This report tells us that a luxury condo owner in Vancouver has directly or indirectly been involved in poisoning some trees on public parkland in a desperate attempt to destroy the trees and improve his or her views. Stories like this pique my immediate interest for in spite of the phenomenal outcry over this (true, true, you can’t destroy public property) I would like to put a few things in perspective.

First, in most of British Columbia the health and well being of trees is not only tantamount to, no it often exceeds, the care and well being of human beings. You can entertain the most bizarre and xenophobic viewpoints, but start to discuss removing trees and you’re in real trouble and even a reasonable argument to cut a tree for safety or esthetic reasons might result in you being nailed to the cross of green righteousness. I know that for a fact for I live in a community with splendid ocean views but any hint at improving those by chopping the odd fir brings out disdain and anger. You see, environmentalism is fine and I can go a long way with it, but the moment it becomes both institutionalized and “gospellized”, we are leaving the domain of ideas and reason and we are dealing with nothing less than pure envirofascism. There’s no room for your argument, in fact, with your suggestions you are endangering not just the trees but the entire system of beliefs built around the damn things.

In this case the view-obstructed condos are not that cheap so the enviro-fascists were able to bolster their case by not only pointing to the damage done to the sacrosanct tree, no these condo-owners were boosting their property values, the ultimate horror: they were enriching themselves! When envirofascism merges with anti-capitalism it’s time to cut your losses in BC, chances are economic value is going to be destroyed one way or the other and you might as well leave before you are being wiped out in the process.

In any other place in the world a formal request to get rid of trees would have been dealt with in a reasonable fashion. A request to have your everyday view improved would be balanced against the interests of an occasional passerby, in this case in a province with probably the highest ratio of trees per person it could hardly have been an onerous request. Yet that’s not the way it works here, the bureaucracy has some solid built-in defenses against those that challenge to enshrined environmentalism and now that the affected ones have taken the law into their own hands they have put themselves in an awkward spot, but they shouldn’t be. They have a valid point that should have been listened to in the first place.

UPDATE: Here's a website devoted entriely to the ever increasing lunacy of the environmental movement: Greenie Watch. In particular the entry "fuck for forest" is worth a visit and then the title of this post could have read: "get laid by saving a tree".