Special science conversation and humanities seminar. I also welcome you this morning heartily from my cohost, brian boone and charles zimmerman. My name is vanessa summers, coordinator of the humanities, special Research Division set up to stimulate Critical Thinking at the intersection of science and the humanities and what better subject to bring science and humanity together. To discuss science and society to study the deeper relationship that people always had with trees through the ages, as meeting points, object of the light, places of peace and wellbeing. Everyone here, i am sure, will have their own favorite tree. Think about your favorite tree. What better place to speak of urban forests, famous as this place is for its unique 68 acres of forest, the oldgrowth forest that the last remnants of the 17thcentury woodlands that once blanketed this whole area, this region on the east. The same words where the indians hunted, some of the very trees standing. This is also the reason the gardens were created here in the first place in the middle of the bronx and what better person, what better person, to speak about the wideranging Natural History of the trees in American Cities than our speaker of the day, jill jonnes. Dell living in baltimore, she lived in new york city and went to Columbia University school of journalism and ever since, writing extremely interesting and inspiring books. A monk which conquering gotham. Empires of light and south bronx rising. She was named National Endowment for the humanities scholar and of interest to us is she is also the founder of the Baltimore Tree trust. What more is there to see . Please help me in welcoming jill jonnes. Jill jonnes. [applause] nice book by the way. Thank you so much. It is such an honor to be here and also just to say thank you again to the many people at the garden who were incredibly helpful to me as i was working on this book over many years with one thing i would like to say is my background amid so many scholars, phd in american history. That has been what informed any of my books. One thing i do find out is which way this goes forward, this way . Okay. All right. So urban forests, many people say, seems like an oxymoron. This is really the answer and many of you here would know that most people never heard of the concept of an urban forest, that is honestly why i wrote this book and this is so important to our future as citizens largely living in cities. Street trees, park trees, private property. This got going and i imagine many of you are familiar with Andrew Jackson downing. And public horticulturalist. And extremely influential i read you what he had to say. Of ancestors found it necessary to set cutdown vast forests, it is all the more needful their descendents plant trees, the first duty of an inhabitant of forlorn neighborhoods is to use all possible influence to have the streets planted with trees and for downing, a terriblelooking street in baltimore and as the country to urban eyes. We are having a bit of a problem with the mike. For downing, Nothing Better than epitomized what a town should look like, for newhaven. After the civil war, these trees have been in the ground for a long time. Downing was such a proselytizer for urban trees, he died at quite a young age, 36 in 1852, and during a terrible steamboat accident on the hudson. After the civil war, a whole new group of evangelists emerged as a sergeant, the ultimate boston prominent who created in 1872, very autocratic head, and he wrote many important multivolume works about american tree species, something he wrote that charms, and frustrations of the tree world is how much things dont change with how cyclical they are. And to the true beauty and native trees which appears to be peculiar to us as a nation which if you are looking at the sergeant he is in front of that most nonnative ornamental cherry and one of the big goals or missions was to to bring back plants that could be introduced to american landscapes. And hard lament, very wrong. And the davey tree expert company, this is the man who is one of my favorite people in my book. He was trained as a horticulturalist in england which did not include being taught how to read and write. He emigrated to kent, ohio and as a young man he taught himself to read and write. He was an extraordinary person, very passionate, so he became superintendent of Standing Rock cemetery in kent where he so rejuvenated the trees that he became known as the tree doctor and his own reaction to what was going on was appalled at the senseless waste of trees. They were treated almost like an enemy that had to be destroyed. The attitude was all plants die, so what is different about a 3 . His other big bugaboo if you look to the right, trees that were trimmed were made to look like hat racks by local butchers and this is all about the utilities and this is a fight that goes on to this day. Drive down the road and people hack the trees and invariably hired by the local utility. He was really visionary and he wrote this wonderful book called the tree doctor which is very blog like. He trained himself to be a terrific photographer, went out of take a photo to make a point and he would write various comments. One of his big lament was just the failure to properly plant trees and care for them and one of his essays was the calamity of cleveland, all about how they goofed up. The next person who was a significant force was j sterling morton who invented arbor day in 1872 as a treeplanting holiday but it never went anywhere until 1882 in cincinnati when the local School Superintendent rebranded as a School Childrens holiday at the first meeting of the american forrester congress which was something about clearcutting the arboreal forests here. What you see here is eden park with 8000 schoolchildren planting trees and they initiated the president ial grove which goes on to this day. I went to visit it and interestingly the one president whose trees they could never keep alive were Richard Nixons and they are on the fourth tree. The rest of them, i asked when i last talked to the person, what is obama getting . We dont know yet. He has to let us know. One of the things unique about arbor day, a very american holiday because arbor day looks forward, devoted to the happiness and prosperity of the future so it was a very obvious way of looking at the world. The other person i like to include is eliza signaler who was an amazing victorian author, foreign correspondent, traveled widely and in 1885 her brother was assigned to yokohama as us consul and went to visit him just in time for the japanese Cherry Blossom festival which he had never seen and remember america doesnt have japanese ornamental cherries except the rare one in a place like the arboretum. Just to give you an idea how she felt about it i will read you what she had to write. In the april sunshine, better still by moonlight, by the poets pale pure light of don, the blooming cherry tree is the most ideally, wonderfully Beautiful Tree that nature has to show and its shortlived glory makes it more keen and poignant. Having experienced the bliss of cherry trees and the festivals, she returns to washington, washington beautify a raw stretch of land, planting with hundreds if not thousands of japanese cherry trees, happens to be the bally wick of the federal superintendent of public buildings and grounds, this person was always a west teco graduate and Civil Engineer appointed a new by each president and went in 1885, she got nowhere. The whole treeplanting movement was embraced, cities began planting trees. Far and away, we planted a tree, in 1905 planting an arbor day tree with kids looking out which and to the schoolchildren in the united states, what he had to say in small part to exist as a nation to prosper as a state and live as a people we must have trees. Part of the treeplanting is part and parcel, and you can see what it meant in cities, the other part of this why people embrace this and city officials being very enthused planting trees because trees also reviewed serving an important aspect of public help. The cities are hot and the trees are one of the few ways you can bring down temperature. Cities are filled with horses and wandering pigs and chickens so other droppings are going up into the air, the trees also really help settle the dust. A healthy thing to be inhaling or breathing so trees, they viewed trees as something you want around you as a way to mitigate the environmental hazards. You notice here that cherry trees have arrived in washington. If you look at the date, 1925, the trees, there may be 10 or 12 years old. A lot of these began in 1885, she got nowhere until 1909 when the Taft Administration came in and there first Lady Nelly Taft became her ally and in fact there was an original shipment. By this time the japanese government was very onboard and had thrown the thousands of cherry trees and send them whereupon they became enmeshed in this political feud i describe in my book at the first 2000 trees were all burned publicly on the grounds of the Washington Monument and the japanese were very goodnatured saying you have a history of destroying cherry trees, george washington, didnt he do that . They sent another 3000 cherry trees and those did get planted in 1912. I mentioned this because i think anytime you want to do something it has a really classic consequence, it often takes a long time and in the case of 27 years. I say that to encourage everyone who gets involved in this. Tree time is different than other kinds of time. Long. They were embraced and 117,000 Young Americans died which the same group you saw for 1882 on arbor day they proposed these young men and a few young women who had been lost were honored with memorial 3 planting and they were stunned at the way this swept the nation and to a greater extent these memorials have been forgotten but if you look back you will find there are a lot of trees planted all over your city for this and american forrester he had this to say about that. The trees were marked to be making the cities just as those men marked the making of the world. Even as we have this very successful tree evangelism, cities getting planted up, we are also having the first ecodisaster which is the loss of the american chestnut. Since i am here at the Botanical Garden i wanted to show this picture of William Alonso mural because he was here and the man who identified the chestnut plate and became quite famous for that because he also was the very rare voice, with distressed politicians and tree lovers that was essentially no point of any money to contain chestnut flights because it was a windblown fungus and wiped out trees so quickly so you would have a healthy huge american chestnut and on these grounds there were 2000 american chestnut that they were gone in a few years. And the parks in its range, somewhat north of new york and into the appellations, all these cities, new york, baltimore, washington, chestnuts, and a significant loss and in the woods which is a keystone species. Interesting 0, youd to be quite a fourth at the garden and ran the Botanical Garden when Nathaniel Britton was doing another thing, referred to himself as the naturalist in his memoir and somehow after world war i it went off the rails, and rediscovered by fellow put him in a corner office, the mycology of florida. American cities were planted up but mainly planted up with american elms, take any abuse and come up really high, not interfering with traffic, and also see how beautiful they are. I am proud. I took this photo that i took it in sacramento where they were able to save a lot of the trees by injecting them. How do people think about the elm . When you came into anytown, the landscape changed. You entered into this kind of forest with hundreds of arches, the shadows changed. Everything seemed very reverent. There was a certain serenity and calmness and as the elves came down started to notice the severity of this. Before i finished that i want to point out many cities and villages had these films that were historic and had all kinds of emotional, historical resonance for people. This is the biggest elm in america after world war ii, dutch elm shows up in the 1930s and works its way to the west coast in california. There was a lot of planting went to what people were saying. You notice the severity of things, wires and utility poles, cracks in the hot pavement no longer bathed in shadows. This was unlike the american chestnut, in the southeast and chestnuts were not street trees. It was the ultimate street tree and loads of them in the parks too so their loss was significant and it happened in many places even as the cities themselves are having trouble meaning gathering everyone into the suburbs, cities didnt have the financing that they needed and so as you lost these trees and as the reason for trees that historic reason for trees had kind of disappeared, meaning you now had air conditioning and modern medicine, so what was it that you were going to say to city managers at a time of great financial stringency, why should they plant trees . There is this nice circle of life, which is 100 years after the 1 cincinnati for street conference, there is another one. And this issue of how do we replant the cities and how do we persuade people they want to do this. So Forest Service, these scientists embedded universities, had a foot in both camps. We knew nothing about urban forests, it was harvested for timber and we were going to need to know many about urban forests to persuade this new generation of mayors and city managers as they are not simply ornaments. Answering basic questions like what was a tree worth . What was the structure and character of a whole urban forest . What percentage of it had been elm and what percentage was okay . Did trees really clean the air and how much . How much money did they save in energy costs . How much storm water might and oaktree absorb . These were very basic questions which no one had any answers to. At this same conference, the conference was interesting, everyone who was really influential Going Forward in urban forestry was there. And was also very influential because he was an entirely new kind of tree lover. He was not a professional forrester. He was a charismatic baby boomer flower child, he fell in love with Tree Planting in california and unlike, i have to say, the Forest Service, instinctively understood how to cast trees and Tree Planting as hip. A glamorous way to heal cities and he really understood marketing. He had been on Johnny Carson and the talk shows and tree people which he started would serve as a really highly influential grassroots model which all history advocacy groups which exist in American Cities really are modeled on 3 people. 3 people. He remains a visionary person, trees are central to the way he thinks but he is thinking in terms of how do you actually register cities. So in the early 1990s many cities including chicago were being told by the epa that they had to clean up the air. The second mayor of chicago was a huge tree lover born on arbor day and he looked at the person who planted trees and said dont trees clean the air as it why dont we solve this problem with a lot of trees, we dont actually have the science to answer that though someone is starting to do that. The got 1 million and Roland Roundtree said his major proteges to chicago to begin the foundational science. They issued the chicago urban forest climate project report, and what they were trying to do is figure out how you determine the value of ecosystem services, the business of how much is saved and mitigated. So very disappointed in what happened in chicago, they issued their report, they were able to quantify the benefits and put it in the dollars and nothing happened. Very powerful pr machine and did not go anywhere with it. They kept on working. I was amazed to find this late in the game. It was literally counting believe on a lot of trees, so they were doing all standard street tree data for 16 american reference cities and had a scientific partner ecologist, paula pepper who was very key, which was the least area index on urban trees. Over two years she had various helpers stripped the leaves off of the canopies of 100 mature specimens of 14, and species of urban trees one of which is the often maligned pair. So this is the answer. They were almost 90,000 trees. Pepper said to me the first couple years i permanently stored really hate cherry trees, they did not want to get rid of their leaves. It was phenomenal, the number of leaves and oaktree has. They needed to know this. They needed to know the services, these species are formed so pepper was a person leading in reference cities have collected 30 pieces of data. What they would do is target at thousand street trees to fulfill a good sample size and use those to develop this, signs of technology for more sophisticated analysis to benefit. In march 2005, the head of forestry here asked pearson and pepper if they would use queens as their reference city for the northeast and so pepper came here and the for Street Division had just done this tree inventory, all the cities, 600,000 street trees. So the whole point of what they had set out to do in 1982 and again we are now looking they were only able to quantify the benefits and translate them into dollars and why were you doing this could you really wanted to change and affect Public Policy how can you could be strategic about using this data and how it could get incorporated so that they were not always an afterthought but an intricate part integral part of what was going on with Planning New York city street trees saved rashly dash mike roughly 55 per tree. The benefit of about 9 per tree. That totaled 5 million. Street trees receipt reduced storm run