elms.59
My father honored every tree as sacred. When I was a kid, an elm in our backyard contracted the disease. He sent away for a kit that promised to help, and weeks later a large cardboard box arrived in the mail. It contained what looked like a hundred tubes and other pieces to assemble a Rube Goldberg machine. We drilled holes around the circumference of the base of the trunk of the diseased tree and then inserted clear tubes into it through a pressurized pump in the root-flared system. I was tasked with pumping the fungicide serum into the tree root three times a day. I’m not sure if the tree is alive today, but it definitely lived beyond the time we moved from that home years later. The experience instilled in me an appreciation for trees and a fierce desire to protect them, like my father had.
The loss of the forty million American elms remains memorable for arborists, tree wardens, and parks supervisors who are in their late forties or older. It’s important to share this history of Dutch elm disease to show how quickly the health and survival of valuable natural assets can be endangered. Today, elms are hatching a return and making a healthy comeback in many cities. Hybrid elms, which have been crossbred to incorporate the genes of other plants, are more resistant to Dutch elm disease. But other trees are in danger, particularly urban ones.
For urban trees, challenges abound, from the encroachment of overdevelopment to the toxicity of soil to neglect and vandalism. Urban trees and other city-based species live a fraction of the lifespan of their rural counterparts. One study suggested that downtown trees have an average lifespan of seven years, compared to thirty-two for suburban; another suggested thirteen years for downtown trees, thirty-seven for residential, and 150 for rural.60
Nadine Galle and her organization, Green City Watch, work to determine forest cover and tree strength in urban areas, and she told me that they utilize geospatial data and artificial intelligence to inform their findings. Their research has shown that many urban areas have cut back on forest cover, which has led to more fragile ecosystems. A report in the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening confirmed the loss, showing that between 2009 and 2014, US urban tree coverage fell from 40.4 percent to 39.4 percent, an annual “urban/community tree cover loss” of 175,000 acres, or 36 million trees. This resulted in an estimated benefits loss of $96 million per year—a dollar cost translated from the capacity of trees to remove air pollution, sequester carbon, conserve energy by shading buildings, and reduce power-plant emissions.61
To counter urban tree loss, a number of cities have undertaken Million Tree Initiatives to add one million trees to their cities through planting and the giving away of free trees. In 2005, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa planted a tree his second day in office and announced a plan, Million Trees LA, to plant one million trees in Los Angeles. When he left office eight years later, more than 400,000 trees had been planted.62 Since then, City Plants has taken over the initiative. City Plants was already a partner of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which had launched a program called Trees for a Green LA in 2001, and today, in collaboration with six nonprofits and several city departments, City Plants plants and distributes twenty thousand trees each year.63 Denver, Boston, Shangai, London, Ontario, and other cities have their own initiatives. Incredibly, Ethiopia planted more than 350 million trees in a twelve-hour period in June 2019, a world record, made possible by millions of Ethiopians who took part in a challenge that was a part of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Green Legacy Campaign.
The only city in the US to have reached its goal to plan one million trees is New York City as part of its Million Trees NYC campaign. The campaign came about when then-mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Restoration Project (NYRP) Founder Bette Midler were viewing six hundred blossoming cherry trees along the Harlem and Hudson rivers that NYRP had planted. It’s said that “Bette turned to the Mayor and said ‘why should we stop here? We should plant one million!’”64 At the time, no other city had achieved this, but the city achieved its objective through three strategies:65 1. Giving away trees to private homeowners in areas with especially poor tree coverage, which “catalyzed the planting of 195,465 trees in residents’ front and backyards.” 2. Utilizing a mix of public and private funding. In 2007, the city committed $350 million to plant 750,000 trees. In 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and David Rockefeller contributed $10 million, and other large donors, from Home Depot to TD Bank to Toyota, contributed more than $1 million. 3. Having committed leadership. Local NYC government and the NYRP, a non-governmental organization, committed to seeing the project through, and New York residents supported it. Inspired by the success of Million Trees NYC, Milan, Italy, utilizing its partnership with Michael Bloomberg’s not-for-profit consultancy Bloomberg Associates, launched a plan in June 2019 to plant three million trees by 2030.
1 “Cultural Heritage Policy Documents: Charter of Athens (1933),” The Getty Conservation Institute, https://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/research_resources/charters/charter04.html.
2 World Commission on Environment and Development, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future, 1987, http://www.un-documents.net/our-common-future.pdf.
3 William McDonough and Michael Braun gart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002), 139.
4 Ibid.
5 Palo Alto Parks, Trails, Natural Open Space and Recreation Master Plan Adopted September 2017, https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/64161.
6 Ibid.
7 “2019 ParkScore Rankings,” The Trust for Public Land, https://www.tpl.org/parkscore.
8 Will Rogers in email interview with author, November 17, 2017.
9 “Bayou Greenways 2020,” Houston Parks Board, https://houstonparksboard.org/about/bayou-greenways-2020.
10 “Visit Mount Auburn,” Mount Auburn Cemetery, https://mountauburn.org/visit/.
11 James Krieger and Donna L. Higgins, “Housing and Health: Time Again for Public Housing,” Am J Public Health 92, no. 5 (2002): 758–768. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447157/.
12 Mary Corcoran, “Rags to Rags: Poverty and Mobility in the United States,” Annual Review of Sociology 21 (1995): 237–267.
13 Dennis Lynch, “LOOP City in Copenhagen / Bjarke Ingels Group,” eVolo, January 25, 2011, http://www.evolo.us/loop-city-in-copenhagen-bjarke -ingels-group/.
14 “Loop,” Loop City, Projects, BIG Bjarke Ingels Group, https://big.dk/#projects-loop.
15 Lynch, “Loop City in Copenhagen.”
16 Jenny Green, “Effects of Car Pollutants on the Environment,” Sciencing, updated March 13, 2018, https://sciencing.com/effects-car-pollutants-environment-23581.html.
17 Gary Gardner, “Power to the Pedals,” World Watch Magazine 23, no. 4 (July–August 2010), http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6456.
18 “The Environmental Impact of Cars, Explained,” Reference, National Geographic, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/green-guide/buying-guides/car/environmental-impact/.
19 Ibid.
20 “Safety,”
