Live Oaks Uprooted

Destroy 84 coastal live oaks (some over 100 years old), then build a housing tract on the site called, what else, Pala Mesa Oaks! I find it very interesting to read of what Richard Blakeslee believes to be “kosher,” when he has mindlessly exterminated living things whose lives would have continued much longer than the sterile homes he plans to construct on their graves.

Ordering Blakeslee to pay for the maintenance of the trees he should be required to plant is not unreasonable. Although Blakeslee would like to pawn this responsibility off on the homeowner’s association of “Pala Mesa Oaks,” he misses the point.

Planting and nurturing the trees is an act not of environmental maintenance, but of returning to the land and all the plants and animals that rely on it something befitting nature, life. Developers have long been unable to figure out how to make money from such an enterprise.

TAD MAILANDER

San Diego