The Need for Equal Trees: All About Portland’s Environmental Services’ Tree Programs (Part 2)
Blog post by Thomas Meinzen, Program Associate with Lea Wilson and Matt Krueger, Portland Bureau of Environmental Services
In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the basics of trees and tree-planting—and how you can help—with Lea Wilson and Matt Krueger of the Environmental Services Tree Program. Tree planting, however, is about more than careful watering, greener yards, or even carbon sequestration. It’s also an equity issue, and a matter of public health. Trees offer a wide range of benefits to people, and the fact that some Portland neighborhoods have far fewer trees than others has important implications for racial justice and community health and wellbeing. To dig more into these issues and how the Tree Program is addressing them, we’d like to share more from our interview with Lea Wilson and Matt Krueger at Portland Bureau of Environmental Services.
Bigleaf maple, a common street and restoration tree in Portland and the Willamette Valley, in bloom along the Willamette River.
Portland's city-wide goal is to reach at least 33% canopy cover throughout the city, so that everyone receives the benefits of trees in their neighborhoods and workplaces. What are some of those benefits? How do trees help increase Portlanders' quality of life?
Trees are incredible. They really are. There are some obvious ecosystem services from trees: they give us cleaner water by reducing stormwater runoff, provide habitat, cool and clean the air, offer energy savings through shade, and provide a barrier to the wind. You’ll see these sorts of benefits in many of our city plans, like the Portland Plan or the Climate Action Plan. But the research on some of the more social and human health benefits of trees is really piling up, and I suspect this is the research a lot of people haven’t heard about yet. Access to tree canopy has been shown to reduce stress and improve learning outcomes and has been strongly correlated with reduced crime and increased birthweights. Motorists drive slower on tree-lined streets and shop owners benefit from increased spending. There’s a great collection of research on this topic here. The bottom line is that trees provide a broad suite of services to people in all different stages of life, as well as to society at large.
When settlers arrived in the mostly forested Portland area, they cleared the land of trees, leaving only stumps behind. We still have a lot of catching up to do! Source: Stumptown, Lorenzo Lorain, 1857. Oregon History Project, ORHI 5487, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
What are some challenges you face in working towards higher and more even city-wide canopy cover?
There are 4 major challenges facing the tree world:
Property ownership. Who can say yes to a tree? How do we engage with absentee landlords or landlords who just don’t value trees, even if their tenants do?
Cost of maintenance. One of the magic things about trees is they tend to gain value and provide more benefits with age and size (unlike human-made infrastructure, which tends to lose value and functionality over time). Big trees are especially good at providing environmental services like climate mitigation and stormwater management. But who has the money to care for big trees? If you live with a low income, are you budgeting to pay an arborist for regular check-ins on the 70’ Douglas-fir in your back yard? We haven’t closed the loop on tree care.
Political challenges. Trees are everywhere – private property, public property, interstate highways. They cross the work of multiple bureaus and jurisdictions, which can be a political challenge.
Leaving space for trees. Portland is getting denser, and in some ways that’s good: individuals are having smaller footprints, and it encourages more walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. But when you cut down a big old tree to put in a brand new row of town homes and each one has a water line and a gas line and a sewer line and a driveway and the planting strip is only 4’ wide anyway… You’ll never be able to grow a tree to replace the one that was lost.
Tree planting at Heron Lakes in north Portland.
Are there any particular success stories you'd like to share in your work?
We’ve learned a lot doing this work. Adding establishment watering and structural pruning services to the program was one big win for us. Taking on responsibility for a tree is a little bit like caring for a long-lived, low maintenance pet. You are responsible for this creature, and we’ve modified our program to try to set up all tree owners for success.
We’re also excited about how our community tree planting contract has evolved through the years. We’ve been able to catalyze neighborhood plantings in East Portland where that model wasn’t widely successful in the past, and direct money into partnerships with BIPOC-led and -serving organizations to work collaboratively where our missions overlap. For example, we’re using tree planting and pruning work as a vehicle for green job skills training, leadership development, internships, and focus groups. There’s still a lot of work to do there, but it feels like incremental progress in the right direction.
Tree canopy cover percentage across Portland, grouped by census block. Source: Portland Parks & Recreation Urban Forestry, 2014
Racial and socioeconomic disparities in urban canopy cover and resulting inequities in urban heat accumulation and air quality have been a "hot topic" of recent research. In your work, how do you see these disparities play out on the ground, and why are they important to address? How is the Environmental Services Tree Program working to address these disparities?
We see these disparities play out on the ground as dense urban development leads to tree canopy loss, and in how certain parts of the city just haven’t had the investment in tree planting in the past. While many removed trees are “mitigated” through the planting of new trees, they are often smaller species and there’s just no way to make up for the loss of big mature trees such as a 100-year-old Douglas-fir or Oregon white oak. That’s why programs such as our Environmental Services Tree Program, Portland Parks & Recreation Urban Forestry, and Friends of Trees are so important: we’re all working to proactively build more canopy to mitigate the negative impacts of lower tree canopy.
We also generally see lower canopy in areas of lower household incomes and higher racial diversity. Development history and gentrification are a big part of this. Since the early days of our program in 2008, we have been focusing our outreach efforts in what we call “equity geographies” to address these disparities. Trees do cost money to plant and maintain and may not be a priority for lower-income residents, so we will often offer free trees and free watering in equity geographies. We also work on building partnerships in the community to reach different populations where a language barrier or a cultural difference may present challenges to getting trees planted. Within those challenges lie important opportunities.
———
Thank you to Lea Wilson and Matt Krueger of the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services for their contributions to this piece. Read Part 1 of this blog to learn more about tree planting and how you can help. Click here to learn more about the Tree Program and Portland’s street trees and to sign up to get free trees added to your street or commercial/industrial/multi-family property, and click here to learn more about equity issues related to Portland’s urban canopy. To learn how to get discounts to your bills from planting trees and mitigating stormwater on your property, visit the Clean River Rewards page. And to volunteer, visit Friends of Trees or our Events page!