I know wood burning is not environmentally cool but solar heat is not gonna work around here especially because we are surrounded by trees. This is a “mature” neighborhood as they say. Not every neighbor burns wood but most do so there is a bit of competition for the downed trees. One of our neighbors has three dogs and she comes by with one and then the other two (they don’t all get along) everyday. She spotted a fallen tree on the next street and told us about it, even introduced us to the neighbors, so Peggi and I dashed over and came back with five loads of red oak. A good score. The people watched as we rolled the logs up in to our vehicle and later asked the dog walkers if we were “hippies”. They thought we were “very industrious”. I didn’t think those two things went together.
This morning while we were reading the paper a huge truck came down our street with a wood chipper trailer in tow. It was a tree service hired by the power company to clean up the branches growing within their airspace, four feet in any direction and ten feet above the power lines that weave their way through the trees. They used to clean up the lower hanging cable tv and telephone lines but now they ignore those and just concentrate on the electric lines. It apparently isn’t worth it to the cable and phone companies (one in the same in many cases) to chip in and have these guys clean up their lines too. That tells me what I already knew. Cable tv and land phone lines are on the way out. Modern developments have all this infrastructure underground. But what about our internet service that comes through those lower lines? Is a wireless connection in our future?
We asked the tree guys for the big stuff and they said, “No problem. It makes our job easier.” Since we asked and our wood burning neighbors didn’t, would it be ethical for us to take the wood that through our intervention was spared from the wood chipper, even if it was trimmed from their tree? How about if the branch was in our air space? Is it rightfully ours anyway? This might be a question for “Dear Rich.”
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