Speak for the Trees

They're already stepping up for us

Trees on the street where I grew up in Urbana, IL. With one of the most diverse urban forests in the Midwest, Urbana is one of only 16 cities nationwide to have maintained the Tree City USA designation every year since 1976.

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.
— Ogden Nash, 1932

Last week, I wrote about the far-ranging benefits of planting natives in our gardens. I’ve been wanting to delve more into writing about nature but haven’t had the time, so I thought I’d follow up this week with a plug for one element of nature: trees.

I mean, who doesn’t love a tree?

In recent years, we’ve been learning more about these wonderful beings. We’ve learned that trees are connected via vast, subterranean networks of fungi through which they communicate and share resources. We’ve learned about the benefits of forest bathing. We’ve learned that trees can improve our cities in numerous ways.

But we’re not treating trees very well. Forests of trees cover 30% of the land on Earth, absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and producing oxygen. But more than 15 billion trees are being cut down each year.

Even if there’s something wrong with you and you don’t love trees, this is cause for concern. We need trees for the health of our planet and all its inhabitants.

Yet again, Dr. Seuss is relevant!

How do we save the trees? We need to protect our forests, which you can help do by supporting organizations like Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch. And we can also plant a lot of trees in urban areas. It turns out that trees provide us many more benefits than you might think.

Unexpected benefits of trees

Trees can do all this and more:

• Improve our health: Sure, trees are great at sucking up the pollutants that cause asthma and other diseases. But it goes beyond that. Studies have shown that patients in hospitals recover more quickly if they can see a tree outside their window. A recent study in Portland, Oregon found that non-accidental deaths were lower in neighborhoods where more trees were planted.

• Make us happier: Data from Wisconsin showed that people feel happier when there’s more green space around them. People in neighborhoods with less than 10% tree canopy were much more likely to report symptoms of depression, stress, and anxiety.

• Cool down a neighborhood: Shade trees can make a city block feel 10–15 degrees cooler in the summer, and they lower air-conditioning costs.

• Increase property values: Money can grow on trees! Studies show that you can increase your home’s value 3.5–15% by planting trees. And it doesn’t take a study to see how they can improve a whole neighborhood.

• Reduce crime: There’s a strong inverse relationship between tree canopy and crimes like robbery, burglary, theft, and shooting. A 2012 study found there was 12% less crime in areas with a 10% bigger tree canopy.

• Make us feel younger and healthier: A 2015 study in Toronto found that living on a street with just 10 more trees can make us feel as healthy (yes, healthy — not wealthy) as if we made $10,000 more (likely higher now, with inflation), or as if we were 7 years younger. It’s not just a perception; living around trees decreases “cardio-metabolic conditions” as much as an income increase of $20,000 would.

Planting trees in our communities

If you have a yard with space for a tree, consider planting one or more. If you can, plant native trees, especially oaks; as I mentioned last week, oaks support more life forms than any other North American tree. When planting multiple trees, aim for variety to protect against diseases that could wipe out an entire species in an area.

Growing up in Urbana, IL, I often heard about the majestic Dutch elms that had once lined the streets but had all succumbed to Dutch elm disease before my time. But my father planted a variety of saplings in the 1970s, and look at them now!

If you don’t have a yard, or if you want to do more, you can see if your community has a program to plant trees. Here in the Bay Area, we have Urban Releaf in Oakland (part of California Releaf) and Friends of the Urban Forest in San Francisco. New York has a project to plant a million trees. Many cities around the country now have tree-planting programs.

Location, location, location

You might also want to support tree planting on a larger scale. The Nature Conservancy’s Plant a Billion Trees project helps protect and expand forests around the globe. For every $1 you donate, the Earth Day Network’s Canopy Project will plant a tree to transform a community. Plant-for-the-Planet’s Trillion Trees campaign aims to restore forest ecosystems to tackle the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.

However, some tree-planting programs are not all they’re cracked up to be. Planting trees is great, but we do have to consider where and how to plant them.

Many tree-planting efforts have focused on quantity without necessarily planting the right trees in the right locations, or ensuring the trees are cared for after planting. They might even plant monocultures of non-native species. And some programs have gone awry; trees have been destroyed by climate change–induced fires, communities have been displaced, farmland has been lost, and some projects have led to water scarcity. It’s important that we do tree planting right.

For guidance on organizations that are planting trees, check out Mongabay’s catalog of tree-planting projects. The directory indicates whether projects publicly disclose the criteria that are key to success.

Don’t buy carbon offsets

If you’re thinking of buying carbon offsets to plant more trees, don’t.

The idea of carbon offsets is that they compensate for emissions in one place by reducing emissions in another place. Some credit cards and airlines promise that in exchange for using their services, they will plant a tree for you.

This may sound good, but carbon offsets don’t work. In most cases, they’re an accounting trick that can cause harm by distracting from actual carbon emissions. This is nowhere more evident than in the corporate world. Corporations are big on using carbon offsets to meet their sustainability goals: they can keep polluting and pay for someone else not to pollute. Numerous studies have highlighted the problems with carbon offsets, showing that most don’t even offset what they promise they will.

We need real, direct action — not offsets.

So if you’re inspired to speak for the trees, consider either planting some or supporting organizations that do. The trees deserve our help.