#saveshefftrees

Tomorrow, Wednesday 23rd of August 2017 will begin the disgusting & devastating work of felling many hundreds of HEALTHY Sheffield Street Trees. (It may well turn out to be thousands more as time goes on!)  This work being now protected by a bad law.

But, what an absolute privilege it was to be able to attend the Sheffield Street Trees meeting last night. OVER 150 folks crammed into the Banner Cross pub upstairs room. Passionate, sensible, reasoned and even joking amongst all the recent bad news and bad decisions & bad laws. 

Paul Brooke explained magnificently the situation we face. The chair (sorry I did not get his name) was brilliant too. Many folks expressed so many useful and sensible ideas. Alison Teal, Calvin Payne and Dave Dillner the ‘Tree Defenders’ were in attendance. Words cannot express the many folks gratitude to you all.

We will not lose this. After seeing  hearing these folks once again I know the war will be won in the end and that Sheffield City Council & Amey / Ferrovial (Spain) will be tarnished forever as vandals of the natural environment. The last pic shows how 'Delilah' on Rustlings road has been 'replaced'!!! 

Evil, evil, stupid, money focussed people / corporations will not beat us...  #Time4BIGChange #SaveSheffTrees 

All of my blogs have been moved to my new website: https://www.allthingstreesblog.com/

Thanks,

A GUEST BLOG BY ... Janine Kara Hammond to Bryan Lodge Sheffield City Council, Cabinet member for the Environment)

Dear Bryan I first came to Sheffield in 1997 as a fresh-faced 18 year old. One of the reasons I liked Sheffield so much was the abundance of trees, it was so different from other cities, almost like a village. The people of Sheffield as friendly and welcoming as the trees and other green spaces. I came to love Sheffield and consider it my home more than any other place has been. I have since been away and come back again, knowing that my heart lies in 'The Greenest City in Europe'. I embraced the loving, caring, multicultural, nature-loving spirit of the city. The nearby Peak District almost an extension to the green trails of Sheffield, being able to walk there via Endcliffe and adjoining parks. The people of Sheffield form a community more like a village, where you can make friends at the bus stop or walking down the street. The people as much a living part of the city as the trees and nature that entwine the streets and houses. To lose the trees is like Sheffield losing it's soul. 

I have been following the Save Sheffield's Trees campaign as best I can in between working full time and living my life. I attended a march last year outside the town hall and I loved the spirit of all who attended. I am members of all the groups on facebook and donated to the crowd funding page when they went to court. But sadly the campaign is not stopping the felling of all the beautiful healthy trees and Sheffield council and Amey are not listening to the people of Sheffield. They are not paying attention to people who have spent their valuable time looking for solutions that will prevent the felling of trees and allow them to continue to live their 100's of years still with us next to our houses, lining our streets, in our parks. 

Surely you know that the sapling replacements will not provide the same canopy cover or flood defence (there was a flood just down the road from Rustlings Road today, where several trees were felled). Saplings will take many, many years before they will be even close to as beneficial as mature trees. Oxygen production and carbon dioxide absorption will be much less. What about wildlife?? Birds cannot nest in saplings! Also very importantly the effect on people's mental health. It has been spoken of and documented many times how trees have a calming/anti-depressant effect and the quality of life of those around them is much improved compared to those who don't live around trees. Saplings will be smaller and less green and so will have less mental health benefits than older, mature trees that have character and likely a story or 2 to tell. The trees of Sheffield helped my mental health greatly when I was going through tough times, just a walk around the beautiful tree lined streets would help clear my mind and release endorphins. Not to mention trees that have been there many, many years and have lived through wars, through disasters and who hold a lot of sentimental value to the residents of Sheffield.

Please, please, please will you stop this senseless murder of Sheffield's trees and instead listen to the people who live here. Design a strategy that aims to retain as many trees as possible. Yes it will be hard work, yes it will take time, but what kind of world is this if everything is done just because it saved money or because it took less effort? 

Thank you for listening.  Janine Kara Hammond

Danielle Fortier Sheffield Resident....It's 3.49 am. I'm awake, nearly 8 months pregnant and seriously wondering what the hell is going on in the city I love. 

I came here as a student at the age of 19, nearly 15 years ago to study. From the moment I stepped off the bus to go to the open day at Sheffield University, Sheffield felt like home. I can't explain the feeling of coming home to a place I'd never been before, but that's what it felt like. A massive part of that was the environment. The trees. The greenest city in Europe. I've moved away and come home, because it is home, twice and up until now there was nowhere else I wanted to live.

I'm starting a family here and I don't want to have to show my little boy what Sheffield used to be in photos. I want him to see it for himself. 

I don't want to show him in books how we used to have streets lined with beautiful, graceful mature trees, but now only have struggling saplings. I don't want to have to walk down the Rivelin or Mayfield Valleys with an ipad to show him that once there were thriving woodlands full of wildlife, instead of 30ft catchment dykes. 

I want him to be able to visit the central library building and appreciate its beautiful architecture, and borrow books and read stories, not stand in the lobby of a 5* hotel. 

I want my son to grow up proud of being from Sheffield, not ashamed that the generations before him put money before the planet he will inherit.

I had never realised that trees were such a marmite thing. Yet in Sheffield our trees are polarising, or at least the leaders of Sheffield City Council would like them to be polarising.  In recent days I have heard some ridiculous ‘low punches’ as an increasingly desperate Council seeks to justify their arrangements with PFI contractor Amey. We can only continue to speculate on what some of those arrangements are though. Indeed, the contract with Amey seems to be a more closely guarded secret than the Queen’s PIN number.  

The ludicrous assertion that saving healthy trees from felling would take money away from the children’s services budget was one of the jewels in the crown of the smear campaign against tree campaigners. Of course, this claim is designed to portray those who oppose the ‘Sheffield Chainsaw Massacre’ in a bad light. They are, in the eyes of a council that seeks to portray a class divide, unfeeling and selfish geographically clustered ‘haves’ who cannot see the wood for the trees. Frankly it’s a pathetic display. It smacks of a desperate regime that has lost all the arguments and denies all the clear evidence ranged against them.

Faced with massive public opposition and growing international condemnation from arboricultural experts the Sheffield City Council have concocted a pantomime unicorn of mystifying indifference. One of the last gossamer threads of self-constructed ‘credibility’ is their newly constituted and soon to be very busy Tree Panel. Sorry Independent Tree Panel. The members of the Panel are tasked to look again at the 38 streets whose residents have rejected the felling of trees in response to a Council survey.

More streets might have rejected tree fellings were the survey well designed and publicised. Instead we have Fifty Shades of Survey in which an authoritarian city council seeks to pull the wool over the eyes of a hitherto innocent public. The outcome is, inevitably perverse and makes for grim reading. The methodology of their survey is, of course, a mockery of how to manage public engagement. Plain brown envelopes delivered just before Christmas. A narrow time window to respond. A link to the survey that didn’t work. An extension of the survey deadline by a few days that was not widely publicised. You couldn’t make it up. Inevitably the response rate averaged about 12%.  We are told this reflects how little public concern there is about the issue.