For the greater good I'm happy to say goodbye to Mount Albert's trees

Friday, 15 November 2019

The Tūpuna Maunga Authority is rejecting claims Ōwairaka-Mt Albert in Auckland will be clear-felled.

OPINION: My city and its hills are alive with the sound of chainsaws.

Fully a third of all Auckland's trees are said to have come down in the years since former Minister Nick Smith loosened up laws on tree protection in the same way a man loosens up his tie after a bottle and a half of whisky.

This has not gone without outcry but mostly it has not been audible above the sound of two stroke motors.

But wait, what's this? Noisy protesting! Rage on social media! Leaflets in your letterbox! Is this the fight back at last?

Yes. And no. There has been a lot of noise in recent days about trees coming down on Ōwairaka (Mt Albert), one of the maunga of Auckland governed by the Tūpuna Maunga Authority.

* Nature lovers angry after mass tree removal at local park

* Path illegally carved into pā site on Auckland mountain to be removed

* Boardwalk planned to protect Mount Eden summit**

The authority has a plan to restore the maunga to something like their state before the colonising began.

Sign me up. What's not to love about a landscape so full of trees and birds you can't hear yourself speak over the dawn chorus? I'd rather wake to that than the noise of Mike Hosking.

David Slack recognises that if the long term plan for Mount Albert's native trees and plants to flourish is to make some cuts now, then that must be done.

Behind our house is the maunga of Takuranga, one of three in Devonport. The other is Maungauika. The third was dug up, quarried and hauled away. How nice it is to have two thirds of them still here to enjoy.

We walk on Takuranga all the time. We love the place and we love what's been happening since the Tūpuna Maunga Authority took over its care. You come to it on foot now. You walk along new paths they've made. You stand on the summit in tranquility because when the cars are gone, tranquility is what you get.

We belong to a small group that looks after rat traps, so we've had a little bit to do with the authority. They are positive, enthusiastic, eager to make things work, eager to see a mission realised: to honour a sacred place, to make it a place everyone can enjoy.

Earlier this year they announced they'd be taking down 50 elm trees affected by dutch elm disease. How was this going to look? What kind of sad barren emptiness would this create? It made no appreciable difference, really, probably because 50 trees on the maunga amounts to not all that much. Certainly not a third.

The authority is working to a long term plan. This perhaps bewilders some people because here in Aotearoa New Zealand we do tend to feel more at home with your short term ad hoc sort-her-out-later she'll-be-right approach.

Protesters attempt to block removal of trees at Mount Albert.

On Ōwairaka what this entails is taking out about 300 exotic trees to make room to regenerate thousands of native plants.

But cutting down a fully grown oak tree can't be a good thing can it? No. And yes.

If your long term plan is to restore a maunga to its earlier state and that involves generating thousands of natives plants and trees, expert opinion - from arborists, from the Tree Council - is that the best time to take out existing trees is now, rather than trying to extract them some years further along when it's harder to do without harming the growing plants and trees.

What we will end up with is more than we have now. That can't be a bad thing, can it?

Maybe, according to some people - especially the Hobson Pledge crowd who know a hijackable opportunity when they see one.

Never mind the fact that this arrangement is the outcome of a treaty settlement, out of which has come a generous sharing arrangement. Never mind that the Tūpuna Maunga Authority has a statutory right to make these decisions, even if they prove to be, as we see in this instance, er, generous and far-sighted.

Every time this sort of thing happens, all the old objections take another trundle around the circus ring and the same sad old clowns who can't seem to settle into a content retirement put on their outsize shoes.

Will it one day dawn on them that these settlements, these efforts to right wrongs, to mend the damage of colonisation, have actually been a force for good, a step towards making this place richer?

For now, they're saplings, these efforts. But they grow a little each day.