Thomas Brail, 47, arborist-climber in the Tarn and founder of the National Tree Monitoring Group (GNSA), will be received on Monday June 20 by the Ministers of Ecological Transition Amélie de Montchalin and Agriculture Marc Fesneau “to work together on tree protection,” the GNSA said in a statement.
The activist dismounted Thursday evening after eleven days spent in a plane tree, assessed as bicentenary by his defenders and threatened according to them by a project to build small buildings at the foot of the Iron Lady carried by the town hall of Paris.
The arborist, his face emaciated, came down alone, seated in his harness.
Thomas Brail is calling on the new government of Elisabeth Borne for “a law which regulates clear cuts” in order to limit the industrialization of forests and the monocultures of softwoods, in particular Douglas firs.
He also calls for a “strengthening of article L350-3 of the environmental code”, which prohibits the felling of trees, with exceptions including “developments”, which considerably weakens their protection for the GNSA.
Thomas Brail relayed the cause of opponents of the building construction project at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, which was to entail the felling of around twenty trees.
This mobilization forced the PS mayor Anne Hidalgo to backtrack in early May, guaranteeing that no trees would be cut down. However, it has not given up on the project, part of a larger project of revegetation and pedestrianization of the axis between the Trocadéro and the Champ-de-Mars.
On Friday, his first deputy Emmanuel Grégoire received the associations on this subject.
The latter nevertheless decided to launch an administrative appeal on Wednesday against this building permit at the foot of the Iron Lady, considering that it involved a “serious attack on the interest of the place as well as the conservation of monumental perspectives “.
