Read on Twitter
Feeling sadness, anger and grief seeing England’s tree of the year needlessly felled and destroyed this morning. Where once there was beauty and life, there is now ugliness and destruction. What can those who care about protecting nature learn and do in the face of this?
We must not let anybody forget that @BerkeleyGroupUK destroyed this tree when they didn’t need to because it was easier and more profitable for them to do so. Let their brand forever be associated with the fact they killed England’s tree of the year.
For all their protestations that homes are needed, it was possible to re-design the development to have the same number of homes and keep the tree, but Berkeley would not countenance a few months delay. Let this never be forgotten.
Don’t buy @BerkeleyGroupUK’s shit flats and houses, tell others not to, remind them of their tree killing whenever you can: on social media or in real life. Let them understand that the damage to their brand means that in future they should retain mature trees not destroy them.
In order to facilitate the felling of the tree against the wishes of local people, the Met Police collaborated with Berkeley Homes and sent dozens of officers to help with the felling, at the same time as saying they have no resources to attend burglaries or robberies
Let’s also remember the role of the legal system in this. City lawyers from @Pinsent_Masons being paid £100’s an hour to threaten local people with imprisonments for standing under the tree to protect it. I hope they feel profoundly ashamed of this money & how they earned it.
... so I’ll leave you to make your own decisions about the way that the English judiciary place themselves in the service of companies who wish to destroy our world for profit.
Finally, we should all give hugs thanks and gratitude to all those incredible local people and campaigners who have so much of themselves to save this tree. They did a wonderful thing.
This doesn’t end here. Let us grieve for the Happy Man Tree, but not let ourselves fall into dejection. We must take the justified anger we feel and use it to fuel ourselves for the ongoing fight to protect nature from destruction.
