Trees, those useless trees

Whilst going to our local Thai place for lunch, we stopped and gasped as we watched council workers hacking down perfectly beautiful trees that were still weeks away from their autumnal shedding of leaves. A few weeks back, on going to a company in downtown Tokyo, I was staggered to find a whole 100 meters of beautiful hedge had been decimated and all that was left was their stumps, and behind them - what had previously, gloriously, been hidden - a grotesque, miserable office block. Presumably a few people had complained that the hedge was encroaching on the pathway - well, millimeters of it perhaps were. On any day around now, if you go out early enough, you'll see elderly Japanese frantically sweeping up the few fallen leaves from outside their homes, as if they are some kind of plague.
Back in London, I read that in the dismal area of Croydon alone, some 7,600 trees have been pulled down in the last 12 months alone. The number one reason? Building subsidence. My number one answer? How about building your fucking house further away from the trees?
I wonder too, perhaps even more importantly, about where humans of the future intend to get their clean air from. Perhaps they imagine it'll come from a bottle.