Monday, Jun 2

Dear Dot, 

College-era Dot once attended a party hosted by Brother Dot’s law school buddies. It was beach-themed, with a small blow-up kiddie pool filled with sand and water, plenty of Hawaiian shirts, a fake palm tree, and two dozen law students letting loose. Sitting beneath the palm tree, his feet cooling in the pool, one future lawyer made a reference to “palm tree justice,” then laughed uproariously at his own joke. Turning to me, he said with all the smugness of someone who has yet to be publicly dressed down by a judge, “oh, you’re not a lawyer. You wouldn’t understand.” He was right about that. And since there was no Google in 1987, and I didn’t care enough to actually find out what palm tree justice is, I remained happily ignorant until I was writing today’s Daily Dot, which brought it to mind. Why?

Because today I’m talking about crimes against trees and, specifically, a policy in Australia that penalizes those who cut them down for the purposes of gaining a better view. 

The BBC reports that authorities in Sydney are taking a hard-line approach to “vandals” who have poisoned, cut down, or drilled deadly holes into hundreds of trees, “conveniently exposing the kind of harbour views that drastically increase property values.” Australia has existing laws on the books to discourage the destruction of trees, but the problem has recently grown exponentially, with thousands of trees being removed or killed, including many on public land. 

But while fines are hefty (they can be as high as A$5 million), determining who’s responsible and collecting fines from them can be difficult. Consequently, there are few convictions.

Instead, officials are turning to public shaming in the form of signs that decry the “tree vandalism” that has taken place and obscuring the view for which the trees were killed in the first place. “Trees shouldn’t die for a view,” reads one.

In some cases, however, community members feel as though these signs are punishing them, too, and they’ve been removed.

Still, while it might not technically be “palm tree justice” (which, incidentally, USLEGAL.com defines as “a pragmatic approach to justice that is entirely discretionary and transcends legal rights or precedent, enabling the court to make such order as it thinks fair and just in the circumstances of the case”), it is good to see laws wrapping their arms around trees.

Also … June 4th is Clean Air Day, and you know what cleans our air? That’s right. Trees. Here’s how.

Justly,

Dot