What the Sycamore Gap tells us about our relationship with trees

It is now two weeks since the felling of the iconic tree at Sycamore Gap in Northumberland. This was a horrific instance of cultural vandalism – the destruction of not only a beautiful tree but also one of the UK’s most loved and visited natural landmarks.

During the last fortnight this news story has produced an outpouring of grief and anger across the world, from local residents to eminent naturalists and writers. And deep within that anger is fear, as we were suddenly made aware of the vulnerability of countless other things we hold dear.

People clearly cared a lot about this tree. For a moment, the population seemed unified in their remorse. You’d be forgiven for thinking the UK a nation of tree lovers. And yet beyond that, we have a complicated relationship with nature, with trees in particular being a contentious topic.

This felling at Sycamore Gap was undoubtedly committed by very few people, if not an individual. And yet it points to a wider, yet undefined, section of society who look at nature as something to be destroyed, mastered, pitted against, who see no worth in the standing of a tall, lone tree.

Around the country we are continually hearing of the battle of local people trying to protect trees, usually from development. In 2014, we heard of the brave souls in Sheffield chaining themselves to trees in order to stop the mindless meeting of felling quotas from the city council. Then in 2021 we heard of people tunnelling under Euston Square Gardens in order to halt the destruction of a park, and one of the few remaining green spaces in that part of Central London. And then there were multiple campaigns to save the many ancient woodlands being laid before the saw of the unstoppable march of HS2.

These issues are not new. Even back in 1879, the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote of his outrage and heartbreak at the felling of the Binsey Poplars in Oxfordshire, which were “All felled, felled, are all felled…not spared not one.”

One thing is clear: a lot of people care for trees in this country and many will put their freedoms on the line to protect them. At that the same time, there will always be others intent on cutting them down. In this light, this incident at Sycamore Gap can be seen as just the latest in a long line of acts of aggression against trees - not the first and certainly not the last.

Where this incident varies however – and what makes it all the more shocking – is its lack of clear incentive. There was no development that the tree was unfortunately ‘in the way of’. There was no threat to property. There is no profit nor counter-argument to be made. There’s no gain to be had anywhere. Even for the poor person who committed this crime – they cannot, surely, be now basking in the fruits of their labours?

Instead, this act of vandalism is all the harder to come to terms with because of its sheer pointlessness. And out of this our collective mourning of this tree has revealed a curious paradox about our relationship to nature in the UK.

The reason this tree was so beloved is that it stood alone in a landscape otherwise devoid of trees. It was a focal point and a unique place worth remembering amongst the rolling moors. It gave scale and presence to our own existence, which otherwise feels so small under the huge moorland skies. However, our environmental memories no longer stretch back far enough to remember the forests that once covered those hills and were – as a pre-echo of that final tree in the landscape – cut down.

And so we bemoan a lost natural treasure. And rightly so, because it served for so many decades as a symbol of patience and resistance, an unchanging point on the landscape. But we ignore at our peril the bigger picture: the unstoppable trends of global forest destruction, habitat loss and ecosystem breakdown.

According to the World Resources Institute, last year we lost 4.1 million hectares of tropical forests around the world, equivalent to 11 football fields being cut down every minute. And this rate of destruction is increasing. Here in the densely populated south east of England it’s just too vast a problem even to imagine, let alone tackle. So we ignore it, and focus instead on something smaller, more manageable, in this case a single tree in Northumberland into which we pour our grief.

Our response recalls the line once attributed to Joseph Stalin, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are statistic.” For there are hundreds of thousands of trees being cut down worldwide everyday, and yet these receive next to no press coverage. Be it the destruction of huge areas of Indonesia, Siberia, Brazil, Congo, or the logging of old-growth forests still occurring in Canada and Australia. Despite us hearing of these large and unimaginable numbers, these stories for the most part go unnoticed, and the trees fall in their millions in forests across the world, ungrieved.

Instead, we mourn a single tree, something small enough to grasp and comprehend, but embodying our wider anxiety about the natural world. For it is through this act of simple vandalism we begin to guess at our strained and broken relationship with nature as a whole.

If anything good is to come out of the felling of this tree it is this, that we convert our collective outrage into action and spark a real conversation about the place of trees and nature in our lives. That this event will give people pause the next time they pass a tree in a lonely windswept place. And that these discussions will inspire a new generation of people to think more openly about the power of trees, and the multiple riches they bring.