Maleea Acker, a UVic professor, a journalist and author of Gardens Aflame, about Garry Oak Meadows, has written this letter to Adriane Pollard, Director, Environmental Services, Saanich, with copies to Mayor and Council, plus to the Times-Colonist and the Editor of the Saanich News, Jim Zeeben about saving the six Garry Oak trees on Finnerty Road by UVic.
If you haven’t already done so, please keep up the pressure to save the Finnerty Garry Oak trees and write mayor@saanich.ca
Here is Maleea Acker’s letter and one by Eric Dahli, Chair of the Cadboro Bay Residents Association
http://cadborobayra.tumblr.com/post/182886728874/cbra-to-saanich-reconsider-removal-of-finnerty
Hi Adriane,
I hope this finds you well.
A concerned citizen, Harriet Graham, wrote to me today regarding a group of six Garry Oak trees on Finnerty road near UVic.
I walked by the trees last week, just before I received Harriet’s letter, by coincidence.
The cutting of mature Garry Oak trees (and indeed, any trees) to facilitate bike lanes needs to stop. There is no reason the two can’t both be accommodated. What Harriet suggests below—either narrowing the road or bike lane, or using a raised boardwalk instead of a curbed sidewalk, would allow the trees to remain.
Nowhere else that I’ve travelled while teaching sustainability classes (in Western and Northern Europe) have urban canopies of trees suffered so greatly as I see them suffering in Saanich and Victoria (I realize you only have jurisdiction over one of these!). I urge you to work to save these trees, and to plant more, not as replacements for cut trees, but as additions to standing, healthy, mature trees. Garry oaks, in particular, are our refugium, which we will come to depend on as climate change becomes more and more pressing, and causes longer and longer droughts in the CRD. It’s a kind of insanity to cut these trees down, wherever they stand, in these times. That it is occurring in the name of bike lanes and increased pedestrian access only gives this kind of sustainability work a bad name, and creates unnecessary friction between residents.
I commend Harriet’s work in starting a petition to save these trees. I urge you to reconsider Saanich’s current plan. City planning needs to start from the ground up, not the top down, as I teach in my classes at Uvic. When concerned citizens speak up, it is a sign that the municipality’s chosen design is not yet working. Adjustments should occur.
All best wishes,
Maleea Acker, PhD Candidate
Critical Geographies Research Lab
University of Victoria
Traditional Territories of the Lekwungen and WSÁNEC peoples
Writer | Journalist | Editor