>> good morning and welcome to the new york botanical gardens. this is our special friday morning science conservation and humanity seminars. i also welcome you this morning very heartily from my cohost, brian and charles. my name is vanessa sellers. i'm the coordinator of the humanities institute, a special research division in the library set up to stimulate critical thinking at the intersection of science and the humanities. and what better subject than urban forests to bring science and humanities together? to discuss science and society, to study the deeper relationship that people have always had with trees through the ages, as meeting points, as object of the light, as places of peace and well-being. and everyone here i am sure will have their own favorite tree. think about your favorite tree for a minute. what better place than the new york botanical garden to speak of urban forests, famous as this place is, for its unique 50 acres time forest, the old growth forest, the last remnant of the 17th century woodlands that once blanketed this whole area, this region along the east coast. it's the same words where the indians hunted with some of the very trees standing. this force is also the reason why the botanical garden was created here in the first place in the middle of the bronx. and what better person, what better person really to speak about the wide-ranging natural history of the tree in american cities than our speaker of the day, jill jonnes? now living in baltimore, she lived in newark city and she went through the columbia university school of journalism, and ever since she has been a journalist and also an author writing very extreme interesting and inspiring books. i'm going to hold the new one ready. among which "conquering gotham," "empires of light" and "south bronx rising." she was named the national endowment for the humanities scholar, and of interest to us here at the new york botanical garden especially as of course she is also the founder of the baltimore tree trust. well, what more is there to say? please help me in welcoming jill jonnes. [applause] >> and here's the book, by the way. >> well, thank you so much, vanessa. it's such an honor to be here and also just to say thank you again to the many people here at the garden over and currently helpful to me as i was working on this book over many years. one other thing i would like to say about my background since i am amid so many scholars is also do have a phd and american history. and that has been really what informed many of my books. so one thing i realized i didn't find out is which way should i be pressing this to go forward? this y.? okay. spirit first you have to put it on. >> all right. so "urban forests", many people say what is that? it seems like an oxymoron. and this is really the answer. i'm guessing many of you here would know that but since most people have never heard of the concept of an armored force, and that is fille honestly what i we this book because i feel like it's so important to our kind of future as citizens are largely living in cities. you see trees, park trees, private property. this really all got going, and again i would imagine many of you with andrew jackson downing. he was sort of america's original horticulturalist or public horticulturalist end-user acted before the civil war, the 1830s and 40s, extremely influential editor of the ultra- cultural. so i will read you what he had to say. if our ancestors found an answer to cut down vast forests, it is all the more needful that their descendents should 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, and you can see this terrible looking straight in baltimore which i think is as the country began to organize, this was very much an issue. such think were were having a bit of a problem with the mic. you want a closer, okay. sorry about that. so for downing, nothing better epitomized what a town or city with the tree should look like then new england towns like new haven. this is after the civil war but you can see these trees have been in the ground for a long time. unfortunately because downing was such a proselytizer for urban trees, he died at quite a young age, 36, in 1852. so before the civil war during a terrible steamboat accident on the hudson. after the civil war, a whole new group of tree evangelist emerged as a very famous charles sargent, the ultimate boston brahmin who created harvard auditorium in 1872 and was it very autocratic head for about 50 years. he wrote many important multivolume works about american tree species and taxonomy. i'll read you something you wrote that one of the sort of charms and a guest frustrations of being part of the tree world is how much things don't change drastically are. this is what he wrote in 1897, this lament about americans that they suffer quote and pigments with regard to the true beauty and value of native trees which appears to be peculiar to us as a nation. if you are looking at sergeant in this photo you notice is in front of most non-native japanese ornamental cherry, and actually one of the big goals or omissions of the arboretum was to send plant explodes all over the world but especially to asia to bring back plants that could be introduced to american landscapes. it's sort of an odd lament but also very au courant here below is john davey. any of you who know that davey tree expert company, this is the man who invented it and 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 canton ohio in 188282 and as a young man he taught himself to read and write. he was a really extraordinary person and very passionate. so he became superintendent of standing rock cemetery in can't what he so rejuvenated the trees that he became known as the tree doctor. and it's on reaction to what was going on in america, the city trees, was quote appalled at the census ways of trees. they retreated almost like an enemy that had to be destroyed. as for sick trees the attitude was all plants die, so what's different about a tree? and then his other big bugaboo if you look to the right, trees that were trimmed were made to look like hat racks by local butchers. this is all about utilities and this is a fight that goes on to this day where you drive down the road and people have just hacked at trees and invariably they been hired by the local utility. davey was a visionary who invented the care of trees and he wrote this wonderful book called the tree doctor which is very blog like. he trained himself to be traffic photographer. he would go it and take a photo to make a point and write these very sort of comment. one of his big laments was just the failure to properly plant trees and care for them. one of his essays was a calamity of cleveland, which is all about how they just had messed up. and then the next person who was a significant force in making people think about trees and plant trees was j sterling morton. he invented arbor day in a basket 1872 as a as a treeplanting holiday really never went anywhere and tell 1882 in cincinnati when the local school superintendent, a man named john peasley, rebranded it as a school children's holiday at the first meeting of the american force to congress which is trying to something about the clearcutting of all the sort of forest. what you see is eden park with 8000 schoolchildren planting trees. and they initiated it at the time something called the presidential growth which goes on to this day. i went to visit it, and interestingly the one the president whose trees they could never keep alive was richard nixon. [laughing] i think there on about the fourth tree. the rest of them, and asked when i last talked to the person, i said what's obama getting? he said we don't know yet. he has to let us know. so one of the things that was unique about arbor day, in morton's opinion, he said it was a very american holiday because arbor day looks forward, devoted to the happiness and prosperity of the future. so it was an optimistic way of looking at the world. so the other person i like to include is a liza sycamore was an amazing victorian author, a foreign correspondent, traveled widely and in 1885 her brother was assigned to yokohama as a u.s. consul. so she to visit him just in time for the japanese cherry blossom festival. which she had never seen. remember, america doesn't have japanese ornamental cheers except for the rare want at a place like the arnold arboretum. just give an idea of how she felt about cherry trees, i'll read you a bit of what she had to write. in the april sunshine, better still by moonlight, and best of all by the poets pale. light of dawn, the blooming cherry tree is the most ideally, wonderfully beautiful tree that nature has to show, and it's short-lived glory makes the enjoyment more keen and poignant. so having experienced the bliss of cherry trees and the festivals, she returned to washington and the proposed that washington beautify a very raw stretch of land along the potomac by planting it with hundreds if not thousands of japanese cherry trees. so this happened to be the bailiwick of a federal superintendent of public buildings and grounds, this person was always a west point graduate and always a civil engineer appointed a new by each president. so she went first in 1885, armed with these photos that were painted, and was received with absolute indifference. so she got nowhere but you'll see this did not stop her. so the whole treeplanting movement really was embraced. cities really began planting trees. i would say that teddy roosevelt was far and away our most tree loving president, and everywhere he went he planted a tree. so this is him in fort worth in 1905 planting and arbor day tree. you can see kids are looking out. and two years later he actually issued and arbor day address to the schoolchildren of the united states in which he had to say, in small part, to exist as a nation, to prosper as a state and to live as a people, we must have trees. so i mean, part of the treeplanting was really part and parcel of the larger progressive era city beautiful movement. and you can see what it meant in cities suddenly have trees. the other part of this, why did people embrace this, why were city officials very enthused to be planting trees, because trees also reviewed serving a quite important aspect of public health. there was no air-conditioning in the cities are hot and the trees are one of the few ways in which you can really bring down the temperature. the other thing is cities are full of horses and wandering pigs and chickens, and to all of the droppings are then drawing and going up into the air. the trees also really help you sort of absorbed and settle the dust, which is not a healthy thing to be inhaling or briefing. so trees, city health commissioners, doctors, i mean, they view to trees is something you want to have around as a way to kind of mitigate the environmental hazards. so you notice here that cherry trees have arrived in washington. if you look at the date, 1925. look at the size of the trees, there may be te ten or 12 years old. remember, eliza scidmore began in 1885 promoting this vision. and she got nowhere until 1909 wendy taft administration came in, and first lady had been in japan and became her ally. in fact, there was an original shipment of, by this time the japanese government was very on board and they had go to all these thousands of cherry trees and sent them, whereupon they became enmeshed in this political feud which i described in my book. the first 2000 trees that the trees were burned publicly on the grant of the washington monument. the japanese were very good-natured about it. they said you have a history of destroying cherry trees. george washington, didn't he do that? [laughing] 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 consequence. it often takes a very long time. in this case eliza scidmore, 27 years. so i just say that to encourage people to get involved in this. the other thing is that tree time is effective at the of the kinds of times as everyone here knows, very long. so again trees really were embraced, and after world war i, 117,000 young americans had died and so the american forest green association, the same group that you saw for 1882 and arbor day, with the proposed, it was these young men, two young women who had been lost to the war, that the honor with memorial tree plantings, and they were sort of stunned at the way this swept the nation. to a great extent, these memorials have been forgotten. but if you look back you will find that there are a lot of trees planted all over your city for this. and american forestry at this to say about that. the trees will mark the remaking of the cities just as those men marked the remaking of the world. so even as we're having this are a successful treat evangelism, the cities were getting planted up, we're also having our first great eco- disaster which is the loss of the american chestnut. since i garden i wanted to show this picture of william alonso mural because he was here and he was the man who identified the chestnut blight and he became actually quite famous for that because he also was the very rare voice telling all these distressed politicians and tree lovers that essentially there was no point of spending any money trying to contain the chestnut blight because it was a winborn -- windborne fungus. you have a very healthy to jamaican chestnut, in fact on these grounds there were 2000 very mature american chestnuts,, and they were gone within a few years. it was really extraordinary. you don't think of american chestnuts as city trees, but actually the parks in its range which was sort of really somewhat north of new york and then down into the appellations, all of these cities, philadelphia, new york, baltimore, washington, were filled with chestnuts. and so it was a really significant loss, especially in the woods. it was kind of a keystone species. interesting fellow, he diagnose the blight in 1905. he continued to be quite a force or at the. he often ran the new york botanical garden when nathaniel britton was off doing other things. and you see his affair with one of his many collections. he referred to himself as a naturalist in his memoir. somehow after world war i he kind of went off the rails, got fired and disappeared down to florida, where he was kind of rediscovered by some of his fellow my colleges who put them in a little corner office summer at the university of florida and he devoted his life to the mycology of florida. and then writing this memoir which was quite fascinating. in any case, again, american cities were planted up but mainly planted up with american elms because they're so much the perfect tree they could take any abuse. you see they come up really high so they're not interfering with the traffic and everything else. but this, you also see how incredibly beautiful they are. i am proud, i took this photo, but i took it in sacramento with the blight arrived quite late and they were able to save a lot of the trees by injecting them. so just how do people think about the elms? when you came into any town, just a citizen writing, the landscape changed your you entered into this kind of forest with 100-foot arches. the shadows change. everything seemed very reverent. there was a certain serenity, a certain calmness. then as the elms came down you would start to notice the severity of things. and actually before i vanished that i want to point out that many cities and villages had these elms that were historic and had all kinds of emotional historical residence for people. so this was considered the biggest elk in america after world war ii, dutch elm shows up in the 1930s and works its way west to the west coast. it arrives in california in the '70s. so you see there was a lot of monocle planting, and when it went, i'll read you what people were saying. as the elms came down you start to notice the severity of things. the wires, the utility poles, the cracks in the hot pavement which no longer was based in shadows. -- based. so this is unlike the american chestnut, which was largely confined to the southeast, i mean, chestnuts without street trees. the american elm really was the ultimate street tree, and there were loads of them in the parks, too. so their loss was just really significant. and it happened in many places even as the cities themselves were really having troubles, meaning that you would be getting to have everyone moved to the suburbs here cities just didn't have the financing that they needed, and so as you lost these trees and as the reason for trees, the historic reason for trees had kind of disappeared, meaning you now had air conditioning and you know that modern medicine, so what was it that you are going to say to city managers at a time of great financial stringency, like why should they plant trees? so there's this kind of nice circle of life which is 100 years after the first cincinnati fourth street conference. there is another one but this one is really devoted to urban forestry and this issue of how do we replant the cities and with what and how do we persuade people that want to do this? so this man, rowan rowntree, is a scientist with the u.s. forest service, his site is or then embed it in universities. they kind of have a foot in both camps. he really realized that we actually knew nothing about urban forests. when you compare to what you knew about a force which is harvested for timber, and that we're going to need to know many things about urban force in order to persuade this new generation of mayors and city managers that these were not simply ornaments. so he was really setting out to answer very basic questions like what was a tree or a whole urban force with what's what was the character of the whole urban force, like what percentage of it had been elms or oak? did trees really clean the air and how much? how much money did they say in energy costs? how much storm water might an oak tree absorb? so these were very basic questions which no one had any answers to. at the same conference, so this conference was really interesting. everyone who was really influential going forward in urban force tree wasn't there. and andy lucas was also very influential because he was an entirely new kind of tree lover. he was not a professional forester like someone, like rowan rowntree. he was a charismatic baby boomer flower child. he fell in love with tree plant at age 15 out in california and unlike i have to say for the forces, he distinctly understood how to cast trees and tree planting is hip. a claim is way to heal cities, and he really understood marketing. i mean, he had been on johnny carson and the talk shows. and treepeople, which he started, would serve as really high and influential grassroots model which all of his trees at the sikh groups which exist in american cities to this day, i mean, really are modeled on treepeople. and he remains a very visionary person who has moved on to doing, i mean, trees are so -- still central to what he thinks but usually thinking in terms of how do you actually retrofit cities with nature works so in the early 1990s, many cities including chicago were being told by the epa that they had to clean up their air. and the second mayor, richard in chicago, was a huge tree lover. he was born on arbor day, and you looked at the person who planted trees in his seat and said, don't trees clean the air, as in why don't we just saw this problem with a lot of trees? and he said well, we really don't have the science to answer that, though someone is starting to do that. so the mayor got $1 million and rowan rowntree sent his two major protéges, rick mcpherson and david nowak to chicago to begin to do really the foundational science and the issues what became known as the chicago urban force climate project, climate project report and what you're trying to do is really figure out how you determine the value of the so-called ecosystem services, this business of how much energy is saved, how much storm water mitigated. i should say, they were very disappointed in what happened in chicago which was the issued their report. they were able to really quantify a lot of the benefits and put them into dollars, and nothing happened. for whatever reason, john daly and is very powerful kind of pr machine and government just did not go anywhere with it. but they just kept on working, and i was amazed to find this out very late in the game that part of what was into in this was literally counting the leaves on a lot of trees. so let's see, they were doing all standard street tree data for 16 american reference cities, and he had a scientific partner, ecologist paula when she was a key and answering the significant question which was the leaf area index on urban trees. so over two years she and various helpers stripped the leaves off the canopies of almost 100 mature specimens of 14 common species of urban trees, one of which is the often maligned bradford pear. so this is the answer. there were almost 90,000 trees. so pepper said to be the first couple of years i have permanently sore thumbs. i really hate cherry trees. they did not want to get rid of their leaves. an oak trees, it is phenomenal the number of leaves an oak tree house. but they needed to know this because they needed to know the services that any one kind of these species performed. and so pepper was a person who was leading teams in reference cities as a collective 30 pieces of data. what they would do is they would target a thousand street trees of the field kind of a good sample size, and then they would use those to develop this science and technology for more sophisticated analysis of the benefits. so in march of 2005, fiona watts, many of you know was head of forestry, and she asked mcpherson and pepper if they would use queens as their reference city for the northeast. so pepper came your and the force or division had just done this tree inventory of all the cities, six oh thousand street trees. but remember that pepper and mcpherson, the u.s. for street scientists were just planning to focus on queens. but then they said why don't you figure out the benefits not just for queens but all of the 600,000 street trees? a realized that this could be really really important because fiona would actually would go to town with us. so in april of 2007, they issued their full municipal forestry resource analysis for all five boroughs and had been using a tree team to help really make sure that they inventory information was correct. the whole point of what rowan rowntree had set out to do back in 1982, and again with now looking quite a bit, quite a few years later, was really to be able to quantify the benefits of trees and chance like them into dollars. and why we do this? because you really wanted to change and affect public policy and terms of how you thought about urban trees, how you could be strategic about using this data and how they could get incorporated so the trees were not always an afterthought, but actually an integral part of what was going on with planning for cities. so this is some of what they found. new york city street trees annually save roughly $28 million or about $47 per tree. air pollution each street tree removed an average of 1.73 pounds of air pollutants, benefit of about nine dollars per tree. that totaled 5 million. street trees reduced storm water runoff by nearly 900 million gallons saving the city early 6 million that it otherwise would need to spend to sort of fortified its stormwater system. so the average street tree intercepted 1432 gallons worth $61 a tree. that made quite an impression on city managers. then there were these collected other benefits which were aesthetics, increase property values, economic activity and reduced human stress. so it is emerged as you go around trees your levels come down and this has quite significant applications for public health. so this was all estimated at about $90 a tree, or 52 million. so the bottom line, now trees at the bottom line, wasn't street trees in new york were delivering $122 million in benefits for about $210 a tree. the parks and for street officials received about $8 million a year to plant and can street trees and then they were also allocated another 6.3 million to pay personal. so in the benefit of all these street trees, remember this is just the street trees, was an impressive 100 million. so for every dollar that you spent on a new york city street tree it was generating $5.60 in benefits. and there was also a huge amounts of other information that was useful in terms of the london planes were 15 15% of stt trees, the norway maples were 12, pears, 11, honey locust, nine, ten oaks eight. almost a quart of the street trees were some right of maples. that allow you to think strategically about as move forward and the plant whatever going to plant next one of greg mcpherson graduate students was amending scott and his job was to figure out how to create software that would enable urban forrester was an city officials to use this information via software and so in 2006, i should say he gave up doing a phd and went and joined the navy trees because david trees is still with us and they are still very much sort of a visionary company in that they saw the importance of this. of course their self-interest in this. davey trees is a tree company. the more people who know about trees, the more they want to plant trees and this is good for davey trees. but nonetheless this is something they do. the force service we all know could never run a software public domain site and also be constantly updating and improving and expanding the range of software that you see here. and interestingly if you go on this site you can see all the places that make use of this software, and it's really all over the world. so there was a really significant consequence to this report to mayor bloomberg who was a very data-driven mayor, which was that he decided to quadruple the four street budget, and he launched 1 billion trees nyc. what you here is the first planting. so it was 1 million trees nyc, nonprofit partner was bette midler new york preservation project and she is to the right of the mayor. so one of things about the new restoration project i came up in numerous times to report on million trees nyc is it, anything to do always involves celebrities to make it more glamorous. and you see that ultimate celebrity that bird coming in behind the cast of wicked in their t-shirts. so finally, really this new tree science is really nothing public policy in a significant way. people often ask me since my book came out i done a lot of talks and people asked me, where is the city that really got it right? no one would ever expect it to be new york but i think new york is really a template at how you use this new tree science and how you move forward with really restoring the urban forest. as far as i know they are unique and actually having planted and million trees, and they did it, finished it a couple years early. now, honestly many of those trees are dead or not the street tree so much but the ones in the parks because as you see they are fairly small trees. i do think many of them were watered. even if a third of the trees survive and grow out in the park in the woods, that truly monumental. and the scale of how much they had to ramp up, even planting about 10,000 trees a year year so they went from 10,000 to 100,000 very, very impressive. and the other thing that they did was they started by targeting poor neighborhoods. and i should say, so vanessa mention i started the baltimore tree trust, and i was so impressed by that when he went back to baltimore and i had no experience at any of this at all but i, the woman who started casey trees in washington actually lives in baltimore, and she was very helpful. but from the beginning we always presented trees as living green infrastructure. so we were completely embracing this very different concept that it's not the trees were ornamental, but that is for most people what they find wonderful and joyful about them, but these are living public utilities who are doing a lot of things as civil servants who deserve to be invested in. so this is, you know, very typical of what you see, which is inner cities with just not anywhere close to enough trees. in baltimore the whole thing is a harbor, and all of our neighborhoods, when you have a big storm and everything goes in, it washes out there and actually the very famous trash wheel which kind of goes like this in the trash goes into it. it has a huge twitter following because he really document with defined in the trash, some of which is quite odd. so the other thing is, all this technology, all these mapping abilities, things have changed so much what we know about the world, how we interact with the world. and so when this whole kind of bad for million trees program came up, la embraced it. but unlike new york, sort of a wishful thinking. the first thing if it is, they said to greg mcpherson was out at uc davis, maybe you could come down and map l.a. so can find out where we can plant trees. so we did that for the very first time and they said do it by counsel mandated district so we can get the politician interested. when they did that what they found, no surprise, is well there had 47% tree canopy in south-central had had about six. people never cared about trees suddenly were interested, and it really highlighted i can sum it windows intuitively which is trees are markers of affluence and if people have a choice and the money, they live surrounded by trees. so we do have kind of almost on thought about relationship with trees where we understand that importance to us and we seek to be surrounded by them. so we had the same thing done in baltimore with exact same result. this district one which has a 6% tree canopy, that is where we largely work in the watershed although i should say harris creek is not been seen since 1880 when it was put in a pipe. all you see is when the water comes out into the harbor full of terrible stuff. so again, everyone loves to plant trees, and this is mcelderry park, and one of the reason they love to plant trees is because when you start it looks like this and when you finish it looks like that. one of the most interesting things to me as i was coming to the end of working on this book is that what is really emerging i think as the most persuasive reasons that cities should be retrofitting themselves, not just with trees but really with the nature in a larger sense, it's, don't just have a tree pit. take out something much more than that, is because of the emerging science of the importance of trees in human health. you find that when you have trees, again, to some extent this must come down to the lowering of the cortisone levels but there's just more committee involvement. that can be as simple as a fact people want to be outside with the trees. there's less domestic violence. there's less crime. you can figure out all the reason for that, but that more, so when people walk out the door, they don't look at the tree and think i'm so glad you are saving me one dollar in my taxes on storm water. they are thinking, history is really beautiful, and they are feeling the effects of it. there's a forest service economist named jeffrey donovan who is done, he's been working on this public health part of things, and again this is all but data set and mapping. he was able to look in portland oregon where the pregnant women were living, where the trees were and what the birth outcome was. what they saw, more trees, closer to pregnant women, better birth outcome. which has a real significance for your life trajectory. he was very surprised by this and very skeptical. i kept on thinking about how could you look at this, the way. it and it's been if you know the emil ashmore is among us in 35 states and arrived first in the midwest. has been wiping out hundreds of millions of the trees. so again big data sets, more mortality sets. he took that for 16 counties out in the midwest and look at trees lost and morbidity and mortality and could track that there were more deaths than you would expect at an earlier age both respiratory reasons and cardiovascular reasons, and two in the most affluent counties with the greatest of of trees pixley has this line can trees are a matter of life and death. but i think that we are in very early days with the kind of research but i think that's what it's going to and asked that piles up i think you'll see even more reasons to plant trees. this is where i leave you. this was again our tree group starting in arbor day, a very tiny holiday these days compared to what it once was. you don't have 8000 children anymore. i think it's been superseded by earth day, but we in a tree planting world still like to hold onto it. so thank you very much. again, it's really an order to be at the new york botanical garden. and also because new york has done such an amazing job and such a leader in urban forestry thank you. [applause] >> okay. so i had the system that ever since my friend lucy, i saw her do this, one man one woman. we were start with the woman in the back. >> i was just wondering if you anything to say about that kind of the trends towards like edible urban forest or you give any comments about that? >> i did a lot of reporting and research for this book that never made it into the book, and one was to go around and look into that. i think it's a very beguiling idea, but as anyone who has been involved in urban orchards will tell you, the big problem is putting these trees somewhere where they will be cared for by someone who knows something, and where the fruits will actually get picked and be used. so as i say i think it's just completely enchanting. in baltimore we have the baltimore orchard project, but everyone who does it, it is a real challenge because they're sort of the initial installment, then -- enthronement, then the neglect. i went around with the very nation man in boston and what they're doing is they would only plant trees sort of an institution places like historic houses where there would be someone there who was committed to taking care of it. but as you know, people will commit to take care of things and then two years later the grant and o are different people are running things. the trees are still there. love the idea. sort of the sustaining of it i think is really hard. and plenty them in schools is insane because of course trees tend to have the fruit in the summer when you are not students there. yes? [inaudible] >> thank you. that's a big help. you said that nyc trees save $200 million per tree, and 122 mowing dollars total for all of the five boroughs. is that over the lifetime of the trees or over -- >> per year spirit so $122 company $200 million per treat for you, $122 million total per dollars total per year? >> yell stupid and that is water services, air quality and speed days so there is a $90 which is a combination of aesthetics, real estate values, you're wondering like how did all that -- >> i can't ask about that in this lecture but who did the study? >> so this was done by greg mcpherson and i believe -- >> okay. perfect. >> and i think if you go on to, there's some parks department people here. i believe if you go into the new york city parks department website for forestry, that is a lot of information there and you may well be able to find that, or just put in, google greg mcpherson and i can give you the title of it again. >> now we are ready for a woman. there she is. >> are there any realistic plans being developed or maintenance for trees in the city? planting and so on is so important but to me it seems, how can we work that plan and so they are maintained? >> so the street trees have very strict maintenance plans and requirements. i think once you get into the parks or you are going onto private, a significant portion of these trees were planted on private property. and i went to some of these events and then i went back several years later. so for instance, nonprivate property but a public park was inwood hill park, and i went to that and i was told that this had been really requested by the neighborhood because that been a lot of partying going up there. i went back four years later. a lot of those trees apparently had been pulled up other people who still wanted to party. they had been replanted. and i would just guess that maybe 30-40% of the trees that had been planted had survived. and they felt like that's an acceptable number. i also went out, i'm trying to remember the name, i went way, the total end of the line on a queens subway to -- what was the name of that? it was a college. it done a bunch of tree planting. of course the college that's what they would take care of these trees. i went around and were pretty much dead or gone. this is the eternal problem. if someone says were going to take care something, you have to accept that, and that really constituted almost being on private property because that college is responsible for that. so it's very variable and there is, you can be trained as a tree steward. i think right now, who is that tree trust person who is here? right behind you. do you want to say anything about that, the tree stewards? just take -- >> absolute. so i come on the new york city parks website there's a section dedicated towards stewardship of street trees as well as volunteering to care for these plantings, which were planted 4 million trees and the opportunity for folks to become a trained as stewards and to participate and trained in events. there's definitely an opportunity, but i think it's fair to acknowledge that if you planted 1 million trees, even though there are 8.59 people who live here, it's difficult -- 8.5 million -- it's difficult to mobilize the number of people you need. >> so there's your answer, okay. >> go ahead. >> sort of a follow-up. in all of this number crunching there would be the devils advocate that says what about the cost of the maintenance of these trees and the destruction of trees, sidewalk damage, wind damage, storm, etc. etc.? i imagine those numbers don't include the of the costs of -- >> that's a very well, you know, a very well, point well taken. so i have come, this may sound rather odd, to think for me the analogy with trees is cars, which is, cars inflict all kinds of terrible damage, both to people, to property, to the world, and yet we would never say oh, that car blew a tire and injured someone and therefore we are going to ban all cars, or no cars can be allowed to come down the street again. and yet if a tree drops a branch out of the blue and inflicts terrible damage, i.e., someone can be badly injured or killed, often the reaction is we have to cut down all these trees, or there shouldn't be any trees here, which, i mean, there are costs to having things, physical things in the world. i really began to think of trees in that way, and i like to hope that that is helpful to people to come to put things in context. >> i completely agree. it's just that i always think when the number crunchers start only looking at numbers, that is, the actuary doesn't care about the human part. it's always those arguments i think probably the better argument is as you ended, they are beautiful. the homeowner is not thinking i'm saving a dollar. >> they do think about, you do notice the energy part of it. if you're the big tree, you really, really feel it when summer comes. what he do think your point is very well taken about well, there's a downside to trees and how does that factor in. all right, we are now ready for a woman. i think we have one last question. okay. you will need the microphone. >> what cost can you put on the ecological impacts of planting these trees? >> i have no idea. what of the reasons that, well, so the callery pear, the norway maple, they were all brought in because they are incredibly top and they were viewed for quite a long time as successful street trees, although the callery pear left because begin to fall apart and drop branches on trees and people. but the norway maple just turns out to be highly invasive. it seemed to take quite a long time for these trees to gather their strength and mobilize and move out to conquer the world. so, i mean, that's a good question and really don't know the answer. i never try and present myself as an expert on trees because it is very complicated, vast world, and i'm not an arborist i've just done my best to bring this story to the pages because i just think urban forests are so important, and i think i alluded to this before. i started off feeling like well, we just need to make many more trees and will have many benefits. at the time i finish this i realized no, cities are way too paved over and believe what we need to do is be rethinking cities, holding up pavement at essentially retrofitting cities with nature, both to mitigate all this storm water and also all the other reasons that even cited in this talk. that in many ways the south andy lipkis has been spent his last couple of decades is working with l.a. which is committed to this vision. but, i mean, realistically probably will take many many many many decades to see it in any major wide way. i think i've used up all my time. thank you. [applause] spirit i would like to thank jill jonnes for a wonderful, inspiring lecture at also, i read it, though book. i made a lot of note. it's very worthwhile to read. the amazing about this book is that it's both an expert overview as well as exceptionally readable, and that's why -- >> that's my goal spirit that combination doesn't always happen but here it is. if there are more questions please come forward. jill jonnes will be here for a while to gladly answer -- >> i'm in no rush to go anywhere and honestly i truly have done this as a labor of love and because i just feel that urban forest are so important. they really are the new green infrastructure, or should be for our cities. i'm sort of proselytizing to the people who already have the notes but i'd like to think that you would give this to people who sort of are aware of treatment should be more aware of trees. >> we will be known from this day forward as the tree store. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> this is a booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here's our primetime lineup. tonight starting at 7:30 p.m. eastern. >> here's a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. and now on booktv, arthur and humorist dave barry on "in depth" from books and books in coral gables, florida. dave barry is the author of 30 books including "dave barry slept here," dave barry hits below the beltway and most recently," best. state. ever." a florida man defend his homeland. >> host: let's begin with where you begin in your book "dave barry slept here," what is wrong with the state of

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