FALLEN FOREST

Evaluating urban forestry after the recent severe windstorm

From March 20012 issue of Arroyo Montly Magazine

When thousands of trees toppled in last November’s fierce windstorm, it was a reminder that urban trees, those gentle giants, can pack a powerful punch. Pasadena and Altadena are still littered with stumps, uplifted sidewalks and orange cones. The event has prompted soul-searching among arborists and tree lovers over the challenges of sustaining urban forests.
The loss of so many mature trees — more than 1,500 in Pasadena alone --- isn’t just an aesthetic issue; it means hotter, more polluted neighborhoods for years to come. “Large trees, particularly conifers, are like giant air filters,” explains Rebecca Latta, a former Pasadena tree superintendent. “They intercept large particle pollution that can get into your lungs.”
It’s a calm January day, and Latta is surveying some of the damage in north Pasadena. She examines the slanting 8-foot-tall stump and exposed roots of a deodar cedar. A resident has wrapped the tree with green-and-white barricade tape reading “killer tree.” “The winds were coming from the north and pulled the root plate up,” says the consulting arborist and oak specialist based in Glendora. “You can see the roots came up a long way, so there had to be tremendous force placed on top of this very tall tree.” Indeed, wind speeds approached 100 miles an hour in the unusually destructive storm; meterologists considered it a ferocious variation on the gentler and warmer Santa Anas typical of the season.
Latta notes the winds especially “devastated the really tall trees — Canary Island pine, deodar cedar, stone pine.” Some trees probably toppled simply because of the velocity. But the demise of others can, at least partially, be attributed to the challenges of growing trees in parkways. “Street trees have to be maintained in a situation where they have limited root space,” says Latta. “And, in some cases, the trees will pull up the sidewalk, curb and gutter, so those trees will have their roots pruned when new sidewalks are put in.” That makes trees less stable.
Inadequate watering regimes also threaten both street trees and their brethren in home gardens. That’s because trees and lawns have fundamentally different water requirements, as horticulturist Barbara Eisenstein is quick to point out. “Watering once or twice a week for 10 minutes is not good for trees,” she says. “The water doesn’t soak down very far; trees want a much deeper root system and you want to water them infrequently and really deeply.”
The storm was so intense at Eisenstein’s South Pasadena home — small branches flying everywhere, windows blowing open, dust swirling around the house — that she worried her mature avocado and deodar cedar would crash onto the Craftsman home. They didn’t, perhaps because of the care she’d given her trees. Eisenstein had removed the lawn around both trees and replaced it with mulch, which allows for less frequent watering and prevents root rot. Another tip: Cap or remove irrigation systems around trees so they don’t spray the trunks. “There should be no watering [next to the tree],” says Latta, “If the soil is too wet or the soil is compacted you don’t have enough oxygen in the soil or the exchange of gasses that tree roots need to be healthy.”
Pasadena is hiring a consultant to undertake a storm post-mortem, analyzing how its street tree practices might be improved. The findings are expected to be released to the public in the spring. Meanwhile, Forestry Superintendent Kenneth Graham says, the city hands out care guidelines to residents when workers plant new street trees, advising, among other things, “not to grow any groundcover adjacent to tree trunks.” He notes that the city trims and inspects street trees every five to seven years, depending on the kind of tree. Latta says that for some trees, that’s not often enough.
And many trees, both municipal and residential, suffer from sloppy pruning. A lot of cities have cut their tree maintenance funds, and Eisenstein says they often contract with companies that charge less and aren’t as diligent. Pasadena, however, has increased its street tree budget in the last decade.
Perhaps the worst offender is Southern California Edison, which prunes — no, hacks --- trees near power lines, lopping off their tops in a bad buzz cut. “Trees should never be brought down, called ‘heading back’ or ‘topping,’” Eisenstein says. “As soon as you cut a branch in the middle like that, it sends out multiple shoots that aren’t attached to the stem very well.” The new shoots are weaker and the dense regrowth creates more wind resistance.
For homeowners, finding a good tree service can be a challenge. Latta says even she struggles to find qualified crews. She recommends making sure a certified arborist supervises any pruning and that the arborist doesn’t leave your job site until the crew is done cutting. It also helps to hire a consulting arborist who specializes in the tree species you have.
As Latta continues her tour, she points out more stumps in Altadena, then drives by a spot where trees blown over in a previous storm have not been replaced. Pasadena officials say they’re optimistic they can secure grants and other funds for replanting, although they acknowledge the city faces financial constraints. But Latta wonders aloud whether L.A. County will have the money to reforest Altadena. “All these cities --- Pasadena, Altadena, Arcadia, La Cañada --- have really amazing urban forests,” she muses. “I think the legacy we leave our children is to replant and to maintain the trees we have so we don’t lose them.” And even if the fallen are replaced, it will be decades before the saplings grow into the giants that stood before the storm.

Click through for Barbara Eisenstein's Tips on Planting and Caring for Trees

State Parks In Crisis

Because of a 25 percent cut to its budget, California's Department of Parks and Recreation is planning to close one quarter of all state parks by next summer. While this has upset park advocates, the state parks system faces another serious issue: The parks that will remain open are in need of maintenance.

One of them is Malibu Creek State Park. Its beautiful red peaks, willow-lined streams and oak woodlands have appeared in scores of movies and TV shows, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and MASH.

But under the sunny spotlight of a recent 90-degree day, a close-up reveals the starlet’s beauty is fading.

Listen to this story on KPCC.org.

Kern County Emerges as Powerhouse

If you drive about half an hour north of Palmdale, you’ll find yourself in the foothills of Kern County ’s Tehachapi Mountains. They’re studded with Joshua trees, that sparse icon of the Mojave. But a new symbol is also rising, reaching its limbs into the desert sky.

Planted amidst the Joshuas: more than 3,000 wind turbines, resembling large white pinwheels. The older models are about six-stories-high. The newest are taller than the statue of liberty. Standing next to the turbines, Kern County planner Lorelei Oviatt says, “You’re actually in the middle of a 223,000 acre wind area that Kern County has set aside, where we hope we can site enough wind for over 3 million households.”

Read the rest of my story on KPCC.org

Gold Rush of Green Power?

In reporting a forthcoming radio story on the rush of alternative energy projects in California’s Kern County, I spoke with V. John White, director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies.

The story takes listeners to the Tehachapi-Mojave Wind Resources Area, and airs tomorrow on KPCC-FM. Meantime, here’s a slice of my conversation with White.

Q: How’s California doing in its quest to tap renewable resources, ASAP?

A: We’re getting steadily better, I think. We spent a lot of time talking about doing renewables, but the fact is we’re still at roughly 15% renewable statewide.

That’s up a little bit from 12%. But we need to go much greater, to 20%-33% and beyond. That’s going to take significant effort, and I think we’re starting to get there. California had this big boom in the 80's and early 90's and then we stopped. And we learned a lot, but most of that experience went elsewhere and now we’re just getting back into it.

Q: How Does Kern County figure in this picture. I believe the California Energy Commission a few years back projected the county would provide about 40% of the energy needed to meet the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS)—the alternative energy mandates for investor-owned utilities.

A: They [Kern] have some of the best wind resources in the state that have yet to be developed--in the Tehachapi Mountains area. They also have, in parts of the county, very, very good solar resources. They also have proximity of transmission lines that bisect the wind and solar areas. So they have some very important advantages in terms of the resources they were blessed with.

They have some expertise from having built, operated and planned these resources, so they’re also becoming leaders and innovators in the planning of these project.

Q: What’s the county’s environmental record?

A: [County planners have] looked at where impacts might occur and added some requirements for the developers to protect species--it's a sign of some leadership. Also, in the solar area they have given a lot of thought to the best places.

Q: Are California's strict environmental laws slowing the pace of alternative energy development?

A: It’s really a combination of things. In some cases it’s the transmission, interconnections, and in some cases there are federal wildlife reviews the state can’t do anything about. I think on balance CEQA [the California Environmental Quality Act] provides a means of identifying and reducing impacts from projects. CEQA is a burden for developers compared to other states, but as a result we get better projects with better mitigation and sometimes even less opposition because of the care and the time that is taken.

CEQA is a proxy for a conversation between project applicant and community. I think what you have in Kern County is a moderator for the conversation that can help [energy developments] be successful. By anticipating there are problems that have to be solved, instead of like in Texas trying to approve them as quickly as possible, you avoid adverse consequences and you learn as you go in ways that improve the projects….

Q: Kern County generally prefers to see wind and solar projects developed on private land. Sounds like good strategy economically and environmentally, yes?

A: I think that’s true. One of the problems with private land, however, is a lot of it is divide up into really small parcels. The [projects on] federal lands…it’s important they have an opportunity to get approved if they’re good projects. We have a great amount of economic stimulus money that we’re racing to try to capture by getting projects approved.

The thing about solar is you can still get a lot of energy from the land--with the right acreage--with very high solar radiation. [Public lands in] Kern County are in the Western Mojave, which has some of the best solar resources in the state and the whole country. And if projects are built there they can be smaller than comparable projects because of how good the radiation is. We have to recognize the scale of the energy we have to displace; the [vast] amount of energy we have to have to get off coal, fuel and electrical cars.

I think what’s happening now is the urgency of putting people back to work, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel use, have combined to create a sense of urgency that’s causing all the local governments, developers, and environmentalists to raise their game.

American Energy companies are also look across the border for alternative energy. Listen to my story for The World.

Turbines for Baja?

The U.S. government this week approved the nation's first offshore wind project. It took nine years. Will similar projects crop up in California?

"There’s a substantial wind resource offshore of CA, fantastic wind resource," says Mike Allman, CEO of Sempra Generation, "but it’s never going to be built, it’s too sensitive. It’s a gorgeous area and people don’t want their view profile changed. The wind is strong offshore, in many cases, and you can put larger turbines offshore. But you need a lot of support to get that done."

So Sempra is looking high and low for windy sites onshore, including across the border in Baja California. Listen to my piece for PRI's The World.

Take a gander at the Sierra Juarez. Learn more about offshore wind in Nantucket Sound.

Arcadia Weed Park

Noodle around on this blog and you'll see there's a lot devoted to lovely spots to hike and learn about nature. Arcadia Wilderness Park is certainly a learning experience. But it's the kind of hard lesson I'd like to be spared.

It's one of the most depressing places I've been. As you can see above, aggressive weeds called invasive plants don't respect fences. They escape gardens and hightail it into wilderness areas. The city of Arcadia has done little to nothing to control the weeds in its park and now they threaten the adjacent Angeles National Forest.

Castor bean and fountain grass have already jumped the fence. Fountain grass is crazy-bad. Below you can see it's growing out of every crack in a stairway and a slope that's been hardscaped. It also blankets a couple acres adjacent to this stairway.

And the plant has also taken root in a creek running through the park. Click over to my weeds series to learn more about fountain grass.

Ah, isn't that a pretty sight? The kiss of light on--just kidding, this is one weed duking it out with another. Bad boy cape ivy trying to strangle His Nastiness, castor bean.

Above Drew Ready of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council cranes to see the crown of a mature elderberry, smothered by cape ivy. "This area is pretty much a dead zone," he said. "If you listen and look around, you hear no wildlife--there's no songbirds; you see no lizards. There are probably rats."

At Arcadia Park ivy's got strangle-hold at least one sycamore (above & below) as well, and is making a run for some gorgeous live oaks. "The ivy over the years has covered the [oak] seedlings, so there's no regeneration going on in this understory," Ready said. "If this oak goes, there's a good chance there won't be one to replace it."

Click below to read the final two installments of my LA Times weed series:

Acacias

Brooms

Runaway Plants

If you missed my five-part series on garden plants that threaten wildlands, check out the first three installments below (with links to the full story on the LA Times website).

GARDEN HANGOVERS PART 1

Ecologist Christy Brigham stands amid willows hemming Medea Creek in the Santa Monica Mountains. The trees’ amber leaves glow in the morning light. She frowns at an ivy-like plant with violet-blue flowers. It’s blanketing a large swath of the creek. “Periwinkle is a common landscape ground cover,” she says. “It’s attractive to some people. I think it’s a green menace.”

Periwinkle (Vinca major) hails from the Mediterranean. Let loose in parts of Southern California, it smothers virtually all of the wildlife-supporting native plants in its path. California is home to many indigenous plants found nowhere else on Earth. Many are at risk of extinction. The main culprit is urbanization, but weedy exotic plants — even some that residents buy for their gardens — often share the blame. Able to rough it in the wild, runaway plants can throw entire ecosystems out of balance.

Read the rest of the story.

GARDEN HANGOVERS PART 2

When many of us think of Los Angeles, there’s a palm in the picture. That palm is likelyWashingtonia robusta, the Mexican fan palm.

Mexican fans are the remarkably tall (up to 100 feet), skinny palms with fan-shaped fronds that have towered over much of the city’s built environment for more than a century. More conspicuous than stars in L.A.’s washed-out night sky, some palm constellations have even been dubbed historic-cultural monuments.

Although other palms have sneaked into the scene, Nicholas Staddon, director of new plants for Monrovia Growers, says Mexican fans are still popular and “very valuable — it’s fast-growing and has a wonderful tropical look.” No primadonna, aptly named robusta thrives in a couple square feet of dirt amid a sea of concrete, even roots in sidewalk cracks.

But the region’s palmy past is seeding trouble. Click over to read the rest of my LA Times story.

Part 3

Grasses are among California’s most prolific weeds. Exotic bromes and other annual grasses now carpet millions of acres, displacing of native wildflowers, bunch grasses and shrubs.

Most arrived with 19th century settlers and livestock (as contaminants in feed or lodged in animals’ coats, for example). But in recent years, ornamental grasses have joined the fray.

“Grasses are useful in a landscape,” says Jim Folsom, director of botanical gardens at the Huntington, “but by nature they are invasive; being a grass generally means being able to cover a lot territory fast.”

Read on.

Sierra Juarez, Baja

I recently returned from Baja on assignment for the radio program "The World."

After visiting Baja's first wind turbines and talking with members of a land cooperative (Ejido), I traveled the length of the Sierra Juarez, from La Rumorosa South 30 some miles on rutted dirt roads into Paque National Constitucion and the placid Laguna Hanson.

The range is topped by a gorgeous Jeffrey Pine forest and the Laguna, the lake pictured in this slide show below.

As you can see, the flora here is a fascinating mix of plants you might recognize from the US side of the border and some endemic species. Coastal sage scrub and chaparral intermingle with Sonoran species at lower elevations.

Manzanitas abound and are mixed with red shank--the shrub pictured here with manzanita-like bark and fine, needle-like leaves--and junipers.

Due to road conditions, my traveling companions and I had a bit of an adventure--prompting me to wonder if we could survive on frosted oatmeal cookies and pee. Video on this to come.

Click here for a large-screen version of the slide show.

Smart Meters

Some power companies are pulling the plug on old-fashioned mechanical electric meters, and, to the likely disappointment of growl-happy dogs, meter-readers will no longer be invading yards across SouthernCalifornia.

Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas and Electric, and San Diego Gas and Electric are upgrading customers to digital “smart meters” that can transmit real-time data about electricity use wirelessly back to the utility company. (The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is updating its meters too, but primarily larger businesses will be outfitted with two-way meters.)

The next step is to provide detailed power-use information to homeowners, in hopes that they can assess and reduce their consumption.

Read the rest of my story on the LA Times LA at Home Blog

Rainy Day, Trashy Day

I love a rainy night. A rainy day, too. But I'll never forget the mountains of trash that wash into Southland waterways after storms. It's particularly depressing to see trash strewn in the branches of trees and shrubs, as you can see behind the ducks in this picture of the Glendale Narrows stretch of the LA River.

I took the photo above (and the one below) a couple weeks ago along the Rio Hondo, a tributary of the LA River. In addition to the ubiquitous shopping carts, plastic bags, styrofoam cups, soda cans, etc, there was a surprising number of rubber balls.

Film plastic is so light-weight that it blows out of trash cans and recycle bins easily. People who live near the Puente Hills landfill have watched the white baggies blow into their neighborhoods for years.

So to help you with a New Year's resolution to not lose sight of any plastic, following is a transcript of a radio story I reported a few years ago about the ecological implications of plastic accumulating in the environment.

KPCC ANCHOR: California has a reputation as a green state: a place where people care a lot about the environment. So you’d think that we’d have solved a basic environmental problem like litter. But public works crews haul tons of litter out of waterways every time it rains. Much of it is plastic. And, as KPCC’s Ilsa Setziol reports in the third part of our series on trash, some of the plastic is ending up in the ocean.

(sound up on: splashing, scraping, women chatting

“we need another bag”)

SETZIOL: After a fall rainstorm, nine women inmates haul trash out of a channel that flows into Newport Bay. Gloria Sauer with Orange County public works oversees the crew.

SAUER: Girls, get all of the floatable stuff. All of the trash and debris you see, the styrofoam cups and the glass, okay.

SETZIOL: The trash is caught behind a net that public works has installed to try to keep it from flowing into the bay and out to the ocean. In about an hour, the crew hauls out a couple hundred pounds plastic cups, water bottles, broken furniture and other trash. Orange County is still trying to get a handle on the total amount of trash is blowing or washing in county waterways—and where exactly it’s all coming from. Vince Gin is with the OC watershed division.

GIN: It could be a trash bag blown of a trash truck, or it could be a cup that didn’t make its way to a trash can. Sometimes, unfortunately it could be litter that someone has thrown out of a car and onto a street.

SETZIOL: Despite local efforts to capture trash, some of it ends up in the ocean. Of most concern is the plastic, because it’s so durable.

(sound of bubbling water)

In a lab in Redondo Beach, Charles Moore with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation is examining what’s in the stomach of an Albatross from the Hawaiian islands.

MOORE: Here we have a lid of some kind of bottle cap to a pen…different types of caps…Here’s a piece of jewelry.

SETZIOL: And lots of pieces of red, yellow and blue plastic. Big ones.

MOORE: Look at this we’ve got a toy bear

SETZIOL: An entire miniature, plastic toy bear.

SETZIOL: Moore says the birds didn’t evolve with plastic, so they have no way to distinguish it from food.

MOORE: They’re filling up on maybe a large percentage of non-digestible,non-nutritive plastic and feeding it to their chicks. So the chicks have what’s called a satiation reflex—it’s getting fuller and fuller and finally it stops demanding food from the parents.

SETZIOL: Moore says about 70 species of sea birds have been found to eat plastic. Researchers have also documented sea turtles and whales killed or injured by ingesting plastic bags and mylar balloons.

The Algalita Foundation thinks southern California is a major source. It sampled ocean waters at the mouths of the LA and San Gabriel Rivers and found 2 and a half grams of plastic for every gram of plankton at the surface--much of it very small pieces.

ANDRADY: Smaller particles I contend would be far more damaging from an ecological perspective.

Dr. Anthony Andrady is a polymer scientist with the research company RTI International. He says UV light gradually breaks plastic into smaller and smaller pieces. His research has found that krill and other zooplankton will eat significant amounts of microscopic plastic.

ANDRADY: That is particularly disconcerting because the food pyramid rests on zooplankton health. But whether that has an effect on them we don’t know.

SETZIOL: Researchers in Japan have found that pieces of plastic placed in seawater will absorb PCBs and other toxins. But scientists don’t know if marine life that eats plastic would absorb any of the pollution.

ANDRADY: It’s an unanswered question and when you have an unanswered question of this magnitude, it’s worrisome and we need to find an answer to this.

SETZIOL: Plastic doesn’t just breaking down in the ocean. It fragments on land and in rivers. The Algalita Foundation points out that the nets public works departments use capture trash don’t snag the small stuff.

(Clean up sounds up)

GIN: We can only pick up so much.

Vince Gin of the Orange County Watershed Department.

GIN: Trying to fight the problem by combating it after it’s already in the system is a losing battle. We have to work on reducing how much trash we create; prevention is absolutely key.

(trash hauling sounds)

In Newport Beach, Ilsa Setziol, 89.3, KPCC

Lives in the Balance

An article in the prestigious science journal Nature this week includes a sobering graphic. In it, the earth is sliced into nine wedges representing planetary systems such as climate, fresh water, ocean chemistry, biodiversity, changes in land use, and the nitrogen cycle. Three of them are very red, indicating humans have already interfered with the climate, biodiversity, and nitrogen cycles sufficiently to potentially threaten our own survival on the planet. In terms of biodiversity, the graphic illustrates what conservation biologists have been saying for some time: Humans are causing other species to wink out at a rate 100 to 1,000 times higher than what the fossil record indicates as a natural baseline.

The authors note that Homo sapiens evolved and thrived during an unusually stable period in the earth's history, a 10,000 year increment called the Holocene. "Such stability may now be under threat," the scientists say. Human activities could "push the Earth system outside the stable environmental state of the Holocene, with consequences that are detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world."

Click here for a summary of the paper. 

Note that "ocean acidification" refers to the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the oceans. The burning of fossil fuels is altering the chemistry of the seas, turning them more acid.