It's been a trend in my town to cut down shade giving trees because their leaves are too much maintenance to clean. When in reality they don't want to pay someone to use a leaf blower for 20 minutes.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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I keep wondering why we don't see more of this.
IMO, planting trees is the most obvious and basic response to climate change. Literally what they evolved to do is to remove carbon compounds from the atmosphere.
They're not going to solve the problem alone, but they're such an obvious benefit, and planting them is something every community and even every individual can do right now.
Interestingly, in places with light coloured dirt/grass/cement planting trees decreases the albedo and increases warming of the Earth
Most people hate or are ambivalent to trees. It’s pretty shocking. If you ask them, they’ll say they love trees but offer to plant one on their property or in their park and you’ll soon see why there aren’t more trees in cities. The primary reason is many people kill them or fight against planting them in the first place.
They don't hate trees; they're too lazy to deal with the leaf litter and don't want to leave it where it falls.
Probably a lot of it is the long term maintenance involved with trees. Both at a personal and municipal level.
We recently had a tornado touch down in a place that doesn’t normally get them, and we lost a lot of really big old trees, some planted long before the roads were paved the first time, and that did a ton of damage to the infrastructure, as well as just sucking in general for all the damage they did to houses. And insurance companies were.. not super great.
Additionally, there is a need to do regular maintenance to keep clear power lines and such, clean up leaves, trim branches, whatever else, making it less attractive financially/time wise, even though it would increase wellbeing all around.
I don’t see that as a particularly valid reason, personally.. there’s a park, about an acre and a half, in the middle of the boring part of my town that was put in a few years back as a veteran memorial because the land is otherwise pretty worthless (with the stupid way we have set society up - it’s actually incredibly valuable real-estate for microshops in a human-centric design). Nobody ever goes to it, because there’s no shade, despite the lovely expensive granite benches, and its central location. The town doesn’t want to pay to maintain more trees, because we already have a lot of them in other, bigger (thus more localized) parks. If they put 2-5 strategically-selected-and-placed trees in now, along with a water retention soil amendment to avoid watering, it would be a nice little local green space park people would walk to in as little as a decade, but they haven’t planted anything but non-native bulb-type flowers that even our pollinators don’t like, so nobody will ever use it. I wouldn’t mind paying more in tax to responsibly green up the area, but they don’t even want to bother trying.
Same with towns/neighborhoods with no trees, they tend to kinda suck to be in. I can’t imagine not having trees in my yard, or immediately around my place if I was renting (I used to rent a place with like 6 big shade trees around the buildings, that was nice). I’d plant some if they weren’t already there, tho I’m adding 4 more to my tiny lot as soon as the easement is nullified! Free food trees (apple, plum, and pear) yeah! But my big tree will -absolutely- wipe out my house if it comes down in a storm, it’s a 150yo oak about 10 feet from the side of my house. The absolute best case scenario if it comes down.. is it splits in half and only takes out the front room and living room (empty rooms at night). I’m leaving it, despite having damage because of it that tornado, but I understand my neighbors taking theirs down when they lost a big branch and had to deal with home damage. And I get not planting new ones after that, tho I disagree with it.
My town has some massive trees that I swear drop the temp under them what feels like 5-10 degrees. It could be a sweltering hot day and it’s still lovely under them.
The temperature difference between streets in our neighborhood that have trees and those that don't is eye-opening. Even more so with parks. Trees create such a pleasant micro-climate.