An ugly move to cut down trees for the sake of a billboard | READER COMMENTARY

Every environmental organization is calling for the planting of trees to help mitigate climate change, but at the corner of South Charles and West Lombard streets, 10 full-grown, native magnolia trees were cut down recently in front of the former Bank of America Building that is now owned by Chase Bank. Both banks, incidentally, are among our country’s biggest funders of new gas and oil drilling projects (“Maryland fills two new climate change jobs, one focusing on sustainability and the other on resilience,” Nov. 15).

Surrounded by benches, the trees were an oasis of green in a sea of steel and concrete — now gone. No one could tell me why. This morning, as I passed the building, I noticed that they appear to have been axed to give an unobstructed view of a giant digital billboard on the Planet Fitness wall displaying a constant stream of advertising and using large amount of power generated by fossil fuels.

Is there no limit to corporate greed?

— Uta Allers, Baltimore