How Do You Mourn a 250-Year-Old Giant?

By Margaret Renkl | The New York Times

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NASHVILLE — Down the street, right after Christmas, a developer knocked down a perfectly good house, along with nearly every tree on the deeply treed lot. It’s an old story here, and the pure waste of it is always appalling.

But this yard also happens to be on the neighborhood bobcat’s route between a school campus lush with trees and a wet creek bordered by dense greenery, and that’s what brought me to tears. Preserving those trees would have meant protecting an unassuming but crucial wildlife corridor in an area where development is putting increasing pressure on already stressed wildlife populations…