r/Charlotte • u/jstohler • Jul 17 '24
Photography The irony of building a nature museum by tearing down nature
In case you can’t read it, the fence says “Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky”
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u/TAtacoglow Jul 17 '24
If you’re mad about trees being cut down, you should probably focus more on every new suburban development than a nature museum
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u/HipsterMustache East Charlotte Jul 17 '24
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u/airavxirts NC Music Factory Jul 17 '24
Lol. The nature museum will be amazing and have positive impacts that far outweigh those few trees. Rube.
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u/thediesel26 Starmount Jul 17 '24
And they’ll almost certainly be re-planting everything afterwards. And they’ll probably have a nice outdoor eco-exhibit
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u/CtheDiff Jul 17 '24
Also, the large Japanese Maple at the entrance circle was to be retained and replanted after construction. Whether they pulled it off will be fun to see, but I consulted on it as well as which trees they could retain through the process. A lot of effort went in to the plan from a tree protection/preservation/replanting standpoint despite the current state. It’s always difficult to see mature trees removed, but this was thoughtfully considered.
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u/TheTruth730 Jul 17 '24
Hopefully they used these guys, they are the best in the biz. Super cool projects they’ve worked on all over the country.
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u/CtheDiff Jul 17 '24
EDI are the best/only for large tree moving. No idea who they ended up using or if they went through with it at all. Maplewood is the only company with a spade possibly large enough locally.
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u/TheTruth730 Jul 17 '24
Gotcha. I was at an expo and they were in a booth next to me. I was blown away at that one project they did where they moved 3 giant Live Oaks down the river on a barge. The 9/11 memorial, Pebble Beach, etc are all other awesome projects they’ve taken on. Takes a year in some cases to properly prep the giants for moving.
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u/airavxirts NC Music Factory Jul 17 '24
It's gonna have a live otter exhibit for gods sake! Otters are so cute!
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u/AdEmbarrassed9719 Jul 17 '24
I've seen a couple renderings of what they are expecting it to look like, and it's definitely got a wooded feel even at the entrance area - trees and shade, not just bare sunny lawn. Of course I imagine it'll take some time to get everything grown in once it's all finished.
Trees are awesome but they aren't monuments (a couple sequoias, the Angel Tree, and a few others excluded), it's easy to re-plant new ones. It's not like this is a housing development where it's clear-cut completely and then the contractor gets a bulk buy of whatever cheap saplings are available to stick one in each front yard.
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u/lkeels Jul 18 '24
Those trees and shade might be grown enough to matter by the 2040s.
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u/AdEmbarrassed9719 Jul 18 '24
Not if they plant larger trees in the first place. It's more expensive but entirely possible to have large trees transported and planted rather than saplings. No idea if they're planning to do that, but it's possible.
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u/lkeels Jul 18 '24
But we know all well and good that they won't. They'll be saplings at best.
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u/AdEmbarrassed9719 Jul 18 '24
Someone up above who consulted on the project says that their plan was to retain and replant as many of the mature trees as possible, so it was at least on their radar. Whether they have the funding to do it is another thing, but their intention clearly was to maintain as much as they could manage.
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u/Mason11987 Jul 17 '24
This guy probably does the “you can’t use planes if you advocate for the environment” thing.
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u/Mashy09 Jul 17 '24
lol destroying nature to value nature it’s teaching the importance of nature it’s just repeating the issues we constantly keep making more of, but by your user name you probably could care less about the environment and more about gas, so here’s your gas light
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u/niedlov Jul 17 '24
How so? What positive impacts?
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u/AdEmbarrassed9719 Jul 17 '24
Well, education, for one. They say they are focusing on stewardship and environmental education, they're clearly nestling the building into the existing forest area there (notice photographer is standing under a tree, with a line of trees across from him?), will feature native plants and animals, etc... It looks like it's going to be very cool!
https://naturecampaign.org/the-new-museum/
Also nearly all organizations of this sort work with other ones on educational and community initiatives in line with their focus. I would expect them to probably work with organizations like Trees Charlotte and other local sites (Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden, if the Garden is lucky, for example) toward goals like maintaining Charlotte's tree canopy and encouraging people to include native plants in their gardens providing habitat and forage for beneficial insects and such.
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u/airavxirts NC Music Factory Jul 17 '24
Through education and advocacy of science and nature. Kids and people visit and learn and that informs their decisions on how to interact with nature.
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u/ImpactMelodic8001 Jul 17 '24 edited Jul 17 '24
Just to clarify, this isn’t a new museum being built. The Nature Museum has been there since 1951. It is being rebuilt and redesigned. Clearly they need to work on their PR since no one on Reddit seems to have heard of it before now 😂
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u/batmanmedic Jul 18 '24
I’ve lived here 36 years, love museums, and had been to that one a few times…. and even I frequently forgot about that place.
Legitimately my first thought when I saw this post was “oh, I’m surprised we never had a nature museum… wait did we??” 🤣
So yeah it wasn’t a super memorable place.
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u/Big-Blackberry8786 Jul 17 '24
To be fair most of Meck county was Ag land before. It’s not like it’s old growth undisturbed forest. It’s been scalped and regrown many times.
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u/crimsonkodiak Jul 17 '24
That's true of many places in the US.
Like, people will walk through NYC's Central Park and lament how the landscape has changed - without realizing that Central Park is an entirely unnatural man-made creation.
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u/Rocqy Jul 19 '24
It’s pretty much the entire country, you can find maps of “virgin forests” in the US and any of them east of the Mississippi are so small they’re hard to see.
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u/AdEmbarrassed9719 Jul 18 '24
This is true, and it takes surprisingly little time for forest to re-grow. Part of the farm I grew up on was completely cleared plowed field, and within 20 years of that ending it's now forested. Not old-growth massive stuff, but it wasn't that in the first place and hadn't been since at least the early 1600s.
And trees are not some sacred thing, nature takes them down now and again to renew things. Natural wildfires, diseases, etc. they come they go, they die, new ones grow.
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u/TheDulin Steele Creek Jul 17 '24
I think cutting down trees here makes sense since it's hard to build on a wooded lot.
But just FYI - replanting trees is easy, but replacing a long term stand of trees or forest isn't as simple as replanting.
Places where there have been trees for thousands to millions of years cannot be quickly restored by replanting a forest.
I don't think this applies to this location but thought I'd mention it.
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u/nexusheli Revolution Park Jul 17 '24
So... were they just supposed to weave materials through the trees to try to make a building?
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u/SpookE_Cat Jul 17 '24
Tree house museum, duh! Lol
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u/Schitheed Jul 17 '24
Unironically that would be cool as hell
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u/ChiSp0 Jul 20 '24
Have you seen this museums future canopy walk? While not a building, they are doing it with a boardwalk.
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u/AdEmbarrassed9719 Jul 17 '24
Dude is standing under a tree taking the photo, with a treeline directly ahead of him - how many did they cut down, like five?
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u/Zestyclose-Smell-788 Jul 17 '24
Have you ever flown over Charlotte? We live in a forest, like Ewoks. We have plenty of trees, trust me.
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u/BaconOnTap South Park Jul 17 '24
That museum needed a serious overhaul. It will better serve the community in its new form.
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u/Uthredd Jul 17 '24
"Take all the trees and put them in a tree museum. Charge the people a dollar and a half to see them."
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u/balzackgoo Jul 18 '24
I've worked on similar projects in my state, yes trees get cut down and a bunch of stuff disturbed during construction. However, there is usually a landscape plan to replace trees and shrubs. Also, if this is a conservation thing, they'll use native species and other stuff, like flowers, to offset the impacts.
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u/javert01 Jul 17 '24
Are they actually tearing down trees? That looks like where the former building was.
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u/CasualAffair Seversville Jul 17 '24
It's a bummer, but we should probably withhold judgement until the place is built and replanted
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Jul 17 '24
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u/TheDulin Steele Creek Jul 17 '24
Not disagreeing with the sentiment in the comments, but most houses today are built using farmed pine trees, not a random mix of trees from clear cutting for construction.
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Jul 17 '24
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u/TheDulin Steele Creek Jul 17 '24
I just meant that no one cut down non-farmed trees to build most of the recent construction.
And not that it makes a meaningful difference, but my house was built on farmland that was owned by one of the early European settlers. So no one bulldozed my lot, they cut the trees with manual labor hundreds of years ago.
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u/diehydrogen Jul 18 '24
That’s nothing. You should see the hundreds they just cut down at reedy creek
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u/Mister_M00se Jul 18 '24
Reminds me of the modest mouse lyric:
"More housing developments go up named after the things they replace. So welcome to Meadow Brook and welcome to Shady Space"
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u/Specialist-Base1248 Jul 18 '24
Heavy equipment continuously running over tree roots will damage the trees.
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u/Deburger316 Jul 19 '24
I fence around the area would have made a nature museum. There’s no money in that though
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u/Low_Purchase_6788 Jul 19 '24
Could just leave it but no money in that. Only the bums profit from empty land.
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u/Successful-Coffee-17 Jul 20 '24
"They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum"- Big Yellow Taxi by The Counting Crows
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u/Kaekuda Jul 17 '24
The only way to aid nature is to replenish the native species, we constantly tear down native growths and replace them with invasive trees/plants that only harm the other native species. If these plants aren’t exclusively native to southern NC/upstate SC, then they are a waste of the land they’re on
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u/captainmicahp Jul 17 '24
Parks like Freedom Park are a built environment. Just because they are green does not mean they are actually natural. The new museum will be good for the city and will not have an impact on any wilderness.
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u/ImpactMelodic8001 Jul 17 '24
It’s not a new museum - it’s an updated version of a museum that has been there since the 50s. But agree it’ll be good for the city!! The museum was in need of an update.
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u/Secret_Elevator17 Jul 17 '24
"… They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them"
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u/Alexkeeney766 Jul 17 '24
We were so upset to see those trees taken down, is there any reason it couldn’t have been placed elsewhere rather than destroying part of the greenway canopy?
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u/PermanentlyAwkward Jul 17 '24
“Fuck these poems in particular!” -Someone sitting at the bar with Khalil Gibran
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u/long5210 Jul 18 '24
greensboro did the exact same thing at our “Natural Science Center”. took out over a hundred mature oaks and popular and put up a hugh wooden boardwalk and had the gaul to post signs saying “natural protection area “. i couldn’t believe what i saw
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Jul 17 '24 edited Jul 17 '24
"and in this exhibit we have a picture of a tree. It's the tree that once stood in the very place of this building before we had it built." " And in this exhibit we have a birds nest. This birds nest was once on top of that tree that once stood before this building was built. Now you can see the birds nest behind this glass" "what's that you say? No, the birds nest is no longer in use. Moving on".
I kid. Sounds like a great idea. Can't wait.
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u/niedlov Jul 17 '24
OP, I am with you on this. It is ridiculous that they are tearing down trees for a nature museum. Also, seeing the comments here is so sad. People will not care about nature until it is too late. "Oh, but they will have otters," lol otters who don't get a life in the wild either. Purely for our entertainment.
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Jul 17 '24
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u/niedlov Jul 17 '24
Ten trees? No, more than that. I don't agree with the suburban development either. Charlotte has a lot of abandoned houses and warehouses that could easily be places for houses. Yet, it "cost too much." When do people start caring about nature more than cost? Probably never, but it is ironic that a "nature" museum would cut down trees to build.
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u/Mashy09 Jul 17 '24
There’s plenty of vacant properties they could have bought and built on
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u/AdEmbarrassed9719 Jul 18 '24
They already had a building on this property though, which is now that blank space there.
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u/m4a785m Jul 17 '24
While yes it is ironic, I think it’s near impossible to build in this type of geography without cutting down trees.