Student Protesters at Harvard Say Cutting Down Old Campus Tree is ‘Murder’
“I question an architectural team and administration who cannot figure out another solution”
A tree specialist has said the tree won’t survive much longer. Plus, it’s blocking a planned renovation.
The College Fix reports:
Harvard students protest plan to ‘murder’ campus tree
If you thought tree huggers had been left out of the new intersectional coalition of campus leftists, you haven’t seen Harvard Divinity School.
Students are protesting the administration’s plan to cut down a tree that’s blocking the renovation of Andover Hall, the main building for the Ivy League university’s religion school, made possible by a $25 million gift, according to The Harvard Crimson.
The tree is a century old and a tree specialist said it probably wouldn’t survive a move – or live much longer, anyway – but some students believe it’s a “sacrilegious act of violence” to cut it down:
Divinity School enrollee Jesse Bercowetz, who said he identifies as a pagan, said he believes the tree is like an elder family member. Cutting it down is an act of murder.
“I question an architectural team and administration who cannot figure out another solution,” Bercowetz said. …
Like Bercowetz, some students say they are concerned by both the ethical and spiritual ramifications of the tree’s felling. Others take issue with the manner in which administrators have handled the decision-making process, calling it one-sided.
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Comments
I don’t know about ‘ethical,’ or ‘spiritual,’ but how about Aesthetic?? Some institutional planners, and the donors they enable, just think that every tree is an obstacle, waiting to be knocked down. They might replace it with a sapling, after they are done. In 100 years, maybe the sapling will become a tree worth looking at. Then again, it might get in the way again, and have to be cut down . . . Apparently, it took an enormous struggle to persuade the architects and planners to save the giant copper beech which is now the most attractive feature and the symbol of Currier House—it had to be transplanted, then replanted, and is doing just fine, fifty years later.
My local university recently spent about a million dollars to move a huge old oak tree. Personally, I have a house plant that has been in my family for six generations that gets its own special window seat in my house. And who among us wouldn’t be outraged at the bulldozing of the Sequoias or bristlecone pines, or the Grand Canyon or Tetons, or the Pyramids or Stonehenge, for that matter? Should we cast out our unproductive elderly as well?
Perhaps it is an inherent human instinct to honor something that has endured for so long, to value it more than what appears on an accountant’s balance sheet.
Well, if the reports are true the tree may be dying anyways and likely wouldn’t survive transplant.
So this is tree euthanasia at the hands of the campus death committee.
So cut a tree is a “sacrilegious act of violence”? And according to the same pagan values, what is an abortion?
Looks like this one brought out Harvard’s version of the lunatic fringe. (Well at least ONE of the versions.) A “pagan” and other tree worshipers in the “Divinity School”? Seriously?