Editor,
If I may, I’d like to briefly respond to Dave’s letter (“Plant a Tree, Block a View”) from last week. To begin with, thank you Dave, your point is well taken. I understand that many homes in Laguna have indeed been built with view sheds in mind, and the insensitive and often malicious desire to “throw up a wall of green” to block that view is at best unfair.
However, the point I was trying to make is that the 100-year-old eucalyptus trees in upper Bluebird were here long before many of the houses, even before the Olympic Village bungalows that populate our hills. They were here first. It is the “scorched earth” policy that’s argued by the new kids on the block, which suggests that these giant trees matter not at all.
The bungalows, the winding roads, the farms, the shade, the banana plantations, the idiosyncratic architecture, the goat herding, the hiking trails, and the eucalyptus trees are still here (at least for now) because those of us that are still here still care. We don’t wish to carve or neuter or hedge-clip our way any closer to Newport Coast. We just want to preserve, while respecting both safety and the local sensitivities, the very things that we found when we first turned the corner on Coast Highway.
With all due respect, many of us care more for “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” than for the Army Corp of Engineers.
I hear a Joni Mitchell song coming on, and that’s okay.
Mace Morse, Laguna Beach
I’ve been a part of Laguna since I was sixteen so I’ve seen a lot in the past forty or so years. I have no problem for the most part of old growth trees if they’re kept thinned out and healthy.
My problems come from people who plant trees or let their other plants grow wild without consideration of their neighbors, especially when their views are much nicer than those around them.
Come on people… Think!