every once and a while. Not everyone understands this. Today while we were busting our asses cutting down trees with hand saws (make no noise, easier to carry, don’t burn fossil fuels) and dragging them to the road for collection, we were greeted with a guy screaming obscenities at us.

He didn’t understand what the goal of the project was, all he saw was a bunch of people cutting down trees. Trees = good, cutting down trees = bad. In a stunning turn of events after we explained that in order to maintain good breeding habitat we needed to cut down the trees so the natural heath land plants could thrive he actually thanked us for what we were doing.

People want the world to be so black and white. Trees are always good, period. Well yes almost all the time trees are good, but sometimes they are not. The world is a complicated place and the answer to problems are always complicated. You want plovers, you need coastal grasslands, you want coastal grasslands you need to have fire or flooding, you don’t want fire or flooding, you need to cut down trees.

In the end all it took to turn someone screaming swear words at you into someone thanking you for what you are doing is a little education. I feel like for the most part people are pretty rational, given information, and enough time to think it over many of them will come to a logical and rational conclusion. Obviously this doesn’t apply to people who make a living by NOT coming to logical and rational answers.

In the end we had a great time, and cleared 1.75 miles of trees with our hands and our muscles. Your welcome plovers.