Even if you can't read the NYT article, the idea of e-mail addresses for trees (and maybe other creatures and things) is very interesting.
Befriending Trees to Lower a City’s Temperature
A program in Melbourne, Australia, that tracks every public tree — and even gives each an email address — is seen as a way to manage climate change.
Central Melbourne, on the other hand, lacks those cities’ financial firepower and is planning to plant a little more than 3,000 trees a year over the next decade. Yet it has gained the interest of other cities by using its extensive data to shore up the community engagement and political commitment required to sustain the decades-long work of building urban forests.
A small municipality covering just 14.5 square miles in the center of the greater Melbourne metropolitan area — which sprawls for 3,860 square miles and houses 5.2 million people in 31 municipalities — the city of Melbourne introduced its online map in 2013.
Called the Urban Forest Visual, the map displayed each of the 80,000 trees in its parks and streets, and showed each tree’s age, species and health. It also gave each tree its own email address so that people could help to monitor them and alert council workers to any specific problems.
That is when the magic happened.
City officials were surprised to see the trees receiving thousands of love letters. They ranged from jaunty greetings — “good luck with the photosynthesis” — to love poems and emotional tributes about how much joy the trees brought to people’s lives.
Members of the public were subsequently recruited to help with forestry programs such as measuring trees and monitoring wildlife, and politicians were left in no doubt about how much Melburnians valued their trees.
City of Melbourne councilors of all political stripes agreed on the ambitious goal of increasing their tree canopy cover to 40 percent of public land by 2040, from 23 percent in 2012.
Their plan is on track after a decade and has been gradually replacing many of the grand European elms and London plane trees that shade the city’s widest boulevards, moving instead to indigenous species such as eucalypts and other trees better able to cope with climate change.
Interesting. I will send the article to my son and his wife. They lived in Melbourne for the first three of their seven years in Australia. We didn’t go there, only to Sydney and surrounding areas. There are many eucalyptus in Sydney - as there are in California. I have always liked eucalyptus trees because of their “airiness” (for lack of a better word) and love the way they smell. They tolerate drought reasonably well. But they are not particularly good shade trees- too “airy”. :)
ReplyDeleteOMG. I can only begin to imagine the scorn American conservatives would heap on the idea of giving trees an email address and hiring public servants to maintain their messages, never mind the fodder it would give FOX to tie the left with trees hugging snowflakery.
ReplyDeleteMaybe a great idea for Melbourne--will ask one of my correspondents there to weigh in--but some ideas just won't translate to American culture, no matter how good-hearted.
The only way to improve tree planting in America would be to show that a) more trees attract business to a municipality, b) planting said trees creates opportunities for small businesses to provide and maintain them, and c) unemployment of the shiftless poor will go down when they have more backbreaking unskilled labor opportunities.
When I worked for the library association, we put together millage request strategies that focused on the the monetary return a decent library contributed to a town. You don't need to persuade the readers to vote yes, you have to persuade the yokels who'll tell you their kids read enough books at school, and what we really need is a new facility for sports and country music concerts.
We just have to take the right approach to Republicans.
DeleteWhen recycling first came to our county, my Republican Trump loving neighbor would have nothing to do with it, although the county provided each of us with a container for our recycle materials. Why? He said "someone" was making a lot of money from the recycled materials and we deserved to be paid for our recycled trash.
The county has now moved to voluntary recycling by the regular garbage companies (they provide two containers) with a reduced garbage fee.
If we want a lot of trees on our properties, simply pay the landowners with reduced property taxes according to the amount of trees they have on their land.
None of this liberal tree hugging spending time and talent to help the environment; just cold-hearted tax reductions for those who want them. And respect for their God-given right to do whatever they want with their property, including chopping down all the trees if they want.
We had curbside recycling. The village council decided that was too expensive, so they set up a voluntary collection center downtown. I doubt very much that their collection is usable. People don't rinse or sort stuff, and often people dump regular garbage in there, so it attracts skunks and raccoons. The village to our south has a monthly recycling drive that makes money for the village coffers. You sort, drive through once a month, and the attendants make sure everything goes in the right bins. Not great for the carbon footprint with the idling cars in line, but at least the junk is creating a public revenue stream down there.
DeleteI'm afraid that we have moved past the point where voluntary environmental measures will help anything, and conservatives want to conserve everything but the environment, so we're screwed.
"Woodman, spare that tree," "Under the spreading chestnut tree", not to mention Joyce Kilmer's poem about trees. People were tree huggers before it was fashionable. And there's the ballad, "Bonnie Portmore".
ReplyDeleteMy family mourned when a grass fire partially destroyed a landmark cottonwood on the farm. We name trees. Sometimes not very creatively, the Bradford pear in our front yard is called "Brad". Our older son had a large spruce named Halonir. Point being that people might be more receptive than we think to giving trees an e-mail.
In our town square, which is a city park, the trees have small signs saying what kind they are. I thought that was nice, and educational.
I didn't watch all the Lord of the Rings movies, but did see the one, I think it was the second, featuring the Ents. They were the trees that walked and talked. Very slowly. I enjoyed them.
DeleteAll the ash trees on my property are dead. The emerald ash borer, one of those globalization bugs, killed 'em dead. A dead branch from one fell in a high wind and smacked my garage roof. Landed flat and did no damage.
ReplyDeleteI remember when all our elm trees died of Dutch elm disease years ago.
DeleteRaber works for a small company that makes everything out of reclaimed lumber from old barns. He is always geeking out when they get a huge plank of something that no longer grows here, or hasn't had the chance to grow as big as the virgin timber they cut down 200 years ago to build Michigan barns.
Now probably 80 percent of the deciduous trees are some kind of maple, which The Boy is allergic to. His doc told us when he was little that replacing a wide variety of native plant species with a few that grow anywhere concentrates pollen and increases asthma and allergies.
I can appreciate his geeking out. We had a great guy around the corner who had a mill and cured his own lumber. I got a bannister and railing from him that I installed. I made a coffee table from some crazy wood he milled for me of which I never heard. He worked into his 80's but time finally caught up with him and he's gone from us now. What a resource. What a loss.
DeleteHere is the online gallery of the place Raber works. If you scroll down to "Gifts" and swipe left past the wooden novelty signs you can see some of his ukuleles, including his Michi-lele,shaped like Michigan's distinctive lower peninsula. Yes, people do buy these ...
Deletehttps://2ndchancewood.com/gallery-1
PS, he did make some of the other things, too. But ukes are apparently enjoying some popularity right now. He sent one of his cat's eye ukuleles to London, England.
DeleteThat's all great stuff. Wood has a presence. Glad your husband is exercising his talent. The Michigan ukeleles are great. I don't play the ukelele but, if I ever build a monolithic dome house, that's exactly the kind of furnishings I'd put in it.
DeleteTree lovers might enjoy these two coffee table-type books:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.amazon.com/Oldest-Living-Things-World/dp/022605750X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3SE0QE6KRM3UN&keywords=the+oldest+living+things+in+the+world&qid=1648600133&sprefix=the+oldest+living+things+%2Caps%2C139&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.com/Wise-Trees-Diane-Cook/dp/1419727001/ref=sr_1_1?crid=11RGV7A0YT0I3&keywords=wise+trees&qid=1648600237&s=books&sprefix=wise+trees%2Cstripbooks%2C149&sr=1-1
I had given them to my dad, and now I have them. The "oldest living things" one in particular is interesting. Not all of them are trees, but all of them are plants. Dad opined that plants which clone themselves shouldn't count, because they are actually separate and newer organisms. He had a point.
Are there any lilacs in the book? I swear those things are unkillable. My parents lived in their house for 60+ years, and the lilacs were still going strong and pushing up suckers that had to be dealt with when I sold the place.
DeleteJean, no lilacs in the book. But there are aspens, which are not known as being an exceptionally long lived tree. The ones in the book are the Pando stand, in southern Colorado. They are a large grove of male aspens which are clones of one another, with a connected root system. The root system is said to be at least ten thousand years old, even though individual trees die and new ones sprouted from the root system.
DeleteExcuse me, the Pando grove is not in Colorado, it's in Utah. From Wikipedia: "The plant is located in the Fremont River Ranger District of the Fishlake National Forest at the western edge of the Colorado Plateau in south-central Utah, United States, around 1 mile (1.6 km) southwest of Fish Lake.[3]"
DeleteFascinating. Seems to be what my Rose of Sharon bushes are doing. Found some photos here, and a story about how Pando seems to be dwindling: https://www.forbes.com
DeleteWish I had some lilacs and rose of sharon. That was an interesting link about Pando. Sounds like it does better when protected from humans and animals. Which makes sense.
DeleteThe book, The Oldest Living Things in the World, is well worth reading if your library has a copy. Not just for the interesting information, but for the author, Rachel Sussman's adventures in gathering the photos and information for it. She traversed the world on a shoestring, and took most of the photos in person, while couch surfing with friends of friends of friends. She suffered a serious injury with one of her photo shoots, but
it all turned out in the end.
I will have Raber get the book on interlibrary loan for me.
DeleteThe lilac and Rose of Sharon came from my mom's house. One is purple and one is white. I also have a big patch of her veronica. Some of my Gramma's lemon lilies are still hanging on, and she died in 1984. They didn't do well last summer, and I think I need to divide them, maybe.