The Tree Murders

If I haven't said this before - I live in a national park which is also an ex-military base. Owned by the feds, of course. Our apartment used to be military housing. Before the military moved in, the land was sand dunes, which are very beautiful and which have a very delicate ecology - and the military (God love 'em!) ruined the sand dunes and the cypress trees because of course they had to put some bunkers under the sand and erect military housing and put some missiles under the ground and other great stuff like that. They also planted a bunch of non-native invasive plants and even a whole non-native FOREST that is now dying and shall have to be removed soon. Brilliant, right? Little by little they are restoring the sand dunes by planting little baby native plants. The apartments we live in are slated to be demolished... eventually. They've already demolished some near the edges; we live near the center. (Hope I can save a down payment for a house before demolition time.)

Once, two days ago, there were some very nice trees that blocked the street noise and blocked the view of the street, while allowing us a view of the bigger cypress trees and the beach beyond. I liked them a lot.

WELL, THEY GOT CHOPPED DOWN!

I came home and they had all been chopped down; I freaked! When the trees near your home suddenly get chopped down, it's shocking. It's like if your partner came home from work one day just kind of casually missing A LEG. Of course, in two days no one has bothered to remove the murdered trees; the corpses are still lying there.
They are dead, we can see and hear the street, and I am sad. I asked one of the maintenance guys what happened. He told me the People Who Make Decisions decided to remove the trees because they were non-native species and they spread seeds.
Then the guy (his name is Carlos, but I think of him as "Feather" because he has a nasty gull feather sticking out of his hat) showed me some little baby cypress trees growing out of a crack in the asphalt parking lot. "They want me to take these out," he said, "But I cannot do it. They are like children! I cannot!" (Okay, his English is poor and my Spanish is poor, but roughly, that's what he said.) Then he told me that when the gophers ate the baby native plants he planted, The People Who Make Decisions wouldn't give him any replacements to plant. Idiots. They want him to remove the cypress trees, which are native, and won't give him any native plants to plant in the native plant restoration area.