The trees, located in the front gardens of privately owned flats in the Clifton area of the city, have been described by a local Green Party councillor as “literally uninhabitable to birds.”
One resident, who asked to remain anonymous, confirmed the spikes were “solely to to protect cars”, which include a number of expensive BMWs and Audis, from bird droppings.
They said: “The spikes are solely to protect the cars, there is no other reason.”
On the surface this seems like a bizarre example of man vs nature, but I think it’s stories like this that really highlight how separated our society has become from nature. In our capitalist modernity, nature and natural resources are commodities that must be bought, sold, exploited, and after that, in cities especially, often only experienced in a prepackaged, sanitised, controlled form.
Nature becomes more and more distant and unfamiliar, so that when we’re confronted with it, it’s an alien world, and rendering trees uninhabitable to birds seems like a reasonable course of action to protect a sports car.
This is like a comic book villain move
Wealthy Bristol residents cause outrage by installing ‘anti-bird spikes’ to stop droppings hitting expensive cars
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