Half a million trees is a lot of trees when you consider that all the trees in all the parks in Chicago add up to only about 250,000. Lay half a million trees end to end and–well, you’d have a lot of dead trees, because they don’t grow that way. But plant half a million trees right way up on parkways and playgrounds, beside railroad tracks and roadsides, in schoolyards and vacant lots, and you could start revolutions.
For 150 years, it seems, Chicago has measured progress by the number of trees it kills–for lumber and newsprint and packing boxes. Trees are for kids on Arbor Day, not 50-ish mayors: even people who agree with Daley that trees are a good idea have a hard time concealing their condescension; when the Tribune editorially praised GreenStreets in November, the endorsement bore the title “Great news for city squirrels.”
Chicago’s tree cover is no more distinguished by its pedigree than by its age. The massive public plantings made around the turn of the century, especially those made on the city’s boulevards and parks, were mostly American elm, that stately and adaptable member of the genus Ulmus that has pretty much come to define what we mean by “shade tree.” Chicago’s public trees tend to be either mature elms that are now aging and infirm, or younger, less elegant trees such as the ashes and the commoner maples, trees that are fast-growing and cheap and thus popular among developers and aldermen eager to make a quick impression.
Bylina offers some numbers. In 1979 the bureau spent $12.8 million. In some of the years that followed the dollars allocated for tree operations disappeared like leaves after a November blow, to as little as $8 million. In 1990 Bylina expects to spend $11.8 million, a figure that reflects the 25 percent increase that Daley put into his first forestry budget. Milwaukee’s model forestry program serves a population about one-fifth the size of Chicago’s, but that city spends nearly as much on its trees (about $10 million a year) as Chicago. Stewart says that the backlog of chores in Chicago is now so large that the city could spend 15 to 20 million dollars a year for several years “and still not do all the things they’d like to do.”
The situation is scarcely better at the Chicago Park District, whose parks have been losing trees at a rate of roughly 1,500 a year for a couple of decades. “The district’s budget for landscaping is not enough to keep up with the yearly losses,” frets Erma Tranter of Friends of the Parks, “let alone replace what’s been lost in the past. In a system as historically significant as ours, that’s crucial.”
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Bylina says that there’s no point planting a tree in front of a house whose owner doesn’t want one. Big trees get girdled and die when people slice through the vital water-conducting tissues of the outer trunk; small trees are simply uprooted or battered to death by “accidental” bumps from lawn mowers. Such attacks differ from the vandalism inflicted on trees by kids in being premeditated arboricide. (Chicago does have a tree-protection ordinance, but while killing a city tree is more serious than stealing a library book, it is hardly a crime that will bring the cops to the scene with sirens wailing.)
There are those who say that if the city’s tree-protection ordinance had been strictly enforced in the past, it would have put the Bureau of Forestry out of business. The tree trade has changed over the years in ways that have made it possible to replace skilled humans with machines. (“Cherry picker” cranes are an example; as Lough says, “I doubt if anyone’s climbed a tree on city business in Chicago for 15 years.”) But tree work still demands a surprisingly high level of technical expertise by specialists whom the city has not always thought itself able to afford. Climbing the career ladder with Chicago forestry in the 1980s was riskier than climbing trees, because you were more likely to find yourself out on a limb. In 1979 the bureau employed nearly 600 people; in 1990 it will be staffed by slightly more than 300. More than one person with a forestry degree today works elsewhere in Streets and San’s sprawling empire because there was no money to pay them to do what they were trained for.
