Trees’ Suffering Is Tough On Us All

URBAN FORESTRY SACRIFICED AS ASPHALT BECOMES MORE PREVALENT IN FAYETTEVILLE AREA

More dead trees than usual became evident this spring when new leaves began to drape greenery across the landscape.

Sorrowfully, the brown gaps in the canopy will be even worse next spring after this scorcher of a summer.

Compounded by the tree devastation during the 2009 ice storm, the loss of more tree canopy to drought means Fayetteville, as well as the surrounding countryside, will become warmer and drier.

Since some large trees can transpire more than a hundred gallons of water daily, fewer trees means less cooling moisture will be released into the atmosphere. Hot asphalt, concrete and rooftops concentrate heat in towns and cities, creating what’s referred to as the “heat island” effect, which we inhabitants combat by leaving the air conditioning on longer.

Forestry, both urban and rural, is one of my old drumbeats to write aboutin this column, and recently several local projects have been beating on my consciousness pretty hard.

My personal travels take me up and down Arkansas 265 on the east side of town, so I get a daily dose of increasing concrete and butchered trees. This widening and that on Garland Street have caused several people to say to me, “I’ve been thinking about you as I see those big trees coming down.”

While I appreciate the sentiment expressed for my personal proclivity of advocating for trees, we should all - not just the tree huggers - be thinking about what tree loss means to us individually and as acommunity.

These two roads are being widened, at great taxpayer expense, for only one reason that I can discern: more. A growing population means more cars, which means more congestion, which drives more disgruntlement,which pushes the politics of funding more projects to widen and build more roads.

Consequently, more trees are cut, more towns get hotter, utilities get used more heavily, power plants need more coal/oil/gas/ etc. to generate more energy, which means more drilling, more mining, more stripping of natural resources to feed the maw of ever more increasing humans and their demands.

“I thought we had a tree ordinance” is the shocked response most folks express to me when they see trees cut for various projects.

It takes some explainingto put Fayetteville’s “Tree Protection and Preservation Ordinance” into perspective. The main thing people need to understand is the tree preservation and replanting rules in this ordinance apply only to new subdivisions and other large-scale developments (including parking lots) that go through the city’s permitting process. The ordinance’s stipulations regarding tree canopy do not apply to single-family homes and duplexes, the exception being homes being built within the Hillside/Hilltop Overlay District because of drainage and erosion issues.

So, yes, we do have a tree ordinance, but it does not address a great deal of the tree removal we see in public road and highway building, utility right-ofway cutting and private landscape choices.

What we need to do, but which as a society we fail to do, is treat trees as a crucial utility that regulates heat, cold, soil absorption, fl ooding, air quality, pollutant fi ltration and, as a bonus, makes our surroundings beautiful.

Locally, however, we recently gave trees an upgrade of respect, when the tree ordinance was amended to require developers to put money into a tree escrow account - “$250 for each tree required to meet the Base Density requirements which fairly represents the costs of material and labor to plant a tree,”plus “$425 as three years of maintenance costs to ensure each tree survives for that period of time.”

Hopefully this more realistic cost of replacing trees will encourage more preservation and protection of the onesalready growing. What is painfully apparent on some building sites, however, is it might take an army of informed enforcers to pound into construction workers’ heads what it takes to save, not kill, a tree. Many seem to ignore or abhor any information or regulation on the subject.

During this drought, if we do not have water rationing, there are personal steps you can take to perhaps save some of your trees. The city’s urban forester, Megan Dale (444-3470 or mdale@ ci.fayetteville.ar.us) put out a news release on tree care in drought, which is very informative. Please request it from her.

Also, Patti Erwin, state urban forester at the Arkansas Forestry Commission, (442-4963, patti.[email protected]) can help.

The “more” we really need is more trees.

FRAN ALEXANDER IS A FAYETTEVILLE RESIDENT WITH A LONGSTANDING INTEREST IN THE ENVIRONMENT AND AN OPINION ON ALMOST ANYTHING ELSE.

Opinion, Pages 13 on 07/29/2012

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