Dennis Minsky is mourning the impending loss of Provincetown’s beech trees in his column this week. In their case, a tiny nematode seems to be the cause. Scientists don’t yet know what role we humans may have in the beech leaf disease that is destroying these beloved members of our forest.
Last month, Eastham adopted a new bylaw regulating clear-cutting and the removal of “legacy trees” — those with a diameter of at least 24 inches — without first getting permission from the building department. In arguing for the bylaw, the select board’s Jamie Demetri said she had in mind cases of forest destruction where humans are clearly the culprits.
I wonder if she was thinking about the case of David and Chellise Sexton, who clear-cut a swath of woods on their property in the Cape Cod National Seashore next to Lecount Hollow Beach in Wellfleet and operated an illegal parking lot there until the town made them stop. The Sextons are suing the zoning board of appeals, which upheld the building inspector’s cease-and-desist order. They say the bylaw protects timber, not trees.
Truro residents Donna and Steve DiGiovanni of Great White Realty are also suing the Wellfleet ZBA. In this case it’s for upholding a cease-and-desist order on the Route 6 site they clear-cut without getting the required permits. The place is a contractor’s yard now.
Maybe she was thinking about the 2016 case of Horton’s Camping Resort in North Truro, where owner Wayne Klekamp illegally cut down 11 acres of trees and brush, including 8,000 square feet of woods belonging to the National Seashore.
Another fight over tree-cutting is now brewing in Truro, where Robert Martin was ordered to stop selling landscaping materials and firewood from the site of the old Jack’s Gas station on Route 6 in the Seashore. Martin admits “there were a few trees cut down” in the unpermitted expansion of his business — an act clearly prohibited by town bylaws. He’s appealing Truro’s cease-and-desist order.
In Eastham itself, where Nauset Regional High School is being rebuilt, contractors clear-cut a stand of trees in the Seashore and will “need to do some mitigation,” said Town Administrator Jacqui Beebe.
These local cases of clear-cutting all show the same pattern: bulldoze first and ask for permission — or file suit — afterward. It’s effective because towns have few tools and little appetite for enforcing the rules.
Maybe Provincetown’s approach will prove instructive. The town adopted a tree bylaw in 2017 and has a tree warden, whose job is to take care of trees on town-owned land.
Let’s hope new rules will help, because it’s not clear how much good “mitigation” can do. In an essay titled “Root and Branch” in the current New Yorker, Jill Lepore argues that clear-cutting destroys an entire ecosystem that cannot easily be restored by replanting. “With the forest go the worlds within those woods,” she writes, “each habitat and dwelling place, a universe within each rotting log, a galaxy within a pine cone.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this column, published in print on June 1, gave an incorrect name for the proprietor of the landscaping materials business in Truro. It is Robert Martin, not William Martin.
