Tree Speech

During their fight to defeat a stronger tree ordinance, developers duped the Express-News into publishing an op-ed piece entitled Does city know our tree canopy ranks No. 1?  In it, they claim that San Antonio’s tree canopy “ranks first among the nation’s 50 largest cities”.

The only problem is, San Antonio is definitely not #1; their claim is false. In what could generously be characterized as poor research, the authors pulled numbers from various studies that were in no way comparable, and used them to reach a wildly incorrect conclusion.

For example, they claimed we have greater tree canopy cover than Atlanta. But if you compare tree canopy measurements made using comparable technologies, San Antonio has only 18% canopy vs. Atlanta’s 29%.

The University of Vermont’s Spatial Analysis Laboratory blogged on this topic in a recent post titled Did the Land Cover Change?  It seems the City of Roanoke, Virginia is claiming that its tree canopy increased from 32% to 48% in only 8 years! Here too, an incorrect conclusion was drawn. As the blogger points out:

The bottom line is that using land cover datasets derived from different sensors using different methodologies to report change yields misleading information.

While this may seem to be an innocent mistake on developers part, it should be pointed out that this very issue has been hashed out in numerous public meetings. Experts on the subject have explained it ad nauseum, repeatedly emphasizing that measurements made from a satellite 450 miles above the earth cannot be compared with measurements taken from an airplane flying close to the ground. Despite that, developers continue to mislead the public and our elected officials.

Way back in 1951, some Californians built a giant bowling ball and used it to clear-cut forests surrounding the Flathead River near Glacier National Park. To the writers at Mechanics Today magazine “Bowling Ball Lumbering“, which could “topple timber like tenpins”, seemed to be the next big thing:

SCORES of times every day in an area near Hungry Horse, Montana, a man-made hurricane takes place. Hurtling through heavy timber with relentless force and a crash heard for miles, a giant steel ball, as big as a garage, snaps trees two feet thick as easily as if they were match sticks. Known as the “ball that saves millions,” this is a revolutionary method for clearing timber in record-breaking time and far cheaper on a large scale, than anything else ever known. The ball, weighing 4-1/2 tons, and measuring 8 feet in diameter, is pulled through the timber by two powerful diesel tractors traveling several hundred feet apart.

Fortunately, the practice doesn’t seem to have caught on here in San Antonio.

Today’s post wrote itself. For your enjoyment, I present this amusing letter to the editor from Philip D. LeMessurier. It was published in the April 18th Express-News.

Why not bird diapers?

The developer crowd has long been known for its outlandish pronouncements in support of the endless search-and-destroy mission which has defined its anti-environmental agenda.

In his advocacy to weaken a proposed tree ordinance update, Mike Hogan of the San Antonio Apartment Association wins this year’s bird-poop umbrella award.

As reported in the April 14 Express-News, he justified a weakened tree ordinance on the basis that “birds land in trees and relieve themselves on the sidewalks,” creating a “mini health problem” for children.

Give me a break.

In an op-ed titled Slumburbia, Timothy Egan describes the vast subdivisions and strip malls of “foreclosure alley” east of the Bay Area. These graffiti-covered, crime-ridden monuments to sprawl sit half empty and poised to become tenements and slums.

Here in San Antonio, a new, stricter tree ordinance is being hotly debated. At the Technical Advisory Commitee meeting last week, developers vowed that the new rules would drive development out of San Antonio and into the exurbs of Schertz and beyond. Presumably, this will hurt San Antonio by denying it tax revenue.

San Antonio should heed the lessons of “foreclosure alley” and other loosely-regulated markets. For the homebuyers and communities, those subdivisions were anything but bargains. According to the article:

They let developers plow up walnut groves and vineyards and places that were supposed to be strawberry fields forever to pay for services demanded by new school parents and park users.

Second, look at the cities with stable and recovering home markets. On this coast, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and San Diego come to mind. All of these cities have fairly strict development codes, trying to hem in their excess sprawl. Developers, many of them, hate these restrictions. They said the coastal cities would eventually price the middle class out, and start to empty.

It hasn’t happened. Just the opposite. The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums.

Come see: this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live.

According to a report published in Science, the future climate in this region will not be favorable for growing trees. According to the report:

There is a broad consensus among climate models that this region will dry in the 21st century and that the transition to a more arid climate should already be underway. If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought or the Dust Bowl and the 1950s droughts will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.

This does not bode well for the success of proposed tree ordinance revisions. City Council directed staff to develop an ordinance that would achieve 40% tree canopy cover citywide.

However, city staffers are banking on much of that tree canopy coming from a tree-planting requirement. Preservation requirements alone fall far short. Consequently, predictions of 40% future tree canopy will likely turn out to be a mirage.