A Solution to Losing Three Yellowstones

I am always a bit puzzled whenever a newcomer goes out of his or her way to settle down in one of the many tree canopied neighborhoods in Durham, North Carolina, where I live and then promptly cuts down every tree on their lot.

I doubt this is ever strategic or they would realize that it immediately lowers their property value and that of their neighbors as well.  Not to mention that it defiles the neighborhood.

But I’ve seen it happen in each of the four neighborhoods I’ve inhabited here over the last 26 years.

I’ve listened to the reasons given: “I didn’t want to have to pick up the leaves;” “I didn’t want them to fall on my house during a storm;” “I didn’t want them to compete for water and sunlight with my lawn.”

I am sure the look on my face conveys, “Then why didn’t you choose to live somewhere else?”  There are plenty of places without trees, and thanks to the drilling of 50,000 oil and gas wells each year since 2000, there are more every day.

That’s the number drilled just in central North America according to a report published a little more than a week ago in the journal, Science, by researchers from the universities of Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Montana State and Oklahoma State.

Between 2000 and 2012, this has cleared an area the size of three Yellowstone Parks of all vegetation across eleven states and two Canadian provinces stretching from the Rockies to the heartland.

Even along the northern Pacific coast where 30-story high Redwoods, Sequoias and Douglas Firs are able to pull a third of their moisture from the air and the remainder up through their 30-foot wide trunks, it is difficult to fathom that it takes thousands of years for them to reach those dimensions.

But while vegetation, including forestland, in the central U.S. isn’t as dramatic and grows much more slowly, the issue isn’t just aesthetic.  The vegetative loss due to drilling robs this region of calculable ecosystem services.

These include not only carbon sequestered but productivity for growing food, biodiversity, wildlife habitat, forestland, landscape connectivity, wetlands and rangeland for growing livestock.

Ecosystem services are what make life possible on earth.

The scientists warn that “the loss of these services is likely long-lasting and potentially permanent, as recovery or reclamation of previously drilled land has not kept pace…”  But some solutions by public and private sector innovators may soon help.

Trees alone are more rare than we think.

In the U.S., there are now 620 native trees while there are thousands and thousands in other countries and 60,000 in all according to a book entitled, The Tree – A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live and Why They Matter.

We are reminded by by its author, biologist and writer Colin Tudge, that each lineage of trees began with a single tree, e.g. the first ever pine etc.

In 1977, the North Carolina General Assembly passed the Forest Development Act which established a “cost sharing program” to help landowners “increase the privately-owned forests of the state.”

Nearly all of the participants are citizens who own small forests; on average up to a few dozen acres.  There are about 469,000 “family” forestland owners in North Carolina who steward 61% of the state’s forestland.

The most commonly cited reason for ownership of these small family forests are beauty/scenery, to pass land on to heirs and nature protection.

Places such as Durham, where officials are considering a long overdue plan involving both urban reforestation and afforestation would be well advised to look at adapting the state plan as a way to help along those who are reticent because they can’t see how it can be done on public lands alone.

“The world cuts or burns down about 26 billion trees a year.  It replants about 15 billion.”  So the net 11 billion trees lost each year would be enough to carbon sequestration to offset the electricity-related emissions of China in 22 years and the U.S. in 13 years.

This is ironically the same span it has taken drilling to agent-orange the equivalent of three Yellowstones.

Run by a veteran NASA engineer, a company called BioCarbon Engineering is now planning to use drones to seed a billion trees a year by firing pre-germinated pods into the ground that have been covered in nutritious hydrogel.

The system can plant 36,000 trees a day using precision mapping and also conduct follow up monitoring and ecosystem assessment, all via specially adapted drones.

To reforest what it loses each year to development and disease, Durham would only need six hours, probably best conducted after midnight after mapping parks, roadsides, stream banks, reservoirs and school grounds along with participating businesses, family-owned forests and residences.

BioCarbon Engineering’s drones may also be a way the central U.S. can hope to recover some of the vegetation it has lost to drilling over the past decade as well as reforest lands that were cleared decades ago but not longer needed for agriculture.

I suspect that BioCarbon would be recompensed at least in part by the exchange of carbon offset credits or be willing to sell the drones and train operators.

I feel better now (smile.)

The Circular Economy is No Place for Whiners

Regulations aren’t designed to set the best standards, only the minimum bar for those who seek benefit at the expense of the general public.

It is typically those who are part of the “whiner” economy who make a fuss about regulations.  Everyone else cleared that regulatory bar long ago and strives instead for best practices.

One of those best practices is the movement toward the “circular economy,” as described in an article this month by McKinsey alum Markus Zils.  Those who fuss about regulations typically take more of a linear approach.

The circular approach is just better business.  It seeks to preserve the “embedded labor, material and capital costs.”  This is true of organic as well as technical materials.

It isn’t just about recycling by breaking down and reusing the products but also involves refurbishment.

The short term benefit is better profit margins but the long term benefit is a “decoupling of the economic growth from material intake.”

Often called the “triple bottom line” or “full-cost accounting,” the improvements aren’t just in manufacturing.  You saw it at work this week when CVS decided that selling tobacco didn’t make sense for a company in the business of providing healthcare services.

At the same time, undeterred by gridlock among nation states, fifty-nine mega-cities around the globe that have banded together to address climate change issued their annual report.

Even McDonald’s is moving toward more sustainable, antibiotic-free beef for its burgers, hopefully by 2016, a movement led many years ago in that food genre by Chipolte.

This even gives hope that marketers for the largest enabler of roadside billboards may one day connect the dots about the harm they are doing by enabling the sacrifice of the equivalent of a good size national forest as well as blighting neighborhoods and property values.

The marketplace likes sustainability.  A CDP report two months ago to inform investors, noted that nearly 30 of America’s largest global corporations - including five major oil companies - aren’t waiting for the U.S. Congress either.

They are incorporating a price for carbon emissions into their long range plans.  The free market isn’t ideological and “whiner” economics, relegated to seeking favors from lawmakers, just isn’t good business.

5 Dangers To Urban Forest Initiatives

Normally, all of the leaves are down in my adopted hometown of Durham, North Carolina by Thanksgiving, a week from now.

Judging by how full of leaves many of my 60 deciduous trees are, we may miss that benchmark but I wonder what a fly-over by the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) would reveal?

According to Dr. Greg Asner, principal global ecology investigator for the Carnegie Institute of Science at Stanford University:

“Global carbon emissions from deforestation now equals the global transportation sector.

That is all ships, trains, airplanes and automobiles combined.”

The CAO is a Dornier 228 aircraft equipped with sensors, lasers, spectrometers and 3-D imaging, and of course, scientists working to learn more about the building blocks of the ecosystem.

None too soon, an insert arrived with my water bill yesterday reminding people not to blow or rake their leaves into the street, but to either utilize them or put them out for yard waste collection, steps often missed by less professional lawn services.

We already have a lot of metrics on the value of trees including forests along roadsides and in urban areas.  Multi-agency groups such as Trees Across Durham are attempting to execute a strategic approach to implementing a 12-step national multi-agency call to action launched two years ago called Vibrant Cities and Urban Forests.

Here, they are challenged with reversing a nearly forty-year period of neglect which saw trees surrendered to impervious surface at a rate that outpaced population growth by 8-to-1.  Deforestation in Durham over that period has been the equivalent of more than entire 8 city lots in my neighborhood which would be nearly 800 trees per day.

One day, initiatives such as Trees Across Durham will benefit from an aircraft such as the Carnegie Airborne Observatory.  Until then, they need our collective will to rise above these five obstacles:

• Activity traps that scratch the itch but don’t add up to making measurable progress tied to an overarching, strategic goal.
• Lip service from officials who, having shorted urban forestry efforts in the past, hope to continue to get by on the cheap or fail to grasp that urban forest includes public and private land.
• Special interests such as billboard companies who press legislative allies to sacrifice trees and vegetation so they can lure advertisers into a dead end technology while robbing the public interest.
• Inadequate ordinances and enforcement that fail to compensate for impervious surface by requiring a tree for every two parking spaces and offsets to replace deforestation by reforesting other areas.
• Failure to communicate by grossly underestimating both the extent and intensity with which the benefits of tree canopy must be explained and reiterated.

Selling Durham’s Urban Forest

In 2007, Durham, North Carolina, where I live set a goal to reduce or offset 90,000 metric tons of the greenhouse gases produced communitywide (city and county, businesses, residents and visitors) by 2030.  Just 17 more years to go.

Hopefully, part of the plan is to place its neglected urban forest canopy on the auction block.  A few months ago, Shell Energy North America announced plans to offset 500,000 metric tones of its carbon emissions by buying into forest regeneration in Michigan.

One of the companies selling the offset is The Forestland Group (TFG), a company headquartered in nearby Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  TFG manages the largest portfolio of hardwood forests in the U.S. but the 3.5 million acres it manages in 24 states are diversified by species, geographic region and age including two areas in North Carolina.

A study conducted by the Institute for Environmental Solutions as part of The Tree Project, concluded that tiny Golden, Colorado (pop. 19,186) could net $20 per metric ton per year by managing its urban forest.  Colorado was the first in the nation to have communities band together to support urban forestry by mitigating climate change.

Colorado’s urban tree canopy is only 13%, compared to 43% in North Carolina and 51% in Durham County, home to the state’s fourth largest city by the same name.  Maybe scarcity helped Colorado cities and towns catch on more quickly.

There is obviously great potential for revenue from Durham’s urban forest, as well as a means to meet its sustainability goal.

However, Durham will need to do three key things in a major paradigm shift in order for this to happen:

1. Take a holistic approach to urban forestry that includes residential and commercial property.
2. Begin to view its green infrastructure not only as a renewable resource but as an investment in not only quality of life but public health, crime reduction, water and air purification, as well as economic development.
3. Overcome years of cutting urban forests short by investing in catch-up, much as it just did with street resurfacing.

As California has already nicely laid out, selling urban forests as carbon credit is not like the song goes “playing the guitar on the M.T.V.” or “money for nothing.”   It requires a detailed management plan.

About five years ago the Congressional Research Service, the public policy research arm of the United States Congress, computed that afforestation of crop or posture land would have the potential to sequester between 2.2 and 9.5 metric tons of greenhouse gases per acre per year.

Reforestation, including efforts to assist natural regeneration, would sequester between 1.1 and 7.7 metric tons per year.  Durham’s forest yields would be on the upper side of those estimates.

Durham also has many areas where afforestation and reforestation can take place including tree “deserts” and areas along the rivers and streams and basins that recharge its water supply.

Like New York City, San Diego and many other cities, it could plant trees in its watersheds where they extend into more rural counties and count this as carbon offset as well.

Tree planting could also be used to mitigate downstream runoff that affects Raleigh’s water supply, which comes from a lake built primarily in Durham during the 1970s – borrowing a page from a tree planting project initiated by Congress and President Reagan.

During the mid to late 1980s, the Conservation Research Program was used to incentivize private property owners to put sensitive lands back into forestland, stream buffers, wildlife habitat, wetlands and ground cover.

At Dow Chemical’s Seadrift Plant, engineers planted 110 acres of trees to do the job of a proposed water treatment plant at 3% of the cost.  Iowa-based Ecolotree has learned that a thousand willow trees on an acre of land can treat ten gallons of toxic water per minute.

Care and deployment of Durham’s urban forest as a form of environmental capital and green infrastructure would include not only tree planting but thinning out brush so both over story and under story trees and vegetation can reach optimal effectiveness.

I hope those responsible for meeting Durham sustainability targets are already aggressively pursuing this. 

The Cost-Effective Strategy Missing In Most Carbon Plans

Ambitious community plans to reduce their respective carbon footprints, such as the one for Durham NC, where I live, are typically missing what experts say may be “…the second most important thing we can do right now,” plant more trees, according to Jim Robbins, a journalist who writes news articles and books about science and the environment.

According to an inventory by Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute, there are 156 local currently in place, 26 of which are comprehensive, 55 establishing policy and 75 dealing with climate change plans.

The most inexpensive and likely the most cost-efficient action a city and county such as Durham could take in the pursuit of the goal of reducing local government greenhouse emissions by 50% and community-wide emissions by 30% over the next 18 years is to fund urban forestry at a level consistent with the benefits provided by trees.

New and deeper research regarding trees, including studies conducted by organizations such as the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Global Ecology, shows that forests have an incredible effect on global warming, far beyond where they are planted.

The studies suggest that urban forestry must be incorporated in sustainability planning and this includes aggressive measures to foster, encourage and maintain those trees that naturally regenerate.

Deforestation, even such as the clear-cutting being uselessly conducted along roadsides in North Carolina by out-of-state billboard companies, contributes not only global warming but also to drought.  Trees are not only a critical part of cooling the earth’s surface but also pivotal to the cycle that creates and sustains and regulates rainfall.

Killing trees creates a vicious cycle.  A recent study by the Carnegie Institution for Science on the dramatic loss of Quaking Aspen reveals that during drought die-offs, trees show a 70% loss of water conductivity.

Currently Durham only budgets about $6,000 each year to purchase on average about 350 trees for reforestation which just barely exceeds the average of over 200 that are removed each year due to damage or disease etc. for net reforestation of about 150 trees.

Even when the Durham forestation budget is augmented by another $4,000 from Parks and Recreation (highly constrained to a few neighborhoods), something just doesn’t compute.

The amount being reinvested here in urban forestation is totally inconsistent with the $162,000 value per tree reaped over a fifty-year lifetime in ecosystem services (188 times the purchase price) and even more if the right species are planted and maintained in the best possible locations.

And Durham isn’t even tracking how many trees are being subsumed each year or have been lost historically to development although that information could probably be mined from development site plans or other documents and probably numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Such a metric should be available to help inform funding and residential and commercial incentives for reforestation and afforestation (planting where they haven’t already existed) in numbers that will significantly increase carbon sequestration and more than compensate for the loss of forest infrastructure.

A good first step is the funding of an Urban Forestry Strategic Plan such as one advocated by Durham’s Urban Forester, an example of which can be found at this link for Santa Monica, CA where even the original developers in 1875 appear to have grasped the importance of forest infrastructure.

A plan for Durham could include deployment of well-proven technology utilized to much more accurately measure not only tree canopy but the amount of area under development and used for roadways or parking lots as well as to identify tree deserts in low income areas and areas that could be used for reforestation.

Of course urban forestry here spearheads a process below the national average of one tree planted for every two that naturally regenerate.  The survival rate for naturally regenerated trees is probably around 1 in 20 based on a recent study.

Unfortunately, unless incented otherwise, many of the trees planted residentially or commercially are invasive species that are not large enough or of the type that will yield the full benefits trees can yield while crowding out those that do.

The value of trees, including the nation’s 3.8 billion trees found in urban areas, becomes more apparent every day as revealed by scientific inquiry.  This far transcends the huge contribution they make to the aesthetics important to property values and sense of place, leveraged into economic development such as tourism.

It includes crime reduction, healthy immune systems, energy savings, water management, removal of toxins, soil and water remediation, prevention of soil erosion and biodiversity to name just a handful.

According to the evidence put forth in the fact-filled and insightful book Robbins published earlier this year, Durham’s forestry plan should include:

• Restoration forestry far in excess of what has or will be deforested by development, going forward and back 30 or more years
• Reforestation or afforestation of low income neighborhoods including neighborhood streetscapes
• Incorporating forest infrastructure along with other types of infrastructure as part of urban and suburban developments
• Afforestation incentives to encourage planting of trees where they have not existed historically or recently
• Agroforestry to marry agriculture and forestry to the benefit of both
• Use of trees as a much lower cost alternative and more effective approach to removal and remediation of toxins including polluted storm water

But there is no benefit from trees more critical than carbon sequestration, valued in a recent study of roadside trees as 16.6 million metric tons per acre, per year which is why they should be included in every local plan to reduce or mitigate a community’s carbon footprint.

Reflections On A Roadside Irony

The engineer-founder of Iowa-based Ecolotree, the headquarters of which I passed on the return leg of my recent cross-country trip, is quoted as saying that “engineers are botanically challenged” which in my experience is true of far too many at the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

But that certainly isn’t true of the engineers in the NCDOT Roadside Environmental Unit.   Over the last five decades, beginning in the 1960s, this relatively small Unit has proactively planted nearly 5 million trees along the state’s roadsides, always staying beyond the safety zone which has been scientifically defined to avoid collisions and facilitate recovery from roadway departures.

Colorful trees such as Dogwoods and Redbuds have been planted for decades along the edge of the roadside tree canopy to augment the Unit’s acclaimed wildflower and scenic byways programs and help deliver on North Carolina’s brand promise to tourists, one of the state’s most important economic sectors. A pine tree seedling was planted in memory of each of the nearly 58,000 soldiers who died in the Vietnam War.

However, most of the trees are planted in league with forestry and ecology experts to either mitigate the impact of the roadways on the environment or for phytoremediation, the same reason roadside forests are carefully protected and retained during road construction.

So residents across the state were puzzled, if not incensed, this past winter to see maintenance crews suddenly clear-cutting entire stretches of roadside trees, further curtailing the 14% national highway system right-of-ways in this state that are lined by trees.

The cutting immediately caught the attention of North Carolinians because it went so far beyond the long-standing federal and state guidelines of 30 feet behind guardrails and otherwise 40 feet, undulating for exceptions around assets such as bridges to no more than 50 feet.

Friends of mine who work in maintenance explained to me that along I 40 in Durham NC, where I live, crews cut the tree line back another 10-20 feet beyond the long-standing policy, in part, hoping to extend the number of years before they would need to do maintenance.

However, some people wonder if the increased cutting may have violated the 1978 impact agreement by the State to “maintain plantings native to the area…alleviating the possible harm to the existing environment” created by construction of that Durham stretch of I 40 a decade later.

Fortunately, NCDOT’s plan is to come back this fall and once again plant Dogwoods and Redbuds but in a transitional area between what large canopy trees remain and the clear zone.

But one must wonder if any projected maintenance savings were weighed against the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, the slain roadside trees across the State represented in public ecosystem services alone.

To put the expanded cutting into perspective the entire roadside from pavement’s edge is only about 87 feet along each side of the Durham stretch, which was established as a best practice overlay prior to construction with community-wide support including the Durham Chamber of Commerce under its then-board president Travis Porter.

The overlay was created in cooperation with roadside landowners to establish very “effective screens including trees, setbacks, landscape standards, sign standards and other elements to also preserve and protect environmentally sensitive and historical assets.”

The effort was chaired by Barbara V. Smith, a former Duke official and later a chair of the Tourism Development Authority, the governing board of the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau, the community’s official marketing agency, authorized by state legislation passed at that same time.

The suddenly and dramatically expanded cutting last winter wiped out fully a fifth to a third of the tree cover left as part of that overlay, leaving less than 30 feet in places.  I have been told by one engineer that Durham got off easy.  Engineers in other parts of the state were shell-shocked to witness the tree line pushed 100 feet up some hillsides, laying waste to huge trees that had existed before the roadways were built.

I truly respect and try to understand the maintenance challenge and from my friends working there, I know how much and how deeply many of them care.  However, my records show that every few years from the time I arrived in North Carolina nearly 25 years ago until I retired nearly three years ago, those original guidelines had been reiterated as policy in regular communications from various chief engineers down to division engineers across the state, stressing strict adherence.

From my reading, the original cut zones are also still clearly defined for roadway design and maintenance by AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and adopted by the Federal Highway Administration.  But something in NCDOT has changed.

It just seems so ironic, that just as new science at the national level has even further documented the crucial role that roadside forests play in areas such as carbon sequestration, in North Carolina we would do something so seemingly contradictory as if we do not understand that trees serve as our most cost effective means of climate eco-technology.

NCDOT has a huge responsibility and is often subjected to incredible external pressure including that from special interests such as those seeking to reap parasitic value at no cost or contribution to the cost of the publicly-owned roadway.

Similar to major corporations, the department is also faced with the daunting challenge of making sure there is always cross agency, as well as inter-agency, communication and willingness to leverage knowledge and expertise from those who are not botanically-challenged.

Hopefully, there is also now even more awareness of how important roadside forests are to North Carolinians and how vigilant we are to promote, protect and preserve this signature asset to our state’s scenic character.

However well meaning or logically-conceived the expanded cutting was, it may have only reinforced for those who witnessed it why by 2 to 1 now, Americans don’t believe their government is protecting the environment.

Quantifying The Environmental Role of Roadside Trees

One way to value roadsides is the scenic views they provide, a window into the soul of the places through which they pass and a pivotal factor in facilitating 1.9 billion tourism person-trips and a trillion dollars of economic impact each year.

Another way to quantify the value of roadside vegetation is by its ability to sequester or capture and hold carbon emissions from escaping into the atmosphere.

According to a pilot study of the National Highway System (NHS) by the Federal Highway Administration, the 3.4 million acres of roadside vegetation including trees, grasses and shrubs in the unpaved right of way along 163,000 miles of Interstates and U.S. Highways is able to clean the air of the equivalent of the emissions from 2.6 million passenger cars each year.

If the voluntary Chicago Climate Exchange hadn’t been torpedoed by members of a particular party in Congress, at the hypothetical carbon price of $20 per metric ton, the sequestration by vegetation along just 4% of the nation’s roadsides would equate to a potential value of $8.5 to $14 billion.

Nonetheless, the value to our planet Earth remains priceless.

Nationwide, including all of the areas where they are so difficult to grow, trees (deciduous, conifer and mixed,) make up 25% of all roadside vegetation along the NHS or about 827,000 acres total.

Roadside trees alone, growing in the right of way of major highways, sequester half of the carbon emissions captured by vegetation or nearly 2 million tons of carbon emissions every year.

In part, because North Carolina precariously clings to 60% of its tree cover, a good deal of the roadside sequestration occurs in this state, where I live. But while other states from Oregon to Maryland are using transportation enhancement grants to plant millions of trees, two North Carolina State Senators, Harry Brown of Jacksonville and Bob Rucho of Mathews, did their best during the recent session of the General Assembly to win back North Carolina’s reputation for being backward.

Working on behalf the outdoor billboard industry, Brown and Rucho pushed through a bill that will soon enable the clear-cutting of 575 miles of publicly-owned roadside trees or enough to go from one end of the state to the other. This is on top of what had already been generously permitted so the 8,000 private outdoor billboards mooching off the North Carolina public right of ways could be visible and purposely distracting to drivers even though they are utilized by fewer than 1 in 10 North Carolinians.

Most of the clear-cutting in North Carolina will occur along major highways that are part of the National Highway System. While representing only 4% of the nation’s roads, the NHS carries 40% of its traffic including 90% of all tourism traffic nationwide, 81% of business travel and the 37 million visitor person trips taken in North Carolina.

It is impossible to speculate on the motives of these two senators but before you deem all North Carolinians as deserving of the epitaph, “backward,” remember the scientific polls showing that 7 out of 10 North Carolinians consider outdoor billboards to be a “desecration” on our state.

As home to programs such as the Green Plus Certification and the Center for Sustainable Tourism at ECU, North Carolinians do understand the triple-bottom-line of social, environmental and financial responsibility and that the outdoor billboard legislation fails miserably on all three measures.

It may not be long before North Carolinians rise up and reclaim control of our roadsides, but it will be decades before the damage from outdoor billboards is repaired and before the state optimizes the far greater value of its roadsides instead for the source of scenic beauty and a cleaner environment.