1000 Flowers for the Planet - #82 Plan Plantings for the Future
My local area has seen a lot of development
over the past decade. I’ve lived in my current home for 23 years and have
noticed a massive decline in the amount of trees in the neighbourhood to the
tune of fifty percent, maybe more. The skyline has been altered forever. As the
great Australian dream becomes the new Australian nightmare, houses are
bulldozed to make way for three or four units to be built on that one block.
The consequences are that every plant and tree, no matter how old or how large,
is bulldozed too. Then the land that once had a house and garden is covered in
bricks and concrete, with little or no room for a garden. By law they have to
plant trees, but these plantings are so inappropriately conducted that the
future of urban flora and fauna looks grim. Trees have been planted so close to
fences that there is no room for trunks to expand as the tree ages – nowhere to
grow.
Whilst I acknowledge that population growth demands
the expansion of housing, and ‘up’ is better than ‘out’ in terms of land use,
there has to be a common sense approach to the needs of humans AND insects,
animals and plantlife. The knock-on effect of covering land with concrete is the extinction
of species. Ultimately we endanger our existence by ignoring this. So plan for
the future – build for the future AND plant
for the future, ensuring trees have room to grow for decades, bees have plants
to visit, insects and wildlife have places to live.
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