Arboriculture and Plant Health Care Discussion Group:
http://www.isa-arbor.com/archives/phc/ 1997/0572 .html
[College of ACES]
[University of Illinois]
[Illinois CES]
2. We have seen the enemy and they is us.
bobw@enteract.com
Sat, 17 May 1997 14:18:06 -0500
• Messages sorted by: [ date 1 [ thread 1 [ subject 1 [ author 1
----------------------------------------
I apologize for taking anyone's time in trying to read my first post on this subject. Understanding the mechanics of writing in the reply form has been beyond me--and apparently for others as well. I've asked that the first fragmented mutant be deleted and I've submitted this second letter that I hope will be printed in one piece. I hope that this isn't tedious beyond the value of the subject, but what I wanted to say was important to me to get before an audience who might feel the same way:
I think of us in this group and in this tree business as a collection of hard-working people inside a house arguing and debating about all sorts of things and no one has looked out a window to see that the house is sliding toward a big hole.
Obviously, the real issue is outside, and we could comfortably stay talking and working until the moment the house tipped into the void, but we'd never notice the real problem without taking the time to look.
To me, in glancing out the window and suddenly being drawn up short in seeing the bigger picture; most of our architectural/designer/developer/construction players, in spite of their newly-found religious conversions, still don't really care about trees.
Maybe I'll get indignant responses from some, and maybe not because they’ll never read this page, but I often judge things by the old common sense rule of looking at what they do--rather than just what they say.
If I add up a lot of the things I've read in these forums, it seems to me we're all standing in the middle of a larger problem. We have common frustrations and shared dreams in the business of trees, and for what it's worth I'd like to mutter a bit. If it's a poor contribution, I'm sure you’ll all let me know and I'll correct my ways:
The View Outside
Architects and engineers chart the history of their professional successes by their proud and progressive taming and controlling of nature. For them, each of their disciplines and specialities share the same goals of stability and permanence in their projects, and they produce designs intended to endure and to defy the changes that nature demands.
Once these designs are established as a standards, codes, or common practices, most of them are reviewed, inspected, and enforced by those same authorities with no apparent need to ever re-examine their thinking or actions. The result is that professionals in both the design and the construction business are often preoccupied with their issues alone. They have been dismissive of other perspectives, or insensitive to aesthetic and environmental concerns, and so the larger living picture of their projects usually suffer.
For example, a great deal of attention and money goes into stabilizing and preparing the soils beneath and adjacent to buildings, roads, and other structures. For them, ignoring this practice would run the risk of negligence since the longevity and safety of their structures may be compromised. Stability to this group means the avoidance of physical changes through aggressive civil engineering practices.
However, we then surround and fill those same projects with living things, with landscapes and greenery to soften the structures and humanize the sites. These living things, by definition, are the embodiment of change; their growth requires change. It can't be any other way.
Yet, we indulge in the contradiction of taking these landscapes and the urban forests that are expected to grow and mature bountifully and placing them into engineered physical settings that are sterile, unforgiving, and intolerant of change. And, once having placed these two expectations in conflict, we are guaranteed costly and repeated corrective measures and constant maintenance for the presence of these visible "natural" enrichments in our cities.
If we spent the same amount of thinking, time, and money in "uncompacting" soils in sequences and areas of landscape construction as we do in compacting soils for structures, trees would think they've lived and gone to heaven. They would grow and flourish--and certainly be fewer topics of discussions in groups like ours as to trees being crippled, abused, and abandoned.
Landscape Mathematics
There is a powerful graphic equation here that we should pay attention to; it is a set of inverse or contradictory curves placed against a background of economic common-sense:
Structures begin to deteriorate from the moment they are finished; the value curve is downward.
Landscapes however, appreciate as they mature; their value curve is upward from the time they are planted. How ironic that present architectural and engineering thinking does not include the recognition and support of that inverse equation for sustainable beauty.
The long term survival of our parks, greenways, and urban forests require a reinvention of philosophies of design that can act in concert with the natural forces and cycles rather continue the prideful witlessness that we should overpower and subdue them. The lessons are very clear. The average life of a city tree has been estimated from 7 to 17 years by different researchers. How can green-oriented professionals like us quietly stand in the company of those statistics?
If pediatricians had signs in their offices saying that the average life of ,a patient was 10 years, there would be never be anyone in the waiting rooms.
If we choose to blame the early death of our trees on "urban environments," we must remember that we, in the larger sense, build those same lethal environments. As my favorite possum-philosopher, Pogo, once observed. "We have seen the enemy, and they is us."
No one is so naive to think that singularly natural settings can be created in the city, but we must move away from the hostile and sterile designs that are unchallenged and claim exclusive ownership of functions and budgets.
A Park Should Be More Like a Farm Than a Highway
In our society, buyers control markets. Standards are set by, and suppliers are obedient to the purchasers with the largest budgets. In this nation, road builders and civil engineers are those big-money determinants of what is specified and purchased. On those roads that connect cities of all sizes, in our cities, and in our parks and parkways, the architects and engineers define our surroundings in the rigidity of concrete and steel. They set the standards that fill the supply houses and prevent the consideration of alternatives.
In this palate of choices for architects and engineers, where is the color green?
I remember how naive I was in reviewing a spec. calling for Grade A Fill in a new park that was to be the bulk of the material laid beneath a veneer of some 8 inches of topsoil. I had asked for samples of all the specified materials and they were eventually delivered in a collection of plastic bags. The sack of grade A fill was a white gravel/stone with a distribution ranging from dust to 1/4 to 1/2 inch pieces. It was the most inhospitable, sterile, and clearly inconceivable material for growth that I could have considered, but it was the traditional, definitive and most-specified fill for an urban park.
Why does the delusion to use this material in a park still persist? In part,because it works under sidewalks and structures, and because it resist change, and because it is cheap, and because everybody does it, and because there is no pressure to change the attitude or the specification.
Simply saying that these parks survive, and it is therefore some measure of our brilliance and forethought, or the validation of our engineering; it is really the statement of the resilience of green things. We have shifted the burden of our shortsightedness to them and they will struggle with it for the rest of their lives.
Parks, in the largest sense--and parkways, boulevards, and holes in the sidewalks in the smaller configurations--must simply be designed from a different perspective than the discards and dismissals of civil engineers, architects and contractors. The infrastructure conflicts are created by us and we persist in keeping them:
One block away from me, the gas company cut in new trenches between the curbs and the trees in the parkway to run new lines. They also trenched back to each house for their new services. These trees, magnificent silver maples about 75 years old that stretch over the street in the most beautiful of canopies, are now root pruned to a depth of 6 feet and a width of 4 feet on three sides. The trenches have been refilled, the cut sidewalks promptly repaired, and new sod quickly thrown down. There are now no clues as to the destruction and the implication of shortened lives for those trees.
"Waddaya talkin’ about, it looks fine to me," will be expected response of anyone considering my complaint. "Waddaya nuts?" will be the thoughts of many who are asked to stretch their minds and understand what trees need to live and how we have failed them here.
Four blocks away from me, the sidewalks on a main street have been cut for long planters and tree pits in my city"s renaissance of greendom. The sidewalks are typically 4 inches thick and rest on the traditional bed of sand and grade-A-fill. So, those new landscape holes and slots have been routinely compacted just as if they were to receive a sidewalk. Yes, at some point, the holes will be filled with topsoil, but only to the only possible depth of 4 inches, and the new trees or landscape materials will then be stuffed inside them.
The new street beautifications will look good at first because we buy the plants live rather than dead. And there will be a flurry of citizen delight--which I welcome as someone who believes in the greening of our cities. But the landscapes will probably not survive. The plantings will succumb to road salt, the lack of water, the alkaline fill beneath them, and the cumulative cruelties provided by any city. So it would seem it's just a matter of time.
I once photographed the exposed cross section of a median on a large street with a row of trees planted down the middle. The tree balls at this section were suspended in gravel with a layer of soil above and a hearty glop of mulch. Even if those trees could extend a few feeble roots into the fill, where could they go? The entire street profile and the new planters were designed by traffic engineers to other standards; well-drained, stable, immovable, unchanging; nothing organic was allowed in the drawings besides the balls, with their little squares of topsoil and mulch.
It was quite obvious what the engineering priorities were, and that only those priorities existed, so the trees would have to fight to survive. I stopped photographing that site three years ago, after the third replacement trees proved to me that no magic would intervene. I also appear to have been the only one to have learned that lesson since there now is another set of replacement trees.
If we would like to move our activities from talking about things as small individual voices to the world of making a difference and being part of the solution, someone has to look out the window. Or better yet, all of us should should look outside, and all of us should say something to the ones who control the settings and the lives of our trees.
I had the good fortune to attend the first annual meeting of the Student Society of Arboriculture last month. It was filled with young people who were energetic, concerned about ethics, and still held the joy of learning. Anyone of them, I'm sure, would stick their head out the window just out of youthful curiosity. I hope they'll be active and righteous--and noisy--about what they see.
I don't quite care how it happens, but we all have to be a louder voice to change things for trees.
Bob Wulkowicz ©
• Next in thread: konomos@doitnow.com: "Re: 2. We have seen the
enemy and they is us." 4of4
-------------------------
The post written above in 1997 was what I thought was important; and all the others who wrote then as well are now gone. The ISA threw us away and never even bothered to tell us; never bothered to ask.
The ISA claims to be responsible for the many issues of trees. I don't understand where history, heritage, shared education. commentary, and simple respect for authors on the invited ISA forums gets dismissed as if it were none of our business.
The words in these forums here are your words. An author of one post or six thousand on Treebuzz have the same rights of ownership and expectation of respect.
PS: As a BTW, It's my birthday. And my present to myself, will be not to give up in the face of a short-sighted bureaucracy. As a start, what did it cost to maintain those forums?
Bob Wulkowicz ©
http://www.isa-arbor.com/archives/phc/ 1997/0572 .html
[College of ACES]
[University of Illinois]
[Illinois CES]
2. We have seen the enemy and they is us.
bobw@enteract.com
Sat, 17 May 1997 14:18:06 -0500
• Messages sorted by: [ date 1 [ thread 1 [ subject 1 [ author 1
----------------------------------------
I apologize for taking anyone's time in trying to read my first post on this subject. Understanding the mechanics of writing in the reply form has been beyond me--and apparently for others as well. I've asked that the first fragmented mutant be deleted and I've submitted this second letter that I hope will be printed in one piece. I hope that this isn't tedious beyond the value of the subject, but what I wanted to say was important to me to get before an audience who might feel the same way:
I think of us in this group and in this tree business as a collection of hard-working people inside a house arguing and debating about all sorts of things and no one has looked out a window to see that the house is sliding toward a big hole.
Obviously, the real issue is outside, and we could comfortably stay talking and working until the moment the house tipped into the void, but we'd never notice the real problem without taking the time to look.
To me, in glancing out the window and suddenly being drawn up short in seeing the bigger picture; most of our architectural/designer/developer/construction players, in spite of their newly-found religious conversions, still don't really care about trees.
Maybe I'll get indignant responses from some, and maybe not because they’ll never read this page, but I often judge things by the old common sense rule of looking at what they do--rather than just what they say.
If I add up a lot of the things I've read in these forums, it seems to me we're all standing in the middle of a larger problem. We have common frustrations and shared dreams in the business of trees, and for what it's worth I'd like to mutter a bit. If it's a poor contribution, I'm sure you’ll all let me know and I'll correct my ways:
The View Outside
Architects and engineers chart the history of their professional successes by their proud and progressive taming and controlling of nature. For them, each of their disciplines and specialities share the same goals of stability and permanence in their projects, and they produce designs intended to endure and to defy the changes that nature demands.
Once these designs are established as a standards, codes, or common practices, most of them are reviewed, inspected, and enforced by those same authorities with no apparent need to ever re-examine their thinking or actions. The result is that professionals in both the design and the construction business are often preoccupied with their issues alone. They have been dismissive of other perspectives, or insensitive to aesthetic and environmental concerns, and so the larger living picture of their projects usually suffer.
For example, a great deal of attention and money goes into stabilizing and preparing the soils beneath and adjacent to buildings, roads, and other structures. For them, ignoring this practice would run the risk of negligence since the longevity and safety of their structures may be compromised. Stability to this group means the avoidance of physical changes through aggressive civil engineering practices.
However, we then surround and fill those same projects with living things, with landscapes and greenery to soften the structures and humanize the sites. These living things, by definition, are the embodiment of change; their growth requires change. It can't be any other way.
Yet, we indulge in the contradiction of taking these landscapes and the urban forests that are expected to grow and mature bountifully and placing them into engineered physical settings that are sterile, unforgiving, and intolerant of change. And, once having placed these two expectations in conflict, we are guaranteed costly and repeated corrective measures and constant maintenance for the presence of these visible "natural" enrichments in our cities.
If we spent the same amount of thinking, time, and money in "uncompacting" soils in sequences and areas of landscape construction as we do in compacting soils for structures, trees would think they've lived and gone to heaven. They would grow and flourish--and certainly be fewer topics of discussions in groups like ours as to trees being crippled, abused, and abandoned.
Landscape Mathematics
There is a powerful graphic equation here that we should pay attention to; it is a set of inverse or contradictory curves placed against a background of economic common-sense:
Structures begin to deteriorate from the moment they are finished; the value curve is downward.
Landscapes however, appreciate as they mature; their value curve is upward from the time they are planted. How ironic that present architectural and engineering thinking does not include the recognition and support of that inverse equation for sustainable beauty.
The long term survival of our parks, greenways, and urban forests require a reinvention of philosophies of design that can act in concert with the natural forces and cycles rather continue the prideful witlessness that we should overpower and subdue them. The lessons are very clear. The average life of a city tree has been estimated from 7 to 17 years by different researchers. How can green-oriented professionals like us quietly stand in the company of those statistics?
If pediatricians had signs in their offices saying that the average life of ,a patient was 10 years, there would be never be anyone in the waiting rooms.
If we choose to blame the early death of our trees on "urban environments," we must remember that we, in the larger sense, build those same lethal environments. As my favorite possum-philosopher, Pogo, once observed. "We have seen the enemy, and they is us."
No one is so naive to think that singularly natural settings can be created in the city, but we must move away from the hostile and sterile designs that are unchallenged and claim exclusive ownership of functions and budgets.
A Park Should Be More Like a Farm Than a Highway
In our society, buyers control markets. Standards are set by, and suppliers are obedient to the purchasers with the largest budgets. In this nation, road builders and civil engineers are those big-money determinants of what is specified and purchased. On those roads that connect cities of all sizes, in our cities, and in our parks and parkways, the architects and engineers define our surroundings in the rigidity of concrete and steel. They set the standards that fill the supply houses and prevent the consideration of alternatives.
In this palate of choices for architects and engineers, where is the color green?
I remember how naive I was in reviewing a spec. calling for Grade A Fill in a new park that was to be the bulk of the material laid beneath a veneer of some 8 inches of topsoil. I had asked for samples of all the specified materials and they were eventually delivered in a collection of plastic bags. The sack of grade A fill was a white gravel/stone with a distribution ranging from dust to 1/4 to 1/2 inch pieces. It was the most inhospitable, sterile, and clearly inconceivable material for growth that I could have considered, but it was the traditional, definitive and most-specified fill for an urban park.
Why does the delusion to use this material in a park still persist? In part,because it works under sidewalks and structures, and because it resist change, and because it is cheap, and because everybody does it, and because there is no pressure to change the attitude or the specification.
Simply saying that these parks survive, and it is therefore some measure of our brilliance and forethought, or the validation of our engineering; it is really the statement of the resilience of green things. We have shifted the burden of our shortsightedness to them and they will struggle with it for the rest of their lives.
Parks, in the largest sense--and parkways, boulevards, and holes in the sidewalks in the smaller configurations--must simply be designed from a different perspective than the discards and dismissals of civil engineers, architects and contractors. The infrastructure conflicts are created by us and we persist in keeping them:
One block away from me, the gas company cut in new trenches between the curbs and the trees in the parkway to run new lines. They also trenched back to each house for their new services. These trees, magnificent silver maples about 75 years old that stretch over the street in the most beautiful of canopies, are now root pruned to a depth of 6 feet and a width of 4 feet on three sides. The trenches have been refilled, the cut sidewalks promptly repaired, and new sod quickly thrown down. There are now no clues as to the destruction and the implication of shortened lives for those trees.
"Waddaya talkin’ about, it looks fine to me," will be expected response of anyone considering my complaint. "Waddaya nuts?" will be the thoughts of many who are asked to stretch their minds and understand what trees need to live and how we have failed them here.
Four blocks away from me, the sidewalks on a main street have been cut for long planters and tree pits in my city"s renaissance of greendom. The sidewalks are typically 4 inches thick and rest on the traditional bed of sand and grade-A-fill. So, those new landscape holes and slots have been routinely compacted just as if they were to receive a sidewalk. Yes, at some point, the holes will be filled with topsoil, but only to the only possible depth of 4 inches, and the new trees or landscape materials will then be stuffed inside them.
The new street beautifications will look good at first because we buy the plants live rather than dead. And there will be a flurry of citizen delight--which I welcome as someone who believes in the greening of our cities. But the landscapes will probably not survive. The plantings will succumb to road salt, the lack of water, the alkaline fill beneath them, and the cumulative cruelties provided by any city. So it would seem it's just a matter of time.
I once photographed the exposed cross section of a median on a large street with a row of trees planted down the middle. The tree balls at this section were suspended in gravel with a layer of soil above and a hearty glop of mulch. Even if those trees could extend a few feeble roots into the fill, where could they go? The entire street profile and the new planters were designed by traffic engineers to other standards; well-drained, stable, immovable, unchanging; nothing organic was allowed in the drawings besides the balls, with their little squares of topsoil and mulch.
It was quite obvious what the engineering priorities were, and that only those priorities existed, so the trees would have to fight to survive. I stopped photographing that site three years ago, after the third replacement trees proved to me that no magic would intervene. I also appear to have been the only one to have learned that lesson since there now is another set of replacement trees.
If we would like to move our activities from talking about things as small individual voices to the world of making a difference and being part of the solution, someone has to look out the window. Or better yet, all of us should should look outside, and all of us should say something to the ones who control the settings and the lives of our trees.
I had the good fortune to attend the first annual meeting of the Student Society of Arboriculture last month. It was filled with young people who were energetic, concerned about ethics, and still held the joy of learning. Anyone of them, I'm sure, would stick their head out the window just out of youthful curiosity. I hope they'll be active and righteous--and noisy--about what they see.
I don't quite care how it happens, but we all have to be a louder voice to change things for trees.
Bob Wulkowicz ©
• Next in thread: konomos@doitnow.com: "Re: 2. We have seen the
enemy and they is us." 4of4
-------------------------
The post written above in 1997 was what I thought was important; and all the others who wrote then as well are now gone. The ISA threw us away and never even bothered to tell us; never bothered to ask.
The ISA claims to be responsible for the many issues of trees. I don't understand where history, heritage, shared education. commentary, and simple respect for authors on the invited ISA forums gets dismissed as if it were none of our business.
The words in these forums here are your words. An author of one post or six thousand on Treebuzz have the same rights of ownership and expectation of respect.
PS: As a BTW, It's my birthday. And my present to myself, will be not to give up in the face of a short-sighted bureaucracy. As a start, what did it cost to maintain those forums?
Bob Wulkowicz ©
