Who knew that over 140 million acres of American forests grow in cities and towns, and trees occupying that 3.6% of the land in the lower 48 are responsible for close to one-fifth of the nation’s carbon capture? That popped out of recent study on projected growth of urban forests and climate change mitigation at the county level from the venerable American Forests, a not-for-profit working for better outcomes since 1875.

Linden flowers at the Illinois Institute of Technology

Yet those urban forests grow inequitably. In their introduction, American Forests’ scientists note that with a few exceptions, canopy cover in urban areas functions well as a map of urban inequality. Average canopy coverage in urban areas is about 39%. Within that, a recent study found that in formerly redlined neighborhoods canopies cover 23% of the space, whereas neighborhoods given high ratings, characterized by US-born white populations, had close to twice the canopy, 43%. In the authors’ own words, the “ranking system used by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s parallels the rank order of average percent tree canopy cover today.” Quite the factoid.

Urban forests will expand with expansion of urban areas, but American Forests projects canopy coverage to decline to 33% by 2060, losing out largely to impervious cover. At the same time acres of rural tree cover will fall to construction equipment.

Under a Chicago River bridge

American Forests calculates that to offset loss of ecological services provided by urban forests if tree loss continues at the current rate, we would need to plant 23 million trees a year, one new tree a year for every 3 acres of urban land, which could be accomplished if each urban resident planted one tree every 12 years. An unlikely scenario.

But to do the full job, which would both balance their Tree Equity Index, and ameliorate the air pollution and heat-related illnesses that concentrate in poorer neighborhoods, we would need to plant and maintain 31.4 million trees a year, which would increase average canopy coverage to 43%. (And yes, it would be more efficient to do a better job protecting canopies, but that’s unlikely too.)

Green versus fossil fuel job projections are politicized, of course, and American Forests forecasts the full reforestation project would support 228,000 jobs annually, jobs that can’t be outsourced. American Forests’ efforts are targeted to people of color, and would provide outdoor work that might allay ongoing fears of covid infection and bring people back into the labor force. Nowhere near enough, but a start, and three times the jobs currently in shale extraction, despite much larger gains theorized by industry-funded research as the so-called Shale Gale was gaining steam a decade ago. (For reference, natural gas extraction, broken out in Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages but not in the Current Employment Statistics, was 30,000 in March of 2021. Toss in a representative share of support activities, and you’re at 75,000.)

And talk about bottlenecks. As many as aware, home gardening encouraged by covid has created shortages in fruit trees, but seedling production itself has been in long decline, exacerbated by the Great Recession. American Forests suggests we need to double seedling production to meet our reforestation goals, and, since nursery and reforestation jobs tend to be in economically depressed rural areas, unlikely to grow on their own these days, there’s an offset to our rural/urban inequality here as well. And it could break up worrisome concentrations of, say, poultry processing in the rural south.

Seedlings along the Chicago River

In addition to those jobs, American Forests’ project, currently underway, would, as the trees mature, absorb 9.3 million tons of carbon, remove 57 tons of particulate pollution, and save the country $5 billion in combined air, water and climate services annually. That $5 billion alone is over half the cost.

American Forests’ tree equity tool, a targeted resource, covers 150,000 neighborhoods and 486 municipalities that constitute 70% of the US population, including socioeconomic status, population density, and current canopy cover. You can evaluate your own community as well as compare your own community to others here.

Large cities with the most to gain include Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Memphis, New York, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, and Portland.

Innovation Coda
Ben Christensen & Marisa Repka of Cambium Carbon, based in DC but operating nationwide, just won the JM Kaplan Fund’s innovation award. Thirty-six million trees fall in US cities each year, and their outfit, Cambium Carbon, creates a regenerative economy by salvaging those 46 million tons of wood, and using the proceeds to fund new tree planting, as well as keep usable material out of the waste stream. Might as well get with the terminology, so upcycling that wood into valuable, and scarce these days, durable goods brings local residents, many of whom face barriers to traditional employment, into the force where they learn technical skills across the tree life cycle, from tree care to carpentry.

Christensen and Repka had the idea when working with the World Resources Institute, observing that the kind of projects coming into the climate space from the financial sector, from private industry, and from the government, were all weak in terms of scalable projects. In their words, by transcending scale, their operation will bridge the “giant gap between supporting communities with the grace and specificity required to build effective local solutions…and the ability to scale those solutions into national climate initiatives.”

Their tagline? “Our wood does good.”

Purple Martins nesting along Lake Michigan

According to a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report there were 34.0 million people, or 10.5% of the population, living below the poverty level in the United States in 2019. Although these are “primarily” adults who are not in the labor force, and children, 6.3 individuals constitute the working poor, those who were in the labor force for at least 27 weeks, working or looking for work, but whose incomes remain below the poverty level. But, that population as a share of all individuals who were in the force for the requisite weeks, fell to 4.0% in 2019, the lowest in the series that goes back to 1986, from 4.5% in 2018. In 1986 the rate was 6.2%, dropped and then rose to 6.7% in 1993, fell into 2001, topped out at 7.2% in 2010, and has been steadily falling with a mini plateau in 2017-18.

Full-time employment (FT) helps a lot, with only 2.7% of those working FT among the working poor, but 9.8% of those working part-time. Women are “more likely” to be among the working poor, 4.5%, than men, 3.5%, and Blacks and Latinos are “much more likely” than Whites and Asians to be so classified. 2.3% of Asian workers earn wages below the poverty level, as do 3.5% of White workers, 7.0 of Hispanic workers, and 7.2% of Black workers. Asian men, 2.4%. have a higher rate than women, 2.3%, but rates for women are higher in all other demographics. The highest rate, 14.5%, is among black women aged 24 to 34 or in their teenaged years, followed by Black men aged 20-24, 10.7%.

Education matters, but it’s no shoo-in. About eleven percent of white workers with four years of high school yet no diploma earn poverty wages, as do 22% of Blacks, 13.9% of Hispanics, and 7.5% of Asians. Overall, only 1.4% of those with Bachelor’s degrees are among the working poor, no difference between men and women. Although white women with BAs are only 0.1pps more likely to be in poverty than men, 1.4%, 1.9% of Black women with college degrees rank among the working poor, as do 0.8% of men, the smallest share. That breakout is reversed among Asian workers, with women at 0.9%, while among Hispanic workers, women are above, 1.9%, and men a bit below, 1.6%, the average, 1.7%.
One fifth of families maintained by women with a child under 18, a demographic we and many others consider highly motivated, earn wages beneath the poverty line, more than twice the share of families maintained by men, 9%. Families with children under 18 and one person in the labor force were five times as likely to live in poverty as those without children.

In the late 1800s, Native Americans told naturalists working in Alaska that the marbled murrelet, a small seabird that flies underwater when fishing, breeds in the ancient forest. Apparently they weren’t listening. The nesting habits of this small chunky alcid remained a mystery until the 1970s when a tree surgeon working on a damaged branch over a campground in a state redwood forest came across a nest, not a first, with a lone chick, unusual, but a chick that had webbed feet, a first.

One clue had been noticed prior to this discovery, murrelets flying up rivers miles from the ocean during breeding season, and more became apparent after. For example, the species ranges from Monterey Bay to the Aleutians, and its pelagic populations are closely correlated with proximity of old growth forests.

One of the most destructive of our many destructive economic narratives is the claim that economic and ecological outcomes are at odds. Among the most polarized, brutal, and misunderstood of battles engaged by this polarity were the Timber Wars concerning California and Oregon’s old growth forests.

Photo from San Francisco State University linked below. If anyone knows M. Hobson, the photographer, please send him or her our way.

They didn’t have to happen. The team of biologists and historians who put together Coast Redwood, A Natural and Cultural History, details how, in the 1930s, the Pacific Lumber Company, under the leadership of Stanwood Murphy, became a pioneer in sustainable timber harvesting, cutting only certain percentages of trees leaving others to hold the soil together and for future harvest. PL maintained these practices for half a century. Their timber holdings were their major asset, and their employees believed the “extensive holdings and sustained-yield logging would ensure their long-term employment.” The last Murphy to run the company said, “We were the good guys. It was fun, it was easy—it was a great life.”

In the 1980s, Pacific Lumber owned about 70% of the old growth forest held privately. Unfortunately for their employees, PL’s under-valued stock came to the attention of Houston-based Charles Hurwitz and his company, Maxxam, who financed a hostile take-over with junk bonds and, heavily levered, raided PL’s pension fund, and began selling off secondary operations, like a welding shop, and clear cutting to service the debt.

By this time the marbled murrelet’s population had been decimated by logging, declining fisheries, you name it, and its habitats were protected. When PL illegally entered those habitats to log valuable old-growth trees, the Environmental Protection and Information Center, among others, sued PL, eventually taking the suit to federal court, who sided with the environmental groups, noting PL had used “fraudulent wildlife assessing methods,” concerning murrelet populations. PLC’s licenses were revoked for “gross negligence & willful” violations of state forestry regulations, and eventually the land was purchased from PL and taken into public hands.

The marbled murrelet isn’t the only species up there. In the late 1990s researchers led by Humboldt State’s Steve Sillett began climbing into redwood crowns. (If you’ve read Richard Powers’s The Overstory you know something about this, but there’s more.) The crown of one mapped redwood contains 210 trunks and fills 32 cubic yards, the tree itself embodies over 37,000 cubic feet of wood. Within those crowns, in addition to ferns, lichens, mosses and epiphytes, huckleberries produce fruit, and some trees become natural bonsais, while others can grow to 8 feet. Wandering salamanders have been found breeding in water-logged humus mats above 200 feet. Salamanders are good climbers, but it is hard to imagine what would impel an individual to use the energy it would take to make that climb, and some biologists believe centuries ago salamanders climbed onto young trees and rode up as the tree grew, as did generations of offspring. There are also crustaceans and, so far, no one knows how they got there. How many STEM jobs, some entry level, could those aerial habitats also support?

Murrelets begin nesting in April, the chicks fledging at about 4 weeks. Until recently no one knew how the young birds reach the ocean. It has now been observed that they fly out of the nest and to sea alone in the evening dark, another mystery solved.