Trees at the receiving end of human folly
COME summer, when humans, birds and animals seek shelter from the scorching sun, municipal workers in Mumbai descend upon trees on the roadside and start their job of hacking and hewing them. They have given this activity an innocent name, ‘trimming’. Instead of trimming, what they do is to mercilessly decapitate them as if the trees were being punished for their good deeds — providing shade and oxygen.
Taking a leaf out of their book, our housing society does a lot of ‘trimming’. Even the ever-spreading banyan and peepal trees that are not a threat to life and limb fail to escape their axe or shears. Once the job is over, the colony looks like a battlefield. Had they, one wishes, done this job just before the rains which would bring down temperature markedly and the need for shade is not so much craved as it is in the summer. But this consideration doesn’t bother them as they go about their job.
By ill-luck, a tree or its branch may fall, resulting in casualties. Could that be a good ground for trimming or felling trees indiscriminately? We have not shunned vehicles even though they cause accidents every day. To reduce the risk of mishaps, trees prone to collapse should be trimmed or cut down. The suggestion that the workers seek an arborist’s opinion on the issue always goes unheeded.
On our society’s premises, there is a magnificent mango tree which spreads its branches across the compound. Once when its bark got termite-infested, municipal workers who had come for periodic fumigation said it should be cut down. Else, they warned, the termites would spread to other trees and nearby buildings. This ill-conceived advice caused panic among us. But better sense soon prevailed and we got a pest control agency to inject an anti-termite chemical into it. The tree was saved!
We celebrate Van Mahotsav every July with great verve. But our celebration is a travesty of the festival as we plant thousands of saplings and later forget all about them. How many of them survive is anybody’s guess. We also recklessly fell trees planted by our forebears and those that owe their origin to natural pollination.
To counter the mosquito menace, workers don’t spray insecticide in the gutters with stagnant water, an ideal breeding ground for these pesky pests. Instead, they strip the Ashoka trees that line the roads of their branches and leaves. When questioned about the rationale behind this action, they say that they have been instructed to do so as it is on the leaves that the mosquitoes settle. Strange logic! They are too intransigent to be dissuaded from pursuing this perilous course.
