The danger of trees

I never got to see any of those epic Lord of the Rings movies. Could never take them seriously. But I do remember one scene which featured a small army of elderly trees on the march, groping their way forwards and muttering menacing things as they went. I'm not sure if they were good guys or bad guys, but they did look a bit ominous.

I thought of them yesterday when I read in one of T&T's newspapers that every single tree at our local airport at Piarco was being cut down, presumably in advance of the Summit of the Americas conference being held in Port of Spain in April. Not that the trees were likely to converge personally on visiting heads of state. But who knows if some secret agent of bin Laden's might not slip through airport security, perhaps dressed as one of the cultural performers hired to wine for the arriving celebrities, scramble into a lovely full-flowering poui tree and take aim at President Obama. 

Well obviously, the solution to that is to cut all the trees down. Take that, bin Laden.

But this morning a spokesman for the airport says indignantly that the massacre of the trees has nothing at all to do with the Summit of the Americas. Heaven forfend. There is a perfectly logical and rational explanation. The trees were obscuring security surveillance of the airport car park. 

Well obviously, it's better to turn the car park into a wasteland of scorching concrete, unrelieved by any sort of shade or green or beauty, than to risk unseemly or untoward behaviour among the vehicles, or some stealthy bomber or assassin squirming under the chassis, or some cunning car thief who prefers to sneak a car past the security barriers rather than take one parked on the open road.

And even more obviously, it's far better to massacre scores of young and mature trees than to move the security cameras to a better angle, or put up a couple of extra ones. I mean, we are becoming a developed nation, are we not? So who needs trees?