Dratsab:

KiwiNZ: Our native trees are being lost one tree at a time, it is not a silly comparison. One could say your trivialising the loss of trees 100's of years old is being silly.

Except they're not 100's of years old. And a more significant stand of trees in another area on the property was going to be left untouched. The developer was doing what he could to minimise the impact on the local environment and a bunch of people, who've already had trees removed to build their houses, decided they didn't want this (sounds like a personal grudge to me) and started spreading misinformation in furtherance of their aim. Didn't take much effort to hook hordes of gullible kiwis...