Tree Hugging Saves Lives
My wife Joan and I always said that if we ever lost that gigantic oak tree in the front yard we would move. And that’s exactly what happened. Just a couple of years after we sadly had to take the indescribably gorgeous tree down, we downsized out of Cleveland Heights and moved slightly over the border to Cleveland’s Little Italy.
That monster oak was “At least two hundred years old,” according to the Cleveland Heights City Arborist and was about five foot in diameter at the base. It towered well above our roof and sheltered the house from the sun, keeping our house without central air conditioning quite comfortable for most of the summer. We had a bedroom air conditioner, which we only used on the hottest and most humid days. The big oak was home to multiple squirrel families.
Coming home from a walk one day, we looked up and noticed sunlight streaming through the trunk of the tree about two-thirds of the way up just below the apex where the tree split off its massive limbs up to the sky. Joan looked at me with a terror stricken face of grief. We had the tree people out right away to take a look, they explained that high winds had just twisted the tree till the trunk split, and there was nothing we could do.
We had been religious about maintaining the tree, but this is what happens in nature. We considered having the tree bound together by steel cables, but as close as it was to the house, every expert on the matter we talked to advised against it. Sadly, our beautiful tree friend of over 40 years needed to come out.
It’s not an overstatement to say it was a tragic and traumatic day when they cut down our oak tree. Joan was sobbing most of the day. A neighbor asked for a slice of the base to make a table out of, and he rolled it away like huge wagon wheel. The yard looked naked, the house forlorn. It’s tough when a good friend who has protected you that long goes away.
I was thinking about that tree a lot this summer as yet another swank rental development was built in our neighborhood, this time right behind our house. They took out three majestically mature trees, two of which were just huge. No green space of any kind was added.
Developers flooding our community with high end rental housing routinely propose to fill every available square foot with income potential and consider green space only when people in the community legitimately freak out about the environmental insult they proffer.
It’s not clear either that the development approval process in the city gives much serious consideration to green space or the quality of life impacts to the neighborhood. We continue to lose tree canopy in Cleveland, despite well-intentioned, organized efforts to build it up, and it’s been that way for a long time, particularly in the inner city, where residents tend to be mostly people of color.
Now, with the climate crisis accelerating and cities sweltering miserably early this summer, we understand clearly how cruel our lack of attention to the tree canopy has been to the people here who can’t afford to spend their days and nights in air conditioned comfort. Robust tree canopy can lower ground level temperatures by as much as ten degrees Fahrenheit, and that can mean the difference between life and death as this climate crisis progresses inexorably in the ugly-weather months and years ahead. (See links to great recent articles on this subject below.)
So it turns out that hugging trees was not so much about simply loving the earth for the earth’s sake but also about just loving other people. Failing to protect people in our cities has always been an environmental justice issue, as dirty industrial air, polluted land and lead contaminated water preferentially hit them hard.
It’s pretty clear too that clean air, pristine water and health-giving shade from a robust tree canopy have been reserved for the well-to-do and mostly white suburbs, and so it is that yet another clear example of systemic racism rears its ugly head as the most vulnerable suffer preferentially from the climate crisis, as they did with COVID.
This is also why teaching Critical Race Theory in all schools is a moral imperative. We can’t understand the effects of systemic racism on people until we delve deeply into its design, delivery and perpetuating systems. Not providing the protection of the tree canopy to people in the city is just one example.
So it turns out that the trees we love will directly save lives, and we must force the cities and the property developers in them to protect the mature ones and plant a whole lot of new ones. Because hugging those good old trees and adding new ones will help people in the city manage in the growing climate mess that is happening right now and will only get a whole lot worse.
And we will almost certainly save some lives by doing so.
(Original art by J.E. Hargate)
Here are some great recent articles that are on point:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/climate/trees-cities-heat-waves.html?smid=url-share
