I should have guessed that, being as I mentioned mine in an earlier post.

Being an environmentalist or a conservative need not be self-exclusive, or doctrinaire. In hurricane country, like Houston and Florida, trees give welcome shade and have environmental benefits, but they also threaten your property if they get blown over in a storm. No one could be blamed for cutting some of them down. You should adjust your actions to optimize your overall benefits, both on a private and public level.

Cutting down a few trees to save your house is one thing, ripping them all out just so your construction crews can save a little time and money is unconscionable. And in the long run, it will cost someone some money and quality of life down the line.

And it works both ways, forcing people to plant trees can be counter-productive if they hastily plant fast-growing imports which interfere with power lines, crowd out native species and which local wildlife will avoid. Hastily implemented rules which mandate back-planting trees without assuring their needs for watering and trimming and cleanup, just to meet some arbitrary regulation, is a misuse of power.

This is why we hire foresters and other professionals to make these decisions, to come up with technical solutions that maximize benefits for everyone. In my county, different municipalities have adopted every range of "government intervention" to deal with these issues, and the cities that have done it right can be easily be identified, as you cross the city limits the shady, urban forested areas are obviously more liveable and the trees contribute to both quality of life and property values. The areas that were built in a hurry, to save some developer a few bucks, look that way.

When I lived in Tampa, some of the finest and most liveable neighborhoods had been built with no urban planning at all, there was a variety of different house types and luxuriant indigenous vegetation and canopy that made them highly desireable places to live. Some of these neighborhoods, like Sulfur Springs, were very low income. Free market forces did this, without government help, because working people built their own houses so they could live comfortably in them, and they cared for their future and for the neighborhoods their kids were going to grow up in.

Property was so cheap there, and so pleasant, that local yuppies soon began to gentrify it. Now that property values are going up, developers are rushing in, bying people out, and bulldozing down 200 year old live oaks and fine century-old Florida bungalows and replacing them with high density luxury housing (cardboard condos). City government tends to smooth the way for these guys with zoning, regulations, etc that favor them. Free market forces are doing this too. Free market forces seem to work best when there are lots of small individual producers who have a personal stake in the long-term viability and productivity of their enterprises.

Large corporate enterprises are impersonal money-making machines owned by anonymous stockholders and managed by hired professionals whose primary goal is short term profit. They don't cultivate the land, they mine it. Because of their size and access to political power, they achieve economies of scale that allow them to roll over individual producers and family businesses, but they have little to do with free market principles. That's why we need regulation.