Amelanchier

I have probably binned at least as many potential posts as I have made - often because after I have rephrased things to be as clear as possible and to reduce the chances of being misinterpreted I find that what I have written no longer looks like what I wanted to say! I don't know that new members are put off posting by the 'robust' discussions. As with other forums I've been on, there are a mix of people that use the site. Some are lurkers, some are one-shot posters, hit and runs, some get very involved for a short while and then move onto something else, some post everyday, some post every month - I don't think we can say for certain why people don't post. All we can do is see why people do post; the topics that are presented to us are our data. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

You gonna go through my bins later?

Not my style. I copied it from a paper called; Gurr, T. R. 1981. Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence. Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research 3:295–350 which is cited in Pinker, S. 2011 The Better Angels Of Our Nature: The Decline Of Violence In History And Its Causes. Allen Lane.

Except that the only option for the LPA should they wish to prevent its removal would have been to serve a TPO - not really an option on a laurel hedge even for the most liberal TO (and I say that as someone who has gleefully TPO'd Leylandii and Elder). A good starting point would be to ask the LPA if their legal team would like to chance their definition of a tree in the courts. They won't.

Did no-one take you up on that offer? S'funny...

And had you lived in the 14th century (still in England but outside of nobility) some sources estimate your likelihood of being murdered as 110 times greater than today (based on the number of homicides per 100,000 population)!

Slavery is a good example of what I'm talking about. It didn't just become politically incorrect; it became illegal. Modernity did that, not romanticism. Societies decided it was immoral, that they wanted to eradicate it and they weren't looking backwards to the good old days when they choose to do so. The average person alive today is many many times less likely to be sold into slavery than their ancestors. And lest we think that capitalism is crypto-slavery lets remember that a slave-owner could brand, beat, rape, mutilate, torture and kill their slaves with impunity as well as profit from their work and control their property and lives. I don't think even the worst fat cat is quite that bad. Ha - get the lottery numbers as well!

No one in their right mind would deny that there are terrible things happening to many many people at this moment in time (see Gibbons good examples). There are and I agree that we should strive to eradicate them (strive harder no doubt, than we are). There are also immoral disparities between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' which we must work on reducing. However, none of this means that things can't be better now than in the past. The reality that the average life has improved does not mean that we should feel less compassion for the starving millions, nor does it mean that we have to accept the dire ethical mechanics of our financial institutions. Just because our world isn't perfect doesn't mean we should bin it and start again from some romanticised pre-agricultural illusion. Thinking that life would be better for everyone if we closed our bank accounts, moved off grid, grew a few courgettes and ate squirrels is a cop out, it's a refusal to really engage with the more difficult question of how we improve the world for everyone.

I knew someone wouldn't bother to read the actual content of my posts, would pick the bits they felt they could deal with, and come up with some sort of parallel arguement that was utterly divorced from the spirit and letter of the original. You just made exactly that assumption. You assumed they were happy. Anyway, leaving that amusing error aside, presumably you somehow interpreted what I wrote as saying that I considered indigenous people 'unhappy'? I didn't. There is nothing that puts my back up more than assumptions regarding the content of my posts... Is this what I said? Did I single out 'western society' for comparison? Did we discuss morality? Civilisation? Nope. That detour into your ranting territory is closed i'm afraid.

My point wasn't that indigenous peoples are less morally or culturally advanced than us, nor that they would not have been better of if historically left alone it was simply to say that the average person alive today is better off on average than their ancestors on any criteria that you care to measure. The reality of the indigenous life is very different (as I'm sure you have experienced) from that imagined by those that wish for us to smash our technology, return to bartering, live in yurts and live off the land. It's hard and one must embrace different (note not lower or higher) expectations. As a result I find the glibness of the "everything would be better if we lived in harmony with nature" mindset epically naive and essentially insulting. It basically demeans the ethics of modernity (and by extension, my ethics) in favour of an unreal never never land.

Predictably I chose the Yanamamo (or Yanamami) for their well documented history of violence, some of it documented by a brown Brazilian woman for the record (does that make it more truthful?). You presumably met idyllic harmonious people living at one with nature, no matter. Perhaps yours is the white man's history? I doubt that, no matter how well travelled I was (and I'll admit I'm not), I could ever consider my limited interactions as a single individual would overthrow the corpus of modern anthropology.

Yes it is. There is a fundamental problem waiting for us though if we disregard the information collected by the 'haves' on the basis that it is all biased - the 'have nots' aren't doing a lot of research. So we either take the information we have and scrutinise it, double check it and critically analyse it or we have nothing more than guesswork. Clearly things could be better. We should have less poverty, disease, crime (and all the other bad things to numerous to mention), and there are problems that humanity will have to address in the near future (adaption to climatic variability, the eventually rising price of conventional fossil fuels, etc etc) but things are better than they were.

I'd prefer evidence over postmodern relativist haymakers. Ever met a Yanamamo?

Also those of us wooried about the increasing population should take note of Malthus and the Demogrpahic Transition Model.

Well I disagree with all the nostalgia for an era that one of us lived through. Life today for your average human is better now than it has ever been. We are fortunate to have less disease, less war, less murder, less rape, less slavery, less torture, more education, more suffrage, less child abuse, greater personal incomes and greater personal autonomy; though I would concede that the overall level of moaning about the world has probably been maintained. Don't get too carried away dreaming of the idyllic lifestyle of an ancient amazonian - life was short (I suspect 40 years would be positively venerable), limited (frogs for dinner again?), parochial (no arbtalk!), drowned in superstition (do what the witchdoctor says...) and involved endless intertribal wars, skirmishes, murders and fights. Harmony indeed.

I have and I recall it being made clear that it was not acceptable.

I'd buy one just to scare children with.

Having just read this thread from start to finish for the first time I'd just like to ask out of pure interest:- Of those climbers that would refuse to use this biner out of concern of the possibility of friction causing accidental opening, how many use four way biners? I suspect I already know the answer. Which is odd really 'cos if accidental opening was a real risk worth worrying about then you'd think that you'd want to reduce the probability as low as possible? Right?

There is no light to shed - the LPA made a mistake, the tree paid the price. The OP made the right decision given that it was the only sensible decision to make...

Tree management is often tacked on to grounds maintenance contracts and subbed out from whoever is fixing fences and mowing the grass. That's who you need to approach. Can be a closed shop though. In my neck of the woods, state schools are run by the county council, who (quite legally) own a company with a subsidiary that undertakes grounds maintenance (under binding contract) for schools. A veritable money-go-round. You can get an oppourtunity to tender for the tree work but because of the contracts, you'll hardly ever get the consultancy. Either way a surcharge is applied to your fee. In my view a very bad deal for schools.

I think 34 views and no replies tells you everything you need to know...

Exactly. Anyone that has a problem with that is free to start up their own discussion forum and spend hours and hours arguing about the appropriateness of what others want to say on it!

Yes. One is a discussion that has the potential to impact upon the business practices of a legal entity and the other isn't. Seems pretty clear cut to me.

Well, y'know...