I'm pretty much done speaking to the subject of this specific limb mainly because we are just going to repeat our selves over and over again until one of use stops posting, and if your anything like myself which I feel is pretty much the case neither one of us will give up the last word. I appreciate your views on it and I think that 99% of the time what you say is true. but we aren't going to change each others mind on this specific tree. So I will leave it alone and speak more to the industry side of things.
Education is a great theory but until companies start caring more about the green on the trees then the green in their bank accounts enforcement is pretty much the only way. In Canada as I would assume in the states arboriculte as a whole has been self regulated not only the pruning standards but by the ministry of labour (our governing safety body). So safety and professional standards begin and end with the person holding the chainsaw. So much so that several of our industry leaders in Ontario got together and created the ASWP (Arborist Safe Work Practices) the board is an ongoing group that has created a book that is now a legal document recognized by the MOL that outlines how our job can be preformed (to a certain degree). This allows our MOL inspectors when there is an incident or when they do an on site inspection to have some kind of guide line into what is to most an absolutely abstract and foran job. Safety on the job site is something we know all to well and can actually understand but people still get injured or die every day. Now this is a little off topic but I make this statement to say that we have a hard enough time educating the climbers and enforcing the rules and regs in this book, concerning workers lives and well being. Good luck educating the industry on proper pruning practices when as I said before, experts on the topic cant agree. The truth of the matter is we know far to little of how and why trees work to start setting up firm protocol on anything we do, and without such all we are teaching is oppinion. There are to many varying factors between species, soils, histroy, weather, growth zones, climate change, etc. etc.i could go on for 3 pages and still probably not list a single percent of the actual contributing factors. Until we understand how and why there will be no should or shall. Keep in mind I stated before I'm done speaking to the trees in question, I'm speaking now more towards education vs enforcement.
On another topic did Dr. Gilman speak of the lightning struck sweet gum he has in his back yard, that is one of his most interesting projects, in my opinion. When i saw him speak in London we actually got to go out and do large tree pruning with him in some of the local parks. That was one of the most educational seminars I've ever been part of. I am a true gilmanite to coin a phrase. I still believe that the reason he didn't talk about reducing large hazard limbs is the CYA (cover your ass), When speaking to a group you have to degrade to the lowest common denominator (which is BS) but it is the way it has to happen in todays world. To speak as if everyone understands what you are talking about fully, leaves your self open for huge LIABILITY, which if you havn't picked up on yet is my favorite word right after naturalize lol. I've learned this over my years teaching climbing and rigging at out local college. I can speak about SRT (which we don't teach) for instance and most of my students would understand enough about it to move on and learn safely, but that one student that has no idea what I'm talking about, but thinks he does goes out and kills himself its my ass. Einstein said "all explanations should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" but when the explanation cant be made simple enough so that everyone from 20 year owner/operators to first year pre-apprentices can understand it, sometimes its best to omit all together. If he did talk about reducing hazardous limbs to a large group and even one of the group members thinks but doesn't actually understand exactly how it works, then goes out and does what he thinks is right, then something happens, then there is an investigation, then He is questioned why the tree was pruned this way, and the member of the group says gilman, with a good enough lawyer you could probably follow it all the way back up the "Then" chain. This is just speculation but with the way the world works today, People suing Mcdonalds because their coffee is to hot, or getting drunk at a bar driving home killing someone and then suing the bar, it makes perfect sense in my head.
