> I’ve been an arborist for 35 years and it is my opinion that it is healthier for trees to be planted outside the lawn area.
Kill your lawn. Lawns don't belong in Colorado. Get your city to adopt rainwater harvesting measures, use it to create microclimates with native flora. That'll make it easier for you to grow trees, and better use of rainwater will reduce/eliminate the city's need to upkeep with water.
"Change" and "resilience"... Two of our rulers' favourite buzzwords right there.
Apart from the wider climatic issues... It would help a lot if cities weren't covered in concrete, tarmac/asphalt and reflecting windows that cook the urban environment. They aren't good for rain runoff either.
> At the Eighth Annual Tree Diversity Conference on March 4th, our Front Range conditions for growing trees was described as “harsh”.
Wow, didn't even know that there was such a thing.
The article is... beautiful, in a sense. It is SO clear that it is not written by AI (it's from 2022, in fact), and it seems refreshing to read something without the need to constantly ask yourself what was written with AI and what by a human mind.
Anyway... Planting trees is getting worse and worse. Our climate is pretty much f*cked. That, in 2026, is abuntantly clear. Sigh.
What does it mean that planting trees is getting worse? In my country we have a holiday for planting trees. The school children plant a tree every year - and when my children were younger I would plant with them.
In my climate, tree establishment is getting more difficult and expensive because of stronger summer droughts. The local city plans for five years of establishment watering now, at an overall establishment cost of ~$4,000 per tree.
Shouldn't that money come from increased taxes on one of the primary causes of the climate change making it more expensive? E.g. gasoline automobile fuel?
One private jet flight produces more pollution than a car does in its entire lifetime. They spray their exhaust fumes thousands of feet up in the sky Yet private jets do not get anything like the same exemptions. I wonder why.
Yes, I do happen to know about jet fuel. There was a scandal at one of the COP summits when it was announced that private jets and private yachts would not have the same tax rates.
Private jet flights are extremely frequent, and are used by wealthy or powerful people. They even use them to go climate conferences. They are used to go to the WEF at Davos in Switzerland, and there are supposed to be so many going there that they have to build extra hangar space.
Even someone like Taylor Swift reportedly uses a private jet all the time to go to her fiancé's games. All of those exhaust fumes go straight into the upper atmosphere.
A lot of urban trees are badly planted as well. There was a very old tree round here which died, because most of the area around it was tarred over and it couldn't get access to rainwater when it did fall.
Roots can extend like 1.5 times or so the high of the tree. In each direction. Paving everything to 1 m of the trunk and expecting the tree roots to breath or be able to survive is extremely dumb.
We need to develop some sort of permeable pavement around this trees or, much better, none at all. Granting a bigger amount of this space by law could be done tomorrow. Taking selfies of yourself planting a tree where is not space for the roots, is just virtue signaling.
Instead to dump trees in some coins of our cities, we need a way to include entire forests to act as a big air conditioner for the city, central park style. And the will to make this places thrive instead to see it as a nuisance that must be cleaned where the unemployed people prune everything at sight. Nobody would put unemployed people at charge of the Mona Lisa. Trees are much more important for our survival than the Mona Lisa.
Totally. The tree I was referring to was at least three hundred years old, and had survived a road being built by it. Then the local government decided to pave the path so it got hardly any rain.
There is also a tree near me which has barely grown in thirty years due to close planting and most of the area near it being paved.
By whom has the obligation to enforce laws in a country; Normally called the executive branch of the government. Environmental crimes are still crimes, as is damaging public property. Trees have an economic value attached. Destroying, lets say, $50,000 of public property should raise some eyebrows at least.
Unless some exceptions apply, the neighbors suffered a damage in the value of their real state. Specially if is proven than the wood was stolen and its money was pocketed by some private actor.
How many of this trees survived this year? Planting is easy. Assuring that the trees will not be stolen or destroyed later is getting more and more difficult each year by the antiscience/antihuman current trend.
The provoked wildfires in most of US, Canada and Europe this year had destroyed decades of work. And the changing climate too fast to allow the forests to adapt to much more heat, and dry spells, and stronger storms, and more salt from the sea level raising... is a big challenge.
And is an asymmetrical game. The group of people that spend their own resources (and get poorer) to save nature can't win against the group of people that get richer destroying nature, even if they pay a small fine eventually only the bad actors can win. Many people has the feeling that the huge efforts on conservation of rainforests, oceans or local nature is just fattening the goose until some criminal eventually come, grab and cash.
After some decades playing of this game one group starves and shrinks while the other have a feast of resources and buys everything
I guess they mean it's harsh because it's Colorado. Bad soil, scarce rain, scorching summers, freezing winters... So they have to take extra care with the species they plant.
Excerpt from the article: "Conditions are predicted to be getting worse. At the Tree Conference, speakers were confident in models showing temperatures increasing more rapidly than in the past and even faster for higher elevations because heat rises. On top of that, large numbers of ash trees, cottonwoods, and weak trees will be disappearing, increasing the “heat island effect”."
> I’ve been an arborist for 35 years and it is my opinion that it is healthier for trees to be planted outside the lawn area.
Kill your lawn. Lawns don't belong in Colorado. Get your city to adopt rainwater harvesting measures, use it to create microclimates with native flora. That'll make it easier for you to grow trees, and better use of rainwater will reduce/eliminate the city's need to upkeep with water.
Brad Lancaster has a website with this and other ecosystem-minded permaculture techniques. He's in AZ but the techniques are adaptable to CO. https://www.harvestingrainwater.com/water-harvesting/
"Change" and "resilience"... Two of our rulers' favourite buzzwords right there.
Apart from the wider climatic issues... It would help a lot if cities weren't covered in concrete, tarmac/asphalt and reflecting windows that cook the urban environment. They aren't good for rain runoff either.
> At the Eighth Annual Tree Diversity Conference on March 4th, our Front Range conditions for growing trees was described as “harsh”.
Wow, didn't even know that there was such a thing.
The article is... beautiful, in a sense. It is SO clear that it is not written by AI (it's from 2022, in fact), and it seems refreshing to read something without the need to constantly ask yourself what was written with AI and what by a human mind.
Anyway... Planting trees is getting worse and worse. Our climate is pretty much f*cked. That, in 2026, is abuntantly clear. Sigh.
What does it mean that planting trees is getting worse? In my country we have a holiday for planting trees. The school children plant a tree every year - and when my children were younger I would plant with them.
In my climate, tree establishment is getting more difficult and expensive because of stronger summer droughts. The local city plans for five years of establishment watering now, at an overall establishment cost of ~$4,000 per tree.
Shouldn't that money come from increased taxes on one of the primary causes of the climate change making it more expensive? E.g. gasoline automobile fuel?
One private jet flight produces more pollution than a car does in its entire lifetime. They spray their exhaust fumes thousands of feet up in the sky Yet private jets do not get anything like the same exemptions. I wonder why.
How frequent are private jet flights? How frequent are car trips?
And for that matter, I don't in fact know how much jet fuel is taxed. Do you?
Yes, I do happen to know about jet fuel. There was a scandal at one of the COP summits when it was announced that private jets and private yachts would not have the same tax rates.
Private jet flights are extremely frequent, and are used by wealthy or powerful people. They even use them to go climate conferences. They are used to go to the WEF at Davos in Switzerland, and there are supposed to be so many going there that they have to build extra hangar space.
Even someone like Taylor Swift reportedly uses a private jet all the time to go to her fiancé's games. All of those exhaust fumes go straight into the upper atmosphere.
A lot of urban trees are badly planted as well. There was a very old tree round here which died, because most of the area around it was tarred over and it couldn't get access to rainwater when it did fall.
Roots can extend like 1.5 times or so the high of the tree. In each direction. Paving everything to 1 m of the trunk and expecting the tree roots to breath or be able to survive is extremely dumb.
We need to develop some sort of permeable pavement around this trees or, much better, none at all. Granting a bigger amount of this space by law could be done tomorrow. Taking selfies of yourself planting a tree where is not space for the roots, is just virtue signaling.
Instead to dump trees in some coins of our cities, we need a way to include entire forests to act as a big air conditioner for the city, central park style. And the will to make this places thrive instead to see it as a nuisance that must be cleaned where the unemployed people prune everything at sight. Nobody would put unemployed people at charge of the Mona Lisa. Trees are much more important for our survival than the Mona Lisa.
Totally. The tree I was referring to was at least three hundred years old, and had survived a road being built by it. Then the local government decided to pave the path so it got hardly any rain.
There is also a tree near me which has barely grown in thirty years due to close planting and most of the area near it being paved.
And the local government should had been sued for that.
By whom?
That's an honest question. Who represents the trees in human society? Do they have recognised authority?
By whom has the obligation to enforce laws in a country; Normally called the executive branch of the government. Environmental crimes are still crimes, as is damaging public property. Trees have an economic value attached. Destroying, lets say, $50,000 of public property should raise some eyebrows at least.
Unless some exceptions apply, the neighbors suffered a damage in the value of their real state. Specially if is proven than the wood was stolen and its money was pocketed by some private actor.
We don't have a mechanism here for doing that, and you can't replace a three hundred year old tree.
How many of this trees survived this year? Planting is easy. Assuring that the trees will not be stolen or destroyed later is getting more and more difficult each year by the antiscience/antihuman current trend.
The provoked wildfires in most of US, Canada and Europe this year had destroyed decades of work. And the changing climate too fast to allow the forests to adapt to much more heat, and dry spells, and stronger storms, and more salt from the sea level raising... is a big challenge.
And is an asymmetrical game. The group of people that spend their own resources (and get poorer) to save nature can't win against the group of people that get richer destroying nature, even if they pay a small fine eventually only the bad actors can win. Many people has the feeling that the huge efforts on conservation of rainforests, oceans or local nature is just fattening the goose until some criminal eventually come, grab and cash.
After some decades playing of this game one group starves and shrinks while the other have a feast of resources and buys everything
I guess they mean it's harsh because it's Colorado. Bad soil, scarce rain, scorching summers, freezing winters... So they have to take extra care with the species they plant.
I too would like to know what such a bold statement could mean
Excerpt from the article: "Conditions are predicted to be getting worse. At the Tree Conference, speakers were confident in models showing temperatures increasing more rapidly than in the past and even faster for higher elevations because heat rises. On top of that, large numbers of ash trees, cottonwoods, and weak trees will be disappearing, increasing the “heat island effect”."