The giving tree: 13 ways valley oaks teach kids of all ages
BY DAVID ROBERTS
I am the father of a second and fifth grader in the Fresno Unified School District. I coach their soccer teams and actively participate in school activities. We compete on fields with little to no shade, and often my kids are indoors on smog-infused days. I seek to change this.
A majority of Fresno’s landscape emphasizes urbanization and irrigated turf. We can create a better framework for our city by highlighting our own endemic valley oak, a tree emblematic of our region.
Earth Day, 2015, in partnership with Tree Fresno, students successfully planted 25 valley oaks at Wawona Middle School. Last Saturday, Earth Day 2017, students again partnered with Tree Fresno. They gathered plans, funds and irrigation, planting eight large-canopy, drought-tolerant trees at Ruth Gibson Elementary School.
What’s the point? There are multiple reasons for these endeavors:
▪ School tree transition: Assist Valley schools to transition from short-lived mulberry and Modesto ash trees , to more appropriate long lived, drought-tolerant trees.
▪ School mobilization: Engage the school communities in all aspects planning, fund-raising, planting, and supervision. In the short term, it generates positive publicity for schools. For the long term, it provides an environmental education setting for generations.
▪ Education: Students engage in hands-on experiential learning through all stages of development from fund-raising to installation. Student participation will increase pride and ownership of the school community. Planted specimens will provide a living science lab for students of all grade levels for generations. Once educated on the natural, cultural, biological and ecological value, some students will become lifelong stewards of our Valley’s trees.
▪ Shade: Temperature in the canopy shade is 10 degrees cooler than in direct sun. Properly located on fields, the shade provides relief for students, parents, coaches, and athletes before, during and after play.
▪ Carbon sink: Valley oaks grow 70 feet wide by 70 feet tall. Throughout their more than 400 years of life, they take in massive amounts of carbon and convert it to oxygen and biomass through photosynthesis.
▪ Endemic: Valley Oaks are distributed throughout the Valley’s grassland ecosystem. They have evolved over the eons specifically to our arid climate and sandy loam soil.
▪ Drought tolerant: Water requirements change over time. During establishment, drought-tolerant trees need deep-root irrigation. After establishment, their tap roots use ground water, and surface watering may not be necessary. They use significantly less water over their lifetime than irrigated lawn.
▪ Natural barrier: Mature trees provide a natural barrier for wind, dust, noise, and pollution. Neighborhoods surrounding schools will benefit once these trees are established.
▪ Biological diversity: Valley oak habitats can support more than a hundred native species of birds, amphibians, mammals, and invertebrates. Similar-sized species support only a raction of this wildlife.
▪ Restoration: Over the past 200 years, 90 percent of valley oak habitat has been cleared for agriculture and urban development. Inadequate natural regeneration further impacts the species. The California Department of Fish and Game and the Nature Conservancy considers these trees threatened. Planting in our community will begin to reintroduce these trees into our urban landscape.
▪ Cultural heritage: The acorns from valley oaks wereused as a staple for native people in the Valley. Europeans settled near valley oak groves to feed their pigs with the acorns and farm the fertile soil.
▪ Iconic: Valley oaks are the largest of North American oaks and showcase the climax ecosystem for Central California. Ideally located in urban landscapes, they make a profound statement in terms of beauty, ecology, and restoration. Just as sequoias are the icons of the sierras and the redwoods are the icons of the Northern California Coast, valley oaks are the natural icons of the Valley.
▪ Economic value: Mature trees have been shown to measurably increase the economic value of a region. Desirability and value of nearby properties increases over time with trees maturity.
Lets make our community beautiful. When planting a new tree, I urge you to consider the valley oak. For future projects in the Valley involving valley oaks, you can donate to Tree Fresno – Valley Oak Project.
We are not in the Age of Aquarius that had brought—to some of us—radical hope about societal change and a turn toward ecology, steady state growth, and different GDP metrics, including happiness. The age was about love, unity, integrity, sympathy, harmony, understanding and trust. The Age of Aquarius was about doing things differently, building the ‘share economy’, where cooperation and frugality were goals that would reduce our heavy human footprint on the planet. Community gardens, composting toilets, making clothes, raising chickens and making preserves, riding bikes and walking, job sharing and creating worker owned cooperatives that shared profit equitably was the stuff of change.
Today we are in the Age of Green. Green cities, green businesses, urban greening, green buildings, green energy, green cars, making green money from green. The Age of Green is deeply different than the Age of Aquarius as there is an assumption that a transition toward a sustainable “green” society is possible with continued economic growth by using better technologies, enlisting nature’s services, and employing market incentives—that is, without changes in consumption patterns. Stormwater runoff a problem? Simply build infiltration trenches. Air pollution a problem? Plant more trees, add a green roof. Carbon emissions a problem? Just buy green products. Create a market for the emissions and use the profits to invest in forests and wind energy. With the proper quantification of nature’s intrinsic processes and recognition of them, we can unproblematically mitigate human impacts on those very processes. No longer do we need to address the difficult questions about the concentration of wealth and concomitant resource use, or fundamental institutional changes to create more level playing fields among nations and their peoples.
This magical thinking is an interesting turn of events. As Norgaard points out (2010), it blinds us to the complexity of ecosystems, the ecological knowledge available to work with that complexity, and the economic difficulties of implementing ecosystem services strategies, even if they could be sufficiently deployed to mitigate the ravages of environmental exploitation and rampant CO2 emissions, for greater economic growth.
There is a facile way that the implementation of ecosystem services is being advocated despite the lack of scientific certainty about the ability to manage ecosystems to achieve desired outcomes (Healey et al 2008). This is seen on the international level with initiatives such as the UN program for using market incentives to reduce deforestation to mitigate against climate change and retain CO2 forest sinks. The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) is an effort to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development. “REDD+” goes beyond deforestation and forest degradation, and includes the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.
But knowledge about ecosystems themselves is contextual; the quality of the background data on climate, soil conditions, and human impacts requires a great deal of on-the-ground research and debate about what to maximize and why. So the REDD path is more about preserving forests such that the institutional, economic and consumption changes to significantly reduce human impact on ecosystems, especially by the rich, can be put off or avoided. Instead of changing free trade agreements that further enable deforestation-derived products to be consumed by the west, we use market mechanisms to incentivize developing countries to preserve their forests, assuming all things are equal.
But they are not. Indigenous forest populations or peasants are truly not the same in terms of values and economic context as those who purchase the wood products in big box retail stores.
Astroturf. Photo: Stephanie Pincetl
Turning to cities, these questions become even more complex due to the specificities of each city and its morphology, its climate zone, human preferences, institutional rules and regulations, and costs of changing obdurate hard infrastructure.
The California cap and trade program’s urban forestry protocol provides funding for urban tree planting, assuming that the benefits can be homogenized by a simplistic formula: biomass calculated using equations derived from native or natural forest trees is adjusted by a factor of 0.80 when applied to open-grown, urban trees (based on 28 selected species) because of differences in biomass allocation between the tree populations (ARB 2010). These values are derived from the USFS i-Tree program that also estimates the additional GHG emissions of on-going maintenance.
Already here there are a number of significant uncertainties that make such calculations problematic. Trees that grow in cities do so under very different conditions than in natural conditions. Soils are compacted, trees suffer from the impacts of air pollution, the watering regime is different, as is soil fertility. They are pruned and trimmed. The program does takes into consideration tree mortality but not the other more tree-specific and complex urban impacts on trees. The protocol also raises a provocative concept: does the planting of trees in the urban fabric constitute making an urban forest? Forests are historic ecological assemblages that are specific to bioregions and differ widely in density and composition that are indigenous to place, the soils, rainfall and other biodiversity. Urban forests are assemblages of disparate trees people like. Trees are jumbled together that come from different bioregions, from an ecological perspective, how does one describe this assemblage? Which parts of forest ecosystem science do you import from native or natural forests to describe these “novel ecosystems”? Does this approach even apply to an anthropogenic environment?
More problematically is that there seems to be the need to justify planting trees from an economic value perspective. Does this imply that if a street tree does not provide monetary value, it should not be planted? Then what about our parks? What about the sewage treatment plant? Livable and beautiful cities are not necessarily constituted by infrastructure that has to justify its economic value. Sewage treatment plants provide public health protection, they are a common good, they are not justified by an economic calculus. We do not build parks based on an economic benefit formula. They are recognized as providing a public good. And thus, well maintained street trees, also provide benefits: beauty (for some), shade (for others), harmony and dignity overall. Creating an economic value for them is an artifact of the Age of Green.
As I have written about before, successful tree planting requires commitment and funding by cities (Pincetl et al 2010); using cap and trade is grasping at straws, trying to get a program going in an era of austerity due to a tax structure that rewards the 1%. If people want trees in cities, they should pay for them through taxes and ensure they are professionally maintained as a common good, whether or not they sequester carbon, stormwater, diminish particulates or provide shade. Each one of those attributes may be incrementally provided by trees (or not), but the “services” will depend on their location, distance from a road, whether there is infiltration available for the stormwater, the size of the tree, and many, many other very situational factors that vary widely across cities, and trees. The fundamental issue is that budgets for cities in the U.S. have declined. It is not that trees provide economically quantifiable benefits that are not recognized.
The question then is why green now? Why does the color green captivate us so? What is the substance of the shorthand implied? Perhaps like “sustainability” it is the term of the period and we can no longer even think of any other that conveys sensitivity to the environment. Once launched it is free for the using and manipulation, the twisting of the meaning. In my neighborhood, green now means astroturf instead of lawn, requiring the balding of the earth beneath it and nearly sealing it, impairing the absorption of water. The plastic lawn is then rolled out over it. No life can survive this treatment, no worms or insects, and certainly no food for birds. I was assured it was permeable though, in case we get rain in Los Angeles. To me astroturf is the ultimate green value. Petrochemical companies continue to make profit, nothing really changes in terms of the aesthetic of the landscape. Green as the predominant idea of nature prevails.
Obviously the push for green is problematic for a host of reasons. Without rigorous urban ecology (and urban hydrology) that treats cities as distinct and as varied as ecosystems and watersheds, it will be difficult to evaluate what techniques are likely to make a difference in making cities more porous to natural rhythms—if that is the goal. Some mitigation of urban impacts is possible, but it needs to be calibrated to the place. Ecology and hydrology have about 100 years of field experience and data collection. Cities need the same kind of attention if the green route for services is desired, and a financial justification seems requisite. So far the benefits have been small and are likely to remain so, until other values begin to change so that the playing field is more level.
Alternatively we can embrace beauty and livability, think about the place in which the city is located, what seems appropriate given its climate and surrounding ecosystems, and develop strategies to make cities respond to those. Cities might end up looking very different from one another, and from place to place. However, such change will most likely not occur unless there are far wider and deeper societal changes about living on the planet. While the Age of Green can be seen to indicate some social sentiment that we need to change, it is still a path of business as usual. Instead it may be time to take Naomi Klein seriously; we cannot continue on the same path of economic growth and consumption—that includes quantifying and then monetizing nature’s services—and expect to truly change our relationships to the environment. More green businesses, creating more green products, off-setting emissions does nothing to reduce consumption of goods—green or not. There are natural limits to our spaceship Earth.
Perhaps addressing how and why we have unleashed consumption as our pathway for redemption should get more scrutiny. This is beginning to happen through analyses such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Noami Klein’s This Changes Everything, Richard Norgaard’s cautionary analysis of the quantification of ecosystem services and others. The Age of Aquarius challenged the relationship between economic growth and happiness in the 70s. It was met with the Reagan/Thatcher revolution that attacked the regulatory supervision of capitalism, and a liberalization of economic activity. We have reaped the consequences this deregulation and growth of free trade in the rampant growth of greenhouse gas emissions, the reduction of city and governmental budgets and their regulatory authority. Free trade shifted production to places like China and India, exporting the environmental burden of production with it. One response has been REDD, and other UN programs to incentivize clean energy production in those places. Reducing consumption in the west is not on the table.
More careful unpacking of the rise of the Age of Green is certainly called for. This will help us to contextualize it and hopefully begin to make changes because they need to be made rather than trying to fuse money making with the alternatives that need to be implemented.
The Age of Aquarius proposed changes in how we as humans interact with one another, and what makes a good life. Sharing, working together, making things, more equity in income and access to the essentials for happiness may be a more sure way to bring nature back in.
The tradition of Arbor Day began in Nebraska in 1872. Raising awareness of the importance of trees, people continue to use the day to plant saplings and improve the health of forests. Trees help clean the air, provide habitat for wildlife, help conserve soil and water, and are the source of an entire industry that support jobs and the economy.
Forest management isn’t as easy as watching the trees grow. Land management agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Forest Service oversee hundreds of millions of acres of forests across the country. An adaptive and evolving approach is necessary to keep the nation’s forests healthy and productive.
We hope on your next walk in the woods, you’ll do your part to preserve these important landscapes and maybe learn more about the trees you see. As an Arbor Day tribute, here are some of the most interesting and remarkable trees found on public lands.
A magical photo of sunlight creeping through the towering trees at Redwood National and State Parks. The protected valleys and alluvial flats found along streams and creeks provide ideal growing conditions for the coast redwood. Photo by Jessica Watz (www.sharetheexperience.org).
The redwood has earned the spot in the record books as the tallest in the world. These towering trees sprout from a seed no bigger than the size of a tomato seed, and they can grow to a height of 367 feet. That’s about the size of 35-story skyscraper. This powerful tree’s ability to regenerate allows it to prosper despite insects and fire, and ultimately to survive as a species. Visitors to California’s Redwood National and State Parks and Headwaters Forest Reserve often come to just see these world-famous trees, but nothing prepares them for a hike in the ethereal forests of massive redwoods shrouded in fog with light streaming through the trees.
To check out the entire article and see more amazing tree photos click on the link below!
Shared from LA Times: Click the Link below to see the whole article.
By Louis Sahagun April 19, 2017
The trees that shade, cool and feed people from Ventura County to the Mexican border are dying so fast that within a few years it’s possible the region will look, feel, sound and smell much less pleasant than it does now.
“We’re witnessing a transition to a post-oasis landscape in Southern California,” says Greg McPherson, a supervisory research forester with the U.S. Forest Service who has been studying what he and others call an unprecedented die-off of the trees greening Southern California’s parks, campuses and yards.
Botanists in recent years have documented insect and disease infestations as they’ve hop-scotched about the region, devastating Griffith Park’s sycamores and destroying over 100,000 willows in San Diego County’s Tijuana River Valley Regional Park, for example. McPherson’s is the first survey to quantify and assess the big picture.
It’s not a pretty one.
His initial estimate is that just one particularly dangerous menace — the polyphagous shot hole borer beetle — could kill as many as 27 million trees in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, including parts of the desert.
That’s roughly 38% of the 71 million trees in the 4,244 square mile urban region with a population of about 20 million people.
And that insect is just one of the imminent threats.
“Many of the trees we grow evolved in temperate climates and can’t tolerate the stress of drought, water restrictions, higher salinity levels in recycled water, wind and new pests that arrive almost daily via global trade and tourism, local transportation systems, nurseries and the movement of infected firewood,” he said.
If as many trees as projected die, the cost to remove and replace them could be about $36 billion, he said.
But Southern Californians would face many other costs.
“Catastrophic loss of our canopy,” McPherson said, “would have consequences for human health and well-being, property values, air-conditioning savings, carbon storage, the removal of pollutants from the air we breathe, and wildlife habitat.”
Jerrold Turney, plant pathologist for Los Angeles County, likened the surge in urban tree mortality to “watching a train wreck in slow motion.”
“It’s heartbreaking,” he said, “to see trees dying in such dramatic numbers in famously lush cities like Pasadena, Alhambra and Arcadia: sycamores, all the maples, olives, liquidambers, flower plums, myrtles, oleanders and oaks.”
Mark Hoddle, director of UC Riverside’s Center for Invasive Species, said that the tree loss is “starting to cascade across the urban landscape.”
“Without shade trees, water temperatures will rise and algae will bloom in riparian areas, for instance,” Hoddle said. “As a result, fish, frog and native insect populations will diminish, along with the pleasure of hiking, because there’ll be nothing to look at but dead boughs of trees.”
“And,” he added, “there will be no miraculous recovery of these urban ecosystems after the beetles are done with them.”
Among the hardest-hit native species of urban trees are California sycamores, typically found along streams and commonly used as shade and street trees in places such as Griffith Park and along downtown’s Wilshire Boulevard.
“Here’s the sad news about sycamores,” said Akif Eskalen, a plant pathologist at the University of California, Riverside. “If we cannot control the shot hole borer, it will kill all the sycamores in California. And when they’re done with sycamores, they’ll move to other trees.”
By 2012, pathologists knew that the shot hole borer was transmitting a fatal fungal disease to 19 species of trees in Southern California, he said. Since then, scientists have identified 30 additional host species.
On April 6, 2017 at 1pm a Tribute Tree was planted in memory of Mia Amendolagine at Malloch Elementary School in Fresno. It was also planted in memory of ‘All Children Who Battle Cancer’. Mia’s classmates, friends, teachers and administrators were all there. Mia’s Grandmother, Mother and Sister all spoke with great passion and strength. It was a wonderful tribute to a beautiful young lady who was taken from us too soon. Many of us were moved to tears. The Tree Fresno staff spoke about the tree, a Camphor. The Tree was prepared and planted. Mia’s sister and friends all help plant the tree. The exact location was noted as N36*49.287 Latitude and W119*49.878 Longitude.
THE FRIENDSHIP TREE APRIL 6, 2017
By Becky Chambers
Today a tree is planted in memory of Mia Chambers Amendolagine and in honor of her many friends, neighbors, faculty, students and family. We take a moment to acknowledge that there are illnesses and hardships that students may suffer in their lives and it is the friendship, camaraderie and compassion of our community that helps them during the tough times. Here at Malloch we have a beautiful example of such help. This similar experience is reflected in nature so let us now consider and honor it with the planting of this tree.
An important forest and tree scientist named Suzanne Simard discovered a network of communication and cooperation in the forests about 25 years ago. At that time she conducted a study in the Canadian forests. She found that trees talk to each other by means of a “symbiotic or mutually beneficial” association with the mushrooms that have roots that grow underground and around them in a thick mat of threadlike connections interweaving within the ground of the forest. A Hub tree or mother tree is able to shuttle carbon, phosphorus, water and resistance to harmful pests to other trees as she benefits from sunshine, water, and nutrients. At other times she may receive water and similar boost to immunity from her kin as they give back when they are able. This relationship allows for interdependence, cooperation and nurturing that increases survival and defense. This is why forests have enormous capacity to self-heal, according to Ms. Simard.
It is comparable to what happens in the human community. When we lose a loved one, we are fortunate when we retain the threads of our relationships with family and friends, to shuttle the milk of human kindness, mercy and love between one another and to talk to each other, to reach out with a loving touch in mutual support and simply communicate that we are here for each other.
Thank you all for being a part of an extraordinary network that sustains Mia’s family and friends as well as all who have met or will meet these challenges in the future.
This was sent to us by Connie Young, Co-Chairperson Fresno Earth Day Event:
This is a photo of a barrio of the town of Mocoa, the Colombian town that was inundated by mud last weekend. The significance of the photo is that this particular barrio suffered relatively little damage and no one was hurt there — because of the presence of deliberate plantings of trees around the neighborhood. Officials are already studying what happened with an eye to better conservation of the ecosystem of the river basin and, of course, flood prevention.
The question then is why green now? Why does the color green captivate us so? What is the substance of the shorthand implied? Perhaps like “sustainability” it is the term of the period and we can no longer even think of any other that conveys sensitivity to the environment. Once launched it is free for the using and manipulation, the twisting of the meaning. In my neighborhood, green now means astroturf instead of lawn, requiring the balding of the earth beneath it and nearly sealing it, impairing the absorption of water. The plastic lawn is then rolled out over it. No life can survive this treatment, no worms or insects, and certainly no food for birds. I was assured it was permeable though, in case we get rain in Los Angeles. To me astroturf is the ultimate green value. Petrochemical companies continue to make profit, nothing really changes in terms of the aesthetic of the landscape. Green as the predominant idea of nature prevails.
