There are lots of suggestions about legal protection for trees being the way forward. My position is it’s part of the solution but cannot be relied upon. Our economy is a story of infinite growth and our planet is finite, so my position is that we will continue to lose trees to feed the economy until we account for the economic value of the natural world. This is happening in New Zealand, we removed general tree protection in 2012 and have lost massive amounts of canopy since then. Now, the government is doubling down and going after our most special protection - notable trees. To me, the problem is financial, interested to hear your thoughts.

Hello everyone, I’ve been an arborist for coming on 15 years now, starting at the chipper and working my way up. I now run a company with a good friend of mine and find myself doing a lot more consulting. All to often homeowners are given I’ll informed advice to scaremonger them into removing/ butchering trees for someone to make a quick buck. Our industry here in South Australia is so unregulated and makes it hard for potential client to distinguish between an arborist and a tree looper. Most of the time they don’t know the difference, so it is up to us to distinguish our selves with professionalism and sound advice. That being said I have recently started advising customers to implement a tree management plan where each tree is assessed methodically and without a bank account bias. This is recurring work as most of the time I suggest a 2 year cycle. A good software makes this easy and presents well to the client, some shameless self promotion here but I use www.arborflow.app

This is around the corner from where I grew up, I walked past it every day to get to school. We, the industry, have failed to retain this tree. Maybe we lost a battle with the lines company. Maybe we failed to adequately support the tree’s health and structure. Either way we failed to retain an old tree today