We should laud, not vilify, the actions of a Wairarapa school that has taken the brave step to ban students (and presumably staff too) from climbing trees on school grounds.

Management have quite correctly noted that trees pose a health and safety risk to those playing in them, and have acted wisely to shut down any possibility of this risk eventuating on their watch. New Zealand would be well-served to not only follow their example, but to take further steps to eliminate these kinds of risks altogether.

Think about it for a moment. You don’t even have to be in a tree for it to harm you. A falling branch or a piece of fruit could have deadly consequences for those unfortunate enough to be under it at the time. Worse still, trees are everywhere. I mean literally everywhere. A quick survey of my yard revealed three of the deadly miscreants lurking in a corner that I had hardly noticed before this story made headlines.

And a tree doesn’t even have to be an actual tree to hurt you, as any victim of a paper cut can attest. Let us not forget splinters. I dare say WorkSafe would be doing the nation a favour if it tallied up the true economic costs of prying tiny slivers of wood out of thousands of hands and feet each year. I’m also willing to bet that hammer-thumb injuries would all but disappear when we stop trying to drive nails into boards and planks.

That is why we, as a nation, need to ban trees, and we need to ban them now.

Sure, alternatives exist. We could assess the health and safety law against the actual threat that trees on a school grounds pose, and then look at remedies that allow children to vent their tree clambering urges safely. But that sounds hard, rational and like it would take a healthy dose of common sense. That’s clearly just not worth the risk.