“The bigger it is, the more it passes,” sums up a neighbor fatalistically.
His pretty house in Basse-Goulaine (Loire-Atlantique) had until a few days ago a breathtaking view of around twenty oak trees, most of them century-old, planted on private land.
But at the end of January and then at the beginning of February, loggers came to cut them down.
They then took part of the logs, the straightest part of the trunk, onto a trailer.
“We even greeted them with my grandchildren and they responded to us,” he remembers.
The problem is that no one, starting with the owner of the land, asked for their intervention… Neither did the town hall.
“Such work has never been requested,” protests the town of Basse-Goulaine, which describes this “savage cutting” as “shameful and scandalous”.
“These are trees with trunks of 70 cm to 1 m in diameter which have been there for at least a century.
The spectacle of these corpses of felled trees is quite sinister,” judges Michel Arbatz, president of the very young Basse-Goulaine Verte et Bleue association, which fights precisely for the defense of wooded areas and biodiversity.
Also read: 400 trees stolen, 4 hectares ransacked: a Spanish lumberjack accused of wild felling in the forests of Ariège
Only the crown of the trees, the part made up of the branches, remains on site.
“This cut sheds a violent light on our reason for being,” underlines the president of the association.
These trees are a collective heritage that must be preserved.
Once the damage is done, it's too late.
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The theft is all the more cheeky as the land is located on the edge of a wealthy residence, a few hundred meters from the Nantes ring road.
The Basse-Goulaine gendarmerie brigade is conducting an investigation for “theft with destruction and damage”.
But today, the mysterious loggers seem to have vanished into what remains of nature.