My work gives me relevant experience of this and it is extremely unlikely that one night, or even a weekend of partying will permanently damage these trees. Fatal damage is more often caused by regular construction traffic, or building / storing heavy stuff like building materials on the root system.

Party on guilt free.
Mobilise against a party to protect the trees? Are you serious? Give me a break. If you want to pretect trees go and protest at people building roads / new housing estates etc. etc. not a few psy trancers having fun.

1664, are you saying that when that psytrance party in a forest was stopped because the forest wardens said that the trees could be damaged and even killed by the event, that the wardens were lying? I can't find the video any more but I assure you it happened and was on Youtube. I am not making any judgement either way on the truth of what they said, all I'm saying is based on how stringent the rules are for construction work, I find their complaint plausible.

I am genuinely interested to know the effects of such events on trees. Please could you tell me how you are qualified to give that advice, what profession are you? I'm a construction professional so I work with arboriculturalists on most projects. Could you elaborate on the technical detail of your advice please, and reference the relevent standards? That would be really helpful and would let me know what amount of weight to give to your opinion.


I have not made any judgements either way, I have just said that this needs to be looked into. What I do judge against is people not researching properly and just making lazy assumptions in order to justify whatever it is they want to do.

Actually, people building roads and housing estates do have to adhere to the rules that I mentioned, anything legal is required to comply! And this is not any old group of trees, this is obviously a sacred space that someone has put a lot of effort into cultivating.

There is the question of who made that sacred space. It truly is beautiful. I want to make something like this myself one day, and it is an endeavour that takes decades to mature. Imagine if you bought some land and slowly cultivated over years a truly sacred space such as this, watching it grow slowy as you get older and older... then suddenly a bunch of people party on it and damage or kill the trees irreparably. How would you feel? I would be heartbroken. So, you owe it to whoever cultivated this sacred space to not be lazy and make sure the trees will not be harmed.

It's carelessness like this that causes the prejudice against hippies as selfish hypocrites, prejudice that affects all of us. All I'm saying is, people should do their research properly to make sure. MAybe this is all a fuss about nothing... or maybe it isn't.

wtf? I spin psytrance and I've never heard of any of those guys.

@ohyaco: much as I like you you're not getting anywhere arguing that psytrance forest parties damage trees more than construction work. no way no how! lol

Hey this looks freakin' awesome! Been a while since I've had a proper stomp...

Haha I never said more than! Or even that it definitely does. I might have to make enquiries myself now to end this matter.

Well technically they all produce darkpsy, im surprised though that you have never heard of any of them.

If you would like a few albums gimme a shout.

ohayoco, I have seen that video as well. It was a free party in a forest that got broken up. All the kids got guilt tripped about damaging the trees and went home. If I remember rightly, there was some kind of delicate or susceptible tree to root damage, so they may not have just been trying to get the smelly hippies off their land, so you do have a point.

I used to work as a ground worker, landscaper and general builder. I am not a professional arborist, but we did get professional advice from them when working on big jobs. From what I learned from those days, it is digging through root systems, piling up soil on roots, or using heavy plant machinery near them that damages them. We used to set up fences and occasionaly temporary roads to limit damage to the trees, but this was to protect from (up to) 13 ton plant machinery over a period of weeks!! I just don't see how a few people walking & dancing around for 12 hours comes anywhere near that level of sustained pressure.

Anyways, you could be right, but I don't tink you should worry about it. Turn up at the party and see if you can move them on if you like.

So does anyone have any info on weather this event is still on? Im wondering if any of the artists are able to get to london with the suspension of all flights still in place.

If we are at it, I always wondered what the folks living in a forest (birds, deers, etc.) think about psytrance...

I somehow doubt they like it.

(Interesting, this theme closely connects to a post I made in ms. manic_minxx's topic this morning... Bridging the gap between the aliens and earthly, human, natural life as we know it... Trying to wake up, to bring in the alien element without fucking with life... The same problem in a different costume.)

Yeah it's well on.

It's all being set up as we speak and if the artists who were billed to play can't make it due to the air travel inconveniences, a plan B lineup has been anounced:

Drumatic
Electrypnose
karash
JellyHeads
Wicked Hayo

Tis a pretty good plan B if you ask me, though fingers crossed for Derango

Ye, plan B looks good, but keeping my fingers crossed for derango, zik and alien.

Reply from the Arboricultural Association. They say parties do damage trees. A psytrance rave sounds to me far worse for soil compaction than the relatively sparse foot traffic at Kew Gardens. Ever been to Kew Gardens? It's enormous and there aren't many people wandering around.

So, it seems obvious that the ethical thing to do is to hold parties in fields, not forests. Unless you own the forest and are as the owner 'entitled' to destroy it just as a farmer is 'entitled' to harvest his crops.

Well this area was privately owned and the party had permission from the landownder so... all good. Anyway the trees were happy enough about it. They told me so

Awesome party by the way.