The Saturday Interview: Aiming to create something positive out of a disaster

THIS is a story about the death and afterlife of trees in Jersey.

A couple of days after Storm Ciarán had done its worst in early November 2023, there was an opportunity to drive out to see how the countryside had fared; it did not look at all happy. It was not so much bruised and battered; rather, it was the ravished victim of a violent rape by a brutal and devastating tempest. Tree trunks that should have proudly borne aloft a canopy of green, now ended with a raw and jagged stump, with their upper parts collapsed and trailing on the ground.

Ciarán is history, but recently we have had Storm Darragh, in which trees also fell and inevitably there will other storms in the future. It hardly needs to be said that trees are also felled intentionally through human agency, for right or wrong reasons…