[thistleclub]

Why Hamilton ‘needs bylaws with teeth’
(Hamilton Spectator, Jeff Mahoney, June 14 2013)

I stood with Keith Archer in the middle of what was once a thriving, beautifully forested area off Stonehenge Road near the Meadowlands in Ancaster.

We stood where there used to be a frog pond, where cardinals once sang and owls hooted in 100-year-old trees. And where healthy, active squirrel populations spurred the chase instincts of neighbourhood dogs on walks through these erstwhile woods.

That place is no more. Part of it is being turned into a storm management pond, presumably as prelude to new development.

For now, it's simply grotesque. Depressingly so. This former woodland, which provided a handsome fringe for the Meadowlands Fellowship Church, has been reduced to a single survivor, like Ishmael at the end of Moby Dick.

A lone tree remains, inexplicably, right at the sidewalk.

Lying beyond it, the tree's mates, literally hundreds of them, are piled in gruesome heaps that bring to mind some kind of arboreal charnel house or mass grave. Other amputated trees are scattered, like a giant game of pickup sticks, their trunks ripped apart, disfigured, discards of a necessarily indiscriminate process.

When Keith brought me through the aftermath he carried with him a large metal measuring rod.

"This one's 59 centimetres," he told me, laying the rod across the base of a felled tree.

An 81-centimetre diameter hardwood, a 75-centimetre white pine, one fallen tree whose base is so broad it dwarfed the entire measuring stick.

A weeping willow, 110 centimetres across. Weeping? If it could, it would be howling from the hills.

Some of these trees were more than 60 feet tall. This goes on for three, maybe four acres, maybe more.

Here's the thing. It was accomplished in not much more than a single day.