Kevin Costner Prince of Thieves iconic tree cut down.

[G-CPTN]

Living in Tynedale, just a few miles from 'the Sycamore tree in the Roman Wall gap', this is a local issue, yet interest is national and also worldwide.
Very recently the tree was cut down without notice or consent.

Sycamore Gap tree no more.

[PHXPhlyer]

Sycamore Gap: 16-year-old boy arrested after famous tree ‘deliberately felled’

https://www.cnn.com/travel/sycamore-gap ... index.html

A famous tree that has stood sentinel on Britain’s Roman-built Hadrian’s Wall for more than 200 years has been “deliberately felled” in what authorities have called an “act of vandalism.”

The sycamore tree, located in the Northumberland National Park in northern England, was made famous to millions around the world when it appeared in Kevin Costner’s 1991 blockbuster film “Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves.”

Police said they have arrested a 16-year-old boy following the incident, which was believed to have taken place overnight Thursday.

The tree - at a spot known as “Sycamore Gap” – was located on the historic UNESCO World Heritage listed Hadrian’s Wall, which was constructed around 1,900 years ago to guard the furthest northwestern frontier of the Roman Empire.

The tree before it was felled.
Sycamore Gap was considered one of the most photographed trees in England and was voted as English Tree of the Year in 2016.

The National Trust heritage charity – which co-manages the site – said it was “shocked and saddened” by the tree’s felling.

Andrew Poad, north east general manager at the National Trust, said: “The tree has been an important and iconic feature in the landscape for nearly 200 years and means a lot to the local community and to anyone who has visited the site.”

Northumberland National Park Authority said it was now “working with the relevant agencies and partners with an interest in this iconic North East landmark.”

The National Park urged visitors to stay away while the site was being made safe.

Police, who earlier said they were investigating what was believed to be a “deliberate act of vandalism,” said a 16-year old youth had been arrested in connection with the incident.

He remains in police custody at this time and is assisting officers with their enquiries,” Northumbria Police posted on X, adding that the “investigation is still at very early stage.”

Prior to the arrest, the police force described the tree as a “world-renowned landmark.”

“The vandalism has caused understandable shock and anger throughout the local community and beyond,” a statement from Northumbria Police said.

Police Superintendent Kevin Waring added: “This is an incredibly sad day. The tree was iconic to the North East and enjoyed by so many who live in or who have visited this region.”

“Anyone found to have been responsible for this damage – which we believe to be a deliberate act of vandalism – can expect to be dealt with swiftly and appropriately.”

PP

[OneHungLow]

Wanton vandalism. Bring back the stocks...

[Hydromet]

What is it with people that they have to destroy things for 'fun'. Another much-loved and photographed tree, the Wanaka tree in NZ, has also been vandalised, with limbs sawn off, as well as being accidentally damaged by idiots climbing on it.

Wanaka tree

[OFSO]

Build a gallows at the site and hang the perpetrator in chains there.

[OneHungLow]

[Karearea]

^ such a striking photo.

I notice that it appeared to be a very skilful piece of tree-felling, very smoothly done. I would be amazed if perpetrated by a 16-year-old...

[Woody]

^ such a striking photo.

I notice that it appeared to be a very skilful piece of tree-felling, very smoothly done. I would be amazed if perpetrated by a 16-year-old...

My thoughts as well.

[barkingmad]

Whoever did it should be suspended from the Tyne Bridge by the neck until they are dead.

Simples!

[Boac]

Forget 'until they are dead'.

[PHXPhlyer]

The stump would make a fitting chopping block.

PP

[1DC]

The 16 year old has been released and a 66 year old has been arrested now.

[tango15]

I am sure that there is more to this than we are being told (yet). I fail to see how a 16-year-old could do this alone. I think he may be the fall guy (excuse the pun) in all this - time will tell.

[Hydromet]

Apparently a 60 year old man has been arrested in connection with this.

[G-CPTN]

Local opinion is that the culprit should be kicked - by everyone who would have wished the tree 'preserved' and not cut down.

[OneHungLow]

I was apt to wonder why there wasn't a greater national outcry when Sheffield Council committed this far greater crime of the mass murder of trees? Perhaps because these innocent trees needed a hug from Kevin Costner. In this case the council got away with the typically limp, meaningless British apology, when in fact the council members should have been pilloried in the streets and the leaders publicly flogged!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... uiry-finds

Deluded councillors in Sheffield behaved dishonestly and destroyed public trust by mishandling a dispute over the unnecessarily felling of thousands of healthy trees in the city, an independent inquiry has found.

Sheffield city council twice misled the high court during the fierce row, during which elderly residents were arrested when trying to protect trees from the chainsaws.

During one particularly contentious episode in autumn 2016, council contractors began work at 4.45am, dragging residents out of bed to move their cars before protesters arrived, scenes compared by Nick Clegg, the former Sheffield Hallam MP, to “something you’d expect to see in Putin’s Russia”.

On another occasion, the council applied for an injunction against one of its own councillors, Green member Alison Teal. The council took her to court for breaching the injunction, only for her to be found not guilty.

The council’s behaviour “amounted to a serious and sustained failure of strategic leadership”, the inquiry chairman, Sir Mark Lowcock,concluded in his 227-page report.

The dispute, described in 2017 as “bonkers” by the then communities secretary, Michael Gove, was “a dark episode in Sheffield”, writes Lowcock. He found the council “lacked transparency, and repeatedly said things that were economical with the truth, misleading and, in some cases, were ultimately exposed as dishonest”.

The battle over Sheffield’s street trees began in 2012 when the council signed a 25-year contract with the outsourcing firm Amey, which included the removal and replacement of 17,500 street trees. It was financed by a £1.2bn private finance initiative (PFI) deal, in which private sector expertise and finance deliver public sector infrastructure and services.

Public opposition to what became known locally as the “chainsaw massacre” grew, but senior council leaders paid no attention. “Out of touch with what significant numbers of local people thought, and how the strength of feeling was growing, they were deluded into believing all was well,” writes Lowcock.

He heard evidence of a “bunker mentality” within the council’s senior leadership team which hardened as opposition grew, and “a culture that was unreceptive to external views, discouraging of internal dissent and prone to group-think.”

In 2015, the council decided to set up an “independent tree panel” (ITP) to adjudicate on the dispute. But Lowcock found that the council then “misled” not just the ITP over what could be done at Amey’s cost under the contract, but also the public and, later, the courts.

“From 2016, the council rejected many of the recommendations the ITP made in good faith to save trees. Setting up an independent panel, misleading it and then ignoring substantial numbers of its recommendations was destructive of public trust and confidence,” writes Lowcock.

He found that the council misled two high court judges by passively allowing the court to rely on something it knew to be false and not correcting the record – namely the council’s five-year tree management strategy, which it knew was flawed.

“While it did not affect the outcome in either case, it is still a serious matter that the court was misled,” writes Lowcock. He said he had taken legal advice as to whether any individuals from the council had committed perjury but decided they had not.

Between June 2016 and March 2018, police attended 40 tree protests in Sheffield, and arrested 41 people. Of these, no further action was taken on more than half of occasions.

South Yorkshire police came under fierce criticism for the arrests, particularly the use of an obscure clause in trade union legislation, which the police watchdog ultimately ruled was wrongly applied. When the force said it wanted to stop the arrests and that they were taking up too much police time, the council replied with a “strongly worded letter” in March 2017.

The local authority felt “very let down by the force” and that it was, “a dereliction of the police’s obligations to fail to support the council in its delivery of its public law duties by failing to make arrests when the criminal law is breached”.

The dispute raged for years. By March 2018 the council’s head of press was warning his chief executive of the reputational damage being done to the local authority. “Put simply, there is no good picture of older residents being arrested. There is no good way to photograph a tree lying in the street,” wrote James Henderson.

Lowcock concluded: “The dispute did significant harm. Thousands of healthy and loved trees were lost. Many more could have been. Sheffield’s reputation was damaged. Public trust and confidence in the council was undermined. It has not been fully rebuilt.”

Many of the senior officers and councillors involved in the dispute declined to attend the public hearing. They included Julie Dore, the Labour leader of Sheffield council from 2011 to 2021, who spoke to Lowcock in private.

In a statement, Sheffield council said: “The council has already acknowledged that it got many things wrong in the handling of the street trees dispute, and we wish to reiterate our previous apologies for our failings. We have taken huge steps already to ensure past mistakes are not repeated and we hope the release of this report will further help us to learn lessons as we move forward from the dispute.”

[Woody]

Plenty of evidence of the damage that HS2 is causing to trees

One example https://www.bucksherald.co.uk/news/envi ... nd-4086320

[OFSO]

No need to take any police action against the chain-saw wielders. Just publish their names and look the other way.

[OneHungLow]

From the Independent:

Maybe good can come from the apparently senseless or downright malicious felling of the beautiful sycamore tree that for at least 300 years stood at the centre of the Northumberland Gap. Maybe its destruction will serve as a pivotal moment, when people born and brought up in this ultra-materialist, ultra-competitive, exclusively anthropocentric age finally undergo the mind shift that’s needed if we, humanity, are ever going to save what’s left of the natural world, and live in harmony with our fellow creatures.

If we changed our attitude then we, humanity, could realistically be looking forward to the next million years, for starters. That we are now staring Armageddon in the face is not only tragic. It is absurd. We can learn much of what we need to know from trees – far more and of far greater profundity than we ever can from politicians and their think tanks of lawyers and financiers who set the tone of modern society and run our lives.

We can learn first of all that we are not the only creatures that matter – we’re only one of an estimated eight million species, of which for all our efforts over thousands of years we have so far recorded less than a quarter, and we should not presume to strive for “dominion” over the rest as we were enjoined to do in Genesis (1:26).

More: we can learn that although all individuals matter, as we feel when one that we love is destroyed, no individual, whether human or arboreal, truly exists, or indeed can hardly be said to be real, in isolation. John Donne’s observation that “No man is an island” is true of all creatures, and indeed of everything.

In like vein, various African peoples embrace the concept of “ubuntu” – which in summary means that “I am what I am because of who we all are”. “Oneness” is the key idea – the idea that was never truly present in Christianity and has gone fatally missing from our modern, obsessively individualistic society.

Oneness is manifest at all levels – psychological, spiritual, and indeed in the most recondite physics, with its concepts of quantum entanglement, and the idea that matter is concentrated energy, and above all perhaps with the notion of universal mind: that we do not generate consciousness de novo in our own wondrous but nonetheless pathetic heads, but that the mind is part of the fabric of the universe. We partake of, and contribute to, what is already there.

In more earthly fashion, ecologists tell us that each and every apparently individual creature is in truth an ecosystem in its own right. Our own guts and outer surfaces harbour trillions of microbes that are essential for sound nutrition and general wellbeing. Each of us is a walking ecosystem. And every tree that is not drenched in pesticide harbours scores or thousands of different species of invertebrates, which in turn are food for many more creatures of all kinds.

So they share water and nutrients – and also, crucially, share information. Each is aware of the plight of the others. So, in effect, the wood with its attendant fungi becomes one superorganism; and although it has no observable brain this superorganism behaves intelligently nonetheless, not simply responding to life’s exigencies whether it’s the onset of winter or attack from some predator, but preparing for them in advance.

Overall, indeed, the more we observe the natural world the more we see that nature as a whole is essentially both cooperative and communicative. Tennyson’s “Nature red in tooth and claw” has entered the modern psyche but in truth, although competition is a fact of life, cooperativeness is its essence. Darwin recognised this too, though he was a man of his time and overstressed its competitiveness.

Modern neoliberals in highfalutin vein like to argue that the no-holds-barred competitive global market is “Darwinian”, and therefore natural and therefore good. But this is bad biology, and appalling morality. A double whammy. Trees make the point admirably.

All trees too form symbiotic relationships with many kinds of mycorrhizal fungi in their roots whose hyphae spread far and wide, and increase their range and versatility. Together the fungal threads form a network of indefinite extent that brings all the trees of all species in a wood into communion with all the others.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/sy ... ml?r=28342

[G-CPTN]

Disgruntled lumberjack.