We don't sit in trees any more

In Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, the hero, an adolescent 18th-century nobleman, renounces the earthbound life one evening when his sister serves him a dinner of snails. He spends the rest of his life living in the treetops, from where he falls in love, embraces radical politics, and participates in the political and cultural revolutions of the Age of Enlightenment.

Calvino's novel was written in 1957 — a novel about rebellion in a not-particularly-rebellious era. But a generation later, in April 1970, college students and politicians organized a "nationwide environmental teach-in" held mostly on college campuses. It would later become known as the first "Earth Day."

Historian Jared Farmer recounts one of the first Earth Day protests in his book Trees in Paradise, which I learned about recently on the Huntington Library's blog. A synopsis there recounts how "At Moorpark College, in Ventura County, 50 students laid their bodies down in front of bulldozers to protest the widening of a tree-lined road... By the time 10 students were arraigned in juvenile court on April 22, the first Earth Day, the trees were gone."

“What had been lost? Ancient redwoods? Historic oaks? No. They aren’t even native plants. Most of the trees in question are Australian eucalypts planted in the 19th century as ornamentals.”

With the benefit of 44 years' worth of hindsight, most Golden State environmentalists of 2014 would probably not risk arrest over some Australian eucalyptus trees. Today, they're generally considered an invasive species that sucks away scarce groundwater and fuels dangerous wildfires with their oily foliage and shedding bark.

Image: www.juliabutterfly.com

But trees — especially giant Californian trees — remained a powerful synecdoche for environmentalism. Tree protests reached a peak in the late 1990s when the charismatic Julia Butterfly Hill, with support from Humboldt County Earth First! activists, spent two years sitting in a 600 year-old redwood that she named Luna.

The immediate consequence of Hill's endurance tree-sit was the permanent protection of her tree and a 200 foot buffer zone from a logging operations.

But more generally, Hill's activism attracted national attention to the regional battles between loggers and environmentalists over the fate of the Pacific coast's old-growth forests. Thanks to stronger enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, West Coast logging was already in steep decline by the late 1990s. The activism of treesitting brought the additional accountability of publicity to logging operations.

In the years since Hill climbed down from Luna, living in trees in order to save trees has become rarer and rarer — in part because it has become less necessary. In the interest of avoiding controversy, logging businesses have committed to more sustainable forms of forestry, and conservation organizations have been able to protect most of what remains of the west's old growth trees. More ambiguously, more timber harvesting has moved overseas, away from the critical eyes of Californian idealists.

Today, treesitting feels like a bit of a 1990s anachronism. We're taught, as ecologists, to think about the complexity of global ecosystems. The idea of devoting months' or years' worth of activism to save a small grove of trees can seem like a lark in the context of the world's more pressing, global crises.

But under the apocalyptic threats of losing everything, any form of activism will feel inadequate. Before we throw up our hands, it's worth noting that Julia Butterfly Hill and her tree-sitting colleagues actually accomplished most of their goals, and leveraged influence far beyond their ambitions. It's the Butterfly effect: given enough time, repeated small actions will eventually generate big changes.

High-Rise Forestry

This pair of luxury housing high-rises under construction in Milan includes beefy cantilevered balconies that have been designed to support hundreds of fully-grown trees and shrubs.

Architect Stephano Boeri boasts that the project "is a model of vertical densification of nature within the city." The trees that will be suspended off of its balconies are equivalent to a hectare's worth of flat-land forest, while the homes inside the buildings represent five hectares' worth of single-family homes in the Italian suburbs.

It's called Bosco Verticale, or Vertical Forest.

These construction photos are by Daniel Iodice, and come from the Stephano Boeri Architetti website:

And a close-up of the tree boxes:


Here's the architect's vision of how the buildings will look when complete:

The plantings, which will include holly oak, European wild pear, and a mix of shrubs like Cain Apples and hawthorns, seem to have been chosen for their tolerance for constrained soil conditions and for their ability to improve the environmental quality inside and around the towers — shading the windows on hot summer days, insulating the apartments from city noise and particulate pollution, and filtering the apartments' grey water.

I first saw this project on the Green Futures blog, which included this critique:

Alexander Felson, Director of the Urban Ecology and Design Laboratory at Yale University, agrees that “there will potentially be microclimate and air particulate removal benefits”, but warns that the “overall energy required to construct a building that would support both trees and the wet weight of soil” places some serious question marks over its overall sustainability. He favors a more modest approach focusing on green roofs.

True, all that beefy steel and concrete required to hold up trees on an Italian balcony probably required the environmental sacrifice of a good chunk of China.

Still, I think Dr. Felson is missing the point (maybe he just can't see the forest for the trees?). This is a luxury high-rise, after all. While the architect Boeri is clearly interested in sustainability, he's also interested in creating a nice place to live for wealthy Milanese city-dwellers who can pay his commission. There are lots of luxury high-rises — the vast majority of them, actually — that blow their budgets waste construction material on much more masturbatory design flourishes.

What I find most interesting about these buildings is their approach to re-introducing wild nature into the city. I write about that idea often on this blog, but this project takes it to a new level (literally) by marrying a forest with a skyscraper. It's not merely creating a park that's geographically delineated from the rest of the city: it's integrating a forest with one of our most anthropocentric infrastructures: a high-rise apartment building.

That's pretty cool, not just for the people who live there, but for everyone in Milan who will be able to look at a vertical forest in their city's skyline.

Notwithstanding the technical questions of the construction project's sustainability, the buildings still presents an extremely bold vision of a sustainable city — a city in which nature is prominent and integrated into daily life.

Silviculture and propaganda

I found these images and places via Strange Harvest, where you'll find a few more satellite-view slogans written with trees. Apparently this was a minor fad in Soviet silviculture during the 1970s.

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Above: "Leninu 100 lyet," or "100 years for Lenin," circa 1970. In the western foothills of the Urals near Ufa.

The slogans honor the past: "USSR 50 years," "USSR 60 years," "100 years for Lenin." Yet, by using trees which would take decades to mature in order to write messages that could only be read from the sky, the foresters who planted these messages were clearly thinking of a glorious jet- and space-age future, when their comrades would read their messages from Intourist space station hotels.

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"60 years USSR," which would date it to 1977, in southern Siberia.

Instead, we read these slogans thanks to a capitalist internet company based in California. The medium has outlived the messages.

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"Lenin," in western Belarus

It makes me want to buy a few hundred acres of Ohio prairie to plant the words "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" in oak trees.

Spring foliage

Ah, spring! The buds are budding! The birds are singing! Everywhere, everything is enjoying the new freedom of wandering outdoors, free from snow and ice!


And few things are enjoying this newfound freedom more than the city's plastic shopping bags, which had spent a miserable winter buried in snowbanks, burdened with a cargo of slush. But no more! The plastic is taking to the skies! To the treetops! Beyond!



And even more are taking to the ocean, to float in long meandering migrations toward those lazy latitudes where winter never comes.

The next manifest destiny

Photo by Vincent Laforet, National Geographic Magazine

It's beginning to look as though the spectacular economic boom in America's arid west - the golf courses in the desert, the huge dams, the miles and miles of tract housing, the strip malls with palm-and-lawn landscaping - coincided with the wettest century of the past millennium, according to an article by Robert Kunzig in the latest National Geographic Magazine.

So now things are getting back to normal, which is way too dry for the West's new arrivals: Lake Powell is half empty and wildfires in suburban subdivisions have become an annual event. The alfalfa farmers in the desert are getting militant. Your southwestern country clubs are getting nervous.

The West's recovery from the past century's bout of relative dampness is actually likely to go speeding right past "normal" and enter into a few centuries' worth of mega-drought, thanks to effects of global climate change that are already taking hold. The warming globe is baking the moisture out of the air in the world's desert regions and making their climates even drier, even as it relocates that moisture north to wallop more temperate latitudes with increased precipitation and more powerful storms.

In Western mountains, which typically attract enough moisture to sustain forests, increased heat and drought and decreasing snowpack are exposing forests to more and more wildfires, while the trees that don't burn are left to contend with exploding infestations of pine beetles and other pests. The West's sky islands, isolated remnants of ice-age ecosystems that survive high up in desert mountains, are retreating further uphill every year as their forests seek the cooler air they need to survive. Like spruce-fir forests in New England, most of these ecosystems will shrink to nothing when they reach the summits of their mountains.

A landscape ecologist for a federal land agency says that "the projections are that Joshua trees may not survive in Joshua Tree National Park. Sequoias may not survive in Sequoia National Park. What do you do? Do you irrigate these things? Or do you let a 2,000-year-old tree die?"

Forest preservation, next to the ketchup

As a general rule, good environmental stewardship gets more and more difficult as our global economy distances and renders abstract the connections between what we consume and the natural resources from which it all comes.

For example, most people wouldn't want to dump raw sewage into the local river or harbor, but most of our cities have combined sewers (buried out of sight) that do precisely that during every rainstorm. Maybe if every shower, washing machine, and toilet had a live video feed of the underground sewer system and overflow discharge pipes (maybe something like the scene 30 seconds into this music video), people would generate less wastewater and our rivers and oceans might be cleaner.

That's probably neither feasible nor palatable, but here's a cheap idea that can save a tree's worth of paper every year: the "These Come From Trees" sticker for napkin and paper towel dispensers.

The idea behind this sticker is to help people make the connection between forestry and paper products in the moment before they grab a fistful of napkins at the fast food restaurant or coffee shop. This is great environmental activism: it's not a dogmatic "you shouldn't use these" message, nor is it a condescending "thank you for your cooperation" message.

Instead, it's sort of a field guide to North American condiment islands and washrooms that gives us the natural history of our paper products. And according to the guy who's promoting them, one of these stickers can prompt people to cut back their use of paper from a particular dispenser of copy machine by 100 pounds - roughly one tree's worth - every year.

Learn more and order your own stickers from thesecomefromtrees.blogspot.com. Portland readers should be advised that I've already ordered 50 and I'm willing to share.

Fractal forestry

This undoctored photograph won the Swedish photographer Jocke Berglund a "Wildlife Photographer of the Year" award from the London Natural History Museum.

Found among the convergences contest winners at McSweeney's.

Plum Creek's economic benefits: a closer reading

This past weekend, the Maine Sunday Telegram published an op-ed column I'd written about the economic benefits of Plum Creek's plan for the Moosehead region. The article is reprinted in full here at the Natural Resources Council of Maine webpage.

The Telegram gave it the misleading headline "Plan no benefit to region's economy." I argued that the plan does provide some much-needed economic benefits to the region; however, most of those benefits come from investments in the region's forest and tourist industries. The most controversial aspects of the plan - the hundreds of houselots scattered across the wilderness - would contribute little, and might actually detract from, the region's economy.

The graph below shows the expected income, in thousands of dollars, from residential development of house lots compared with expected income from one industrial forest products facility (source: Dr. Charles Colgan, "Estimated Economic Impacts...", 2006):

Note how income from hundreds of house lots plunges to zero after peaking in 2015, while the income from one sawmill rises and exceeds construction income every year. Also, though Colgan doesn't break it down by individual counties, it's widely expected that most of the construction income from residential development will go to construction firms and workers from outside of the Moosehead region (mostly in Bangor, in Penobscot County). The bulk of industrial income, on the other hand, will go to long-term employees living within a feasible commuting distance of the mill, which is proposed to go on the road between Greenville and Rockwood.

Then there's the fact that the sawmill will have fewer demands of municipal services than nine hundred seventy-five new houses. And all of those houselots are going to take thousands of acres of productive forest land out of production, off-limits to the much more lucrative businesses of forestry and recreation.

So yes, Plum Creek's plan does have some economic benefits. But those benefits would be a lot less ambiguous if the company stuck to the business of forestry and struck the wilderness housing developments from its proposal.

Up Plum Creek without a paddle

Thanks to Maine Environmental News for the tip on this one.

The Oregonian reported on Saturday that the same Plum Creek we're dealing with in the Moosehead region of Maine is looking to make an end run around Oregon's strict land-use laws in order to develop 32,000 acres of coastal forestland.

For decades, Oregon's laws have dictated that working farms and forests are strictly off-limits to housing development. These laws allowed foresters and farmers to work in natural resource industries without pressure to sell out to the latest real estate boom, and as a result, Oregon has gained a reputation as the state that does the best job of protecting its natural landscapes from the forces of suburban sprawl.

Then, a few years ago, Oregon voters passed Measure 37, a proposal from a right-wing property rights advocacy group. Few voters understood what the consequences of Measure 37 would be at the time of the election, but in effect, the initiative allows landowners to either ignore land use laws or demand compensation from the government if they can demonstrate that the regulations have adversely affected the value of their land. Never mind that Oregon's laws have increased state land values tremendously by making the entire place a more attractive place to live, but that's a whole other topic, because this particular blog entry is about Plum Creek.

Plum Creek, a corporation whose timber interests have benefited tremendously from Oregon's timber-protective laws, is now saying that the rules that have kept them from turning their forests into houselots have cost their company $95 million.

Which means, that under the auspices of Measure 37, Plum Creek is holding 32,000 acres of Oregon's coast - which is certainly a state treasure, if not a national one - hostage for $95 million.

The fact that Plum Creek filed their claims with little fanfare at the last minute before a regulatory deadline speaks to their shame in the matter, since they are clearly trying to avoid criticism. The difference between the time zones may only be three hours, but what passes as good timing for Plum Creek in Oregon amounts to horrible timing in Maine. Hearings on Plum Creek's designs on the Moosehead region begin in just a few weeks. The news from Oregon hardly inspires faith in the corporation that would transform Maine's north woods.

Measure 37 explained

More Measure 37 wackiness, from Sightline

Plum Creek

Map of the Plum Creek proposal (thanks Paul)

Perhaps you've heard about what Plum Creek, the stockholder-owned real estate and timber company, has planned in Northern Maine. In a landscape that today stands as a largely undeveloped working forest, with pristine lakes and a remarkable wealth of renewable forest resources, Plum Creek has proposed building 975 houses and two large resorts.

By way of comparison, North Conway, New Hampshire has 1,602 housing units in all (2000 Census), and Bar Harbor has 1,558 (2000 Census).

Plum Creek has also tried to sweeten the deal by including a proposed "conservation framework" that would put 368,000 acres under easements or conservation ownership. The possibility for conservation is indeed impressive: the framework would connect a million acres of conserved lands stretching from Baxter State Park to the Canadian border. The only hitch is that the company demands approval of their development plans, then expects state taxpayers and conservation nonprofits to pony up millions of dollars for the framework to take effect.

I'll be writing about this business in greater depth in the weeks to come, until and during the time when the state conducts public hearings on the plan. In the meantime, a few links:

-Natural Resources Council of Maine (who are shaping up as the main opposition group)

-Plum Creek Moosehead Plan site

And this is the big plan: Plum Creek's own documents (these are huge files):

Vol. 1: Petition for rezoning (PDF, 90 mb)

Vol. 2: Plan description (PDF, 165 mb)

Vols. 3 and 4: Appendices (PDF, 110 mb)

The Maine Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC) has a whole web page devoted to the concept plan and its path through the regulatory process here, as well as a calendar of updates and upcoming events.