Should a Person Go to Jail for Cutting Down a Tree?

NASHVILLE — Down the street, right after Christmas, a developer knocked down a perfectly good house, along with nearly every tree on the deeply treed lot. It’s an old story here, and the pure waste of it is always appalling.

But this yard also happens to be on the neighborhood bobcat’s route between a school campus lush with trees and a wet creek bordered by dense greenery, and that’s what brought me to tears. Preserving those trees would have meant protecting an unassuming but crucial wildlife corridor in an area where development is putting increasing pressure on already stressed wildlife populations.

So I was primed to be incensed when I read about the Ohio siblings who cut down a 250-year-old black walnut tree in a suburb of Cleveland. Todd Jones and his sister, Laurel Hoffman, believed that the tree stood on family land, and the family’s finances were in dire trouble, so they sold the massive black walnut to a logging company for $2,000.

But according to deeds and survey images, the irreplaceable tree actually stood 7.5 feet outside their property line, in an area owned by Cleveland Metroparks, a system of local nature preserves. Now the Cuyahoga County prosecutor has charged Mr. Jones and Ms. Hoffman with grand theft and falsification, felony crimes. If convicted, they face up to 18 months in prison.

The Cleveland story is remarkable because of the size and age of the tree involved and also because it was felled on public land, which made prosecution an option. What was not remarkable is the attitude Todd Jones and Laurel Hoffman brought to bear on the question of the black walnut tree itself. “I have no idea where this is coming from,” Ms. Hoffman told The Plain Dealer. “It’s ours. I just don’t understand any of this.”

The tree belongs to us. The tree is ours.

I have heard of people cutting down massive trees, trees planted decades before the homeowner was even born, because they were dropping leaves into the family’s swimming pool. Or because they were impeding the homeowner’s desire to install plastic turf. Or because their kids wanted a trampoline. One woman I know told me we should cut down the 70-year-old maples in our own yard. “They’re so thick it feels like the house can’t breathe,” she said.

This was an educated person, a successful professional. Surely she knew that houses can’t breathe? And that trees can?

Still, I have nothing but compassion for the Ohio siblings who cut down a massive tree to pay down their stepmother’s back taxes. This is how collisions between the human need to survive and a tree’s need to survive tend to be resolved. Human beings become desperate, and trees carry no weapons. That’s why one of the most effective methods of reducing deforestation in poorer countries is remarkably simple: It’s paying landowners not to cut down their trees.

Human desperation takes many forms, and it’s not just the poor who can feel it. Homeowners with the very best of intentions can become alarmed about the dangers that trees may pose, as storms grow more frequent and more violent. No one wants to be spared by a tornado only to end up with a tree through the roof anyway. The worried homeowner inevitably consults a tree company for advice, never mind that people who make their living cutting down trees might not be the very best resources to consult about the safety of a tree.

Public policy, I’m thankful to say, is changing in favor of trees, at least in places where elected officials acknowledge climate change. Forests are well-known harbors of biodiversity and well-known carbon sinks, absorbing and sequestering greenhouse gases. In cities, trees cool hot streets, absorb pollution, improve air quality, limit storm water runoff, prevent erosion, enhance the physical and mental health of human beings, and provide desperately needed habitat for wildlife. Trees are a public good. Protecting them in public areas is a no-brainer for municipal leaders.

But how to protect trees on private land is a far greater challenge, and we have been far slower to address it. A great many homeowners share Laurel Hoffman’s view that they are entirely within their rights to cut down a tree on their own land. Occasionally there’s a brief hue and cry on social media, much like the one that followed a Lexington, Ky., homeowner’s decision to cut down a rare riparian oak planted by the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay sometime before 1850. But in too many places, it’s generally understood that when you own a piece of property, you also own every tree on the place.

Sustainability advocates have long recognized the importance of trees on private land and employ various strategies for preserving them. Many cities have ordinances to protect trees of a certain size or belonging to certain species, even on private land. In those places, a permit might be required to cut down a living tree — and replacement trees might need to be planted, with penalties levied for violating those terms — but such progressive laws often raise the ire of development-besotted politicians. In a red state such as Tennessee, laws made by blue cities can be easily overruled for the benefit of donors who fund state lawmakers’ campaigns.

To truly protect trees, we need to make a profound paradigm shift that transcends politics. We need to stop thinking of trees as objects that belong to us and come to understand them as long-lived ecosystems temporarily under our protection. We have borrowed them from the past, and we owe them to the future.

It’s dumbfounding to consider how long native trees can live if they manage to avoid an encounter with a chain saw or an alien microbe. There are living “witness trees,” as they are called, that stood watch over every important event in post-colonial American history. The doomed black walnut was a sapling in the Ohio woods while Washington was crossing the Delaware. Last month, a white pine fell in upstate New York that had stood since 1675, the year one of the accusers during the Salem witch trials was born. I know this because Susan Orlean just wrote the pine tree’s obituary for The New Yorker.

Her impulse to eulogize a tree should tell us something about what trees really are. They are living, breathing beings. They created the very air we breathe, and they are creating it still.

Their green leaves belong not to us, but to all the orders of insects who use them as a nursery. Their broad limbs belong not to us, but to the nesting songbirds and raptors. The damp soil beneath them belongs not to us, but to the snakes and turtles and lizards rooting for food, and to the rabbits looking for a safe place to hide their nests. Their flowers and drupes and nuts and berries feed absolutely everybody.

And a tree’s shade belongs not to us, but to the furtive bobcat making its shadowy way through our cacophonous world.

Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” and “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”

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