'Chainsaw massacre' of trees in London

"A report yesterday by the London Authority gave warning that the capital's seven million trees face 'a chainsaw massacre', with some 40,000 full-grown trees cut down by councils in London over the past five years", complains the columnist Ben Macintyre. "Our attitude towards urban trees is weirdly ambivalent. We claim to love them, but barely notice as they vanish, while demanding that the council hack them down without mercy if they impinge on our daily lives or, worse, our house prices. William Blake had it right: 'The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.' We are both tree-huggers and tree-muggers. City trees are accused, often wrongly, of causing subsidence; the pigeons in their branches bespatter our cars; their leaves cause mud and blockages; we fear their rotten limbs might fall on us; their foliage obscures the CCTV cameras that must now follow us everywhere."

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