Sean Parkinson
Special to The Lake Report

As an ecologist, certified arborist and homegrown resident of NOTL, I am embarrassed by the Town of Niagara-on-the-Lake’s disregard for one of Niagara’s most-valued features — healthy, mature trees.

Back on May 2, reporter Evan Loree’s story, (“Two homeowners get council approval to chop down problem trees,“) described how two residents successfully circumvented NOTL’s 2019 private tree protection bylaw, as well as the professional assessments of a certified arborist and the town’s bylaw enforcement officer to get two mature, native trees chopped down.

But how could this happen in Niagara? Aren’t we internationally renowned for our English gardens, our expansive agricultural landscapes and our oak-laden riverside mansions? Why would we then disregard natural assets that take decades, sometimes centuries, to grow?

The short and long answer is colonialism, according to master naturalist and urban forestry historian Jill Jonnes.

Jonnes explains that the destruction of trees is not a mere consequence of colonialism — it is one of the founding pillars of Indigenous genocide: European colonizers demolished natural landscapes such as forests, in a direct effort to destroy the land, resources and homes of Indigenous Peoples, and by the deeply intertwined nature of their relationships, the Indigenous Peoples themselves.

The bypassing of NOTL’s private tree protection bylaw, as permitted by our town council, is demonstrative of a centuries-old colonial attitude that fosters contempt for trees, systemically permitting their elimination by labelling them as nuisances, pests or as obstacles to our absolute control of the land we call property.

In the past, European colonizers would clear their cities of towering urban trees, much like our current victims, the honey locust and the black walnut, simply because they had become nuisances to upper-class citizens, removing crucial canopy for the rest of the community — because they had an odour, because they bore fruits, and even, because they housed birds. The travesty.

These city giants would then be replaced en masse with the flavour of the week — oftentimes invasive plants (such as the infamous Tree of Heaven) that conveniently offered little appeal to local wildlife. We are still trying to rid them from the landscape in 2024.

John Davey (1846-1923), founder of the Davey Tree Expert Company, is known today as “The Tree Doctor” and the father of modern arboriculture in North America.

He described settler deforestation in both urban and natural spaces as a “senseless waste of trees… (that) were treated almost like an enemy that had to be destroyed.” It’s a sentiment that chillingly reflects the attitudes of some residents more than a century later.

Adding insult to irony, one resident described the natural shedding of leaves by the mature honey locust in his yard, an organism of natural design, as an ”ungodly” inconvenience to his man-made pool, one that is presumably chlorinated to exterminate any life that would otherwise inhabit a natural pool of water.

What might be a discomfort to some for having to clean their private pool will now lead to a significant communal loss of natural canopy in NOTL, a canopy already recognized by Coun. Sandra O’Connor as well below the regional average.

We need more councillors and residents to speak up like O’Connor has, to defend our precious trees and green spaces.

When we carelessly tear down trees from our neighbourhoods, we lose wildlife habitat, shading, air cooling (by evapotranspiration), natural beauty, biodiversity, protection from disease, soil stabilization, water infiltration, property value, and also our mental/spiritual well-being — all well-documented in research.

As much as we covet every inch of our property, our local ecology does not share such compartmentalized limitations, rather it exists in complex and sensitive interconnected webs, where each change cascades outward in a thousand ways.

And that is not an exaggeration. Mature oak trees boast an ability to support more than 2,300 species of plants, bacteria, fungi and animals.

If everyone is given permission to remove their mature native trees with such carelessness, then we will continue to see a decline in Niagara’s limited canopies.

Instead, I urge the town to make a greater effort to uphold its legislation, respect professional direction, conserve our existing natural features, and promote a concerted effort to reforest and renaturalize our land.

Ignoring the tree bylaw and the assessments of trained professionals renders the whole process a farce and makes NOTL look like it is truly living in the days of the horse and buggy.

That honey locust and that black walnut, both native specimens in this area of southern Ontario, could have lived to more than 125 years and 250 years respectively, and maybe even outlived these colonial relationships with land and nature, had they not fallen victim to them first.

NOTL resident Sean Parkinson is a certified arborist.