I hate to see a good tree go down. Unfortunately I’ve had the misfortune to witness two incidents so far this year. The first was the worst.

In the late morning of New Year’s Day I heard a buzzing outside and went onto my little sixth floor balcony to investigate. On a tiled roof below stood a man with rope tied around his shoulders and waist. It stretched up to the branches of a tall fir tree nearby which another man was sawing through lower down. The rope was to restrain it from crashing down too swiftly. I was outraged. The tree was perfectly healthy, and a prime fine feature of the landscape, towering over the crazy patchwork jigsaw of housing in the slum area where I live in Istanbul. I loved to watch the crows hopping about in its branches with my morning coffee.

“Ayyıp’ (Shame!)” I shouted, and went back inside, furious. They were probably going to use it for firewood. The area is poor and in the slow process of demolition, and the tree was in nobody’s yard. Still. I went back out to shout a final comment.

“Günah! (Sin!)” I left it at that. The tree was down. The deed could not be undone, and perhaps the guys were ashamed of their murder.

The next tree to go was the beautiful gnarled carob towering at the right side of my balcony. In Turkish it’s called the “keçiboyunuz” (Goat ear) tree. Crows and pigeons pecked at the pendulous dry black seed pods, and sparrows and doves met in the shade of the green leaves, through which I watched the white moon passing in the night sky. Apart from its beauty (especially with the recent blooming of little white flowers and scattering of petals) it was also my planned earthquake escape route. If a particularly big tremor was to hit Istanbul, this old jerry-built house would go down quite easily. A leap from the balcony to the sturdier tree could be easily performed and save my life.

Only a few days ago, however, the city was beset by sudden short sharp gusts of strong wind. I was indoors with the windows closed when I suddenly heard a rush and a crash. Going out, I found that half the carob tree had been blown down and was lying in the yard below. Neighbours were leaning out of their windows,discussing the event in loud voices. I went inside sadly. Instead of the screen of green leaves I was now faced with the view of the cracked grey walls of the neighbouring tenements, and the lower part of the remaining tree trunk was too far below to make a leap to safety.

I love trees. And so I was particularly interested to learn this morning that fellow tree-lovers were staging a demonstration in nearby Taksim Gezi Park in the centre of Istanbul to protest and block the removal of trees from the last green public space in the centre of Istanbul.

As part of the controversial plan to pedestrianize Taksim Square, the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) have plans to reconstruct the Topçu Kışlası Artillery Barracks which used to occupy the area long ago before they were demolished to make way for the public park. The reconstructed barrack building will subsequently be converted into a shopping mall and possible apartments with social facilities. Protesters gathered in response to media messages alerting activists to the arrival of workers tasked with cutting down trees late May 27.

Amid running altercations between demonstrators on one side and police (using physical violence and tear gas to try to disperse the group) and company workers on the other, Istanbul deputy of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) Sırrı Süreyya Önder obstructed the path of a buldozer, demanding to see the license for the demolition, which was not provided by municipality workers.

Police pulled out of the area as dusk set, allowing around 1,000 protesters to stage a mini-festival during which they vowed that the park would not be turned over to “land speculators.” A group of protesters said they planned to stand guard at the site all night long to prevent any night-time demolition.

Önder slammed both the police’s behavior and the economic vision of the ruling AKP party.

“I am not merely an Istanbul deputy. I am a deputy of the trees, too. We might have repelled the police today, but they will surely come back tomorrow. The hunger of this neo-liberal system is such that if it cuts all the forests, it won’t be satiated,” he said, adding that the demonstration aimed at raising awareness. “Each of us will guard a tree, and in the morning, we will give a report to the birds.”

I took a walk to the park to find out what was going on. There were a couple of hundred mostly young people sitting around on the grass talking in groups in the shade of the fine big trees, some tents, political banners hanging from branches calling for the protection of the park, people being interviewed by TV reporters. A gouged trench showed the roots of the seven or eight trees that had been bulldozed before the protestors arrived. There was no police presence, but as Önder said - they’ll be back. Big respect to those brave nature-lovers who are there to face them and shame them as collaborators in such an ecologically harmful project.

In 1999, before he became Prime Minister, Recep Tayyıp Erdogan was jailed for four months for sedition after reciting a poem to a crowd in south-eastern Turkey containing the lines: ‘The minarets are our bayonets, the mosques are our barracks, and the believers are our soldiers.’

Perhaps he should amend the lines to something like:

“The skyscrapers are our minarets, the barracks are our malls, and the shoppers are our believers.”

Save the trees! Occupy Taksim Park!