Heirlooms of Conquest: Trees + Justice in Los Angeles

[Music] Los Angeles is famous for its trees. The city's network of towering palm trees might be its most famous human-made structure, better known than almost any single building besides the Hollywood sign. Beyond the palms, LA has one of the most diverse urban forests in the world, with a density of species comparable to a tropical rainforest. But this amazing canopy is almost entirely the product of human intervention. Almost every species in it comes from somewhere else, whether it's the California fan palm from the nearby Colorado desert or the gold medallion tree from Brazil. Almost every tree was planted by some past Angelino for some specific reason. As a result, LA's trees are also a record of profound injustice, a visible reminder of the patterns of violent and unequal development that have shaped the city. And as LA looks toward a hotter, drier, but maybe more equitable future, trees will play a surprisingly important role. The story of LA's trees will take us back a century to the early booms of Los Angeles, to our present moment, to future visions of a vibrant, more equitable city. Welcome to Lenscast from UCLA's Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. On Lenscast, we search for stories about people working toward richer, more just relationships with the natural world. In this episode, we explore the history and the possible futures of Los Angeles' trees. My name is Matthew C. Swanson. I'm a PhD student in UCLA's English department where I study 20th century American literature and its relationship to the natural world. And today, I will be your host for this episode of Lenscast. Why should we care about LA's trees? People should care because people should care about their history, right? And landscape is history. It's a visible history. It's history around us. That's Jared Farmer, a professor of environmental history at the University of Pennsylvania. When Farmer sees trees, he sees history. He sees a record of people's dreams, of their choices. And so trees are... In a sense, they represent values in the past because for every tree, there was some person in the past who decided that I want a tree here and I want this tree in this place. And if you understand that, you can better appreciate the values of people in the past who created the landscape we now live in. Farmer remembers the day when, as a student walking across the campus of Stanford University, he realized that Stanford's, and in fact all of California's trees, tell a deeper story. It just occurred to me like, wow, this is like a microcosm of this bigger story of like California, which is one of the most incredible modern arborita. You know, the state itself is an arboretum, and that itself is a... It's an heirloom of conquest. It is a form of conquest. It is a product of conquest, the greening of California. That phrase, heirloom of conquest, stuck with us as we explored the meanings of LA trees. The conquest of California started with the early waves of European settlers who murdered and displaced Indigenous peoples, but it didn't end there. It continued with the wholesale remaking of the landscape itself. In the 19th and 20th centuries, real estate investors took advantage of a natural climate where seemingly anything would grow to sell an artificial vision of middle-class prosperity. Los Angeles transformed itself in order to sell itself. Part of what LA was selling in the 20th century was a version of the good life, right? A version of the American dream, like the California dream, or really more specifically the Southern California dream, and I think palm trees were a really, really important part of the selling of the image of Southern California, and they promised to be sort of symbiotic with infrastructure, or they were a kind of aesthetic infrastructure themselves. They were a part of the automobile landscape, right? They were the living part of the automobile landscape. As Farmer explains, in the first few decades of the 20th century, LA grew incredibly quickly. That growth was driven largely by one industry, real estate. There are very few examples of this in modern history, of a city sort of being built from scratch into one of the biggest cities in the world, mostly just on land speculation. That was the primary industry of California. Speculators sold land to eager middle-class migrants from elsewhere in the United States, but more than that, they sold an image of the land as a kind of exotic paradise. People bought into that image, they literally bought into it, then they helped make it a reality. Like the great kind of early plantings in Los Angeles were largely just private home owners, the people who survived the booms in the bus, who bought property, who did settle down, who moved from Iowa or wherever else, mostly Iowa, as it was like in the early days, and started planting trees in their yards to express their kind of vision of the California good life to kind of show that like we do not have winter here, right? It was it was a kind of like Anglo-American fantasy of like the semi-tropical paradise. I mean that term semi-tropical was sort of like made up to describe this landscape that was being invented. From the beginning, in other words, LA's tree canopy was shaped by the intertwined forces of fantasy and money. Palm trees fit into that niche quite perfectly. Palm trees, basically they're cheap, they're easy to grow, and they had this promise in the automobile era as being a kind of aesthetic infrastructure that was totally compatible with the modern automobile landscape. Because a lot of these old street trees were planted when all the streets were dirt, of course, right, and there were no automobiles and there weren't necessarily sewer lines or overhead electric lines, and so when cities started putting, you know, all this infrastructure in, it came at great cost to the trees, but also the trees themselves could damage the new infrastructure with their roots. And so palm trees were very attractive to city planners and especially like the 1920s when LA laid out its kind of major highway system, you know, the big boulevards that were essentially highways in their day and predated the freeways and sort of decided that LA would be a car city. And for these new, you know, paved roads with sidewalks and, you know, sewer lines and the whole complement of infrastructure, they wanted trees that were essentially infrastructure, too, that had limited roots, had limited leaf fall, were cheap, and like palms just like ticked off all of those things. Palm trees were planted as a cheap, easy, exotic, seeming way to decorate streets made for cars. Only later did they take on the outsized meanings they imply today. Palms are, you know, very old kind of plants that predate humans and humans have been around palms for as long as there have been humans, right? But that particular set of meanings, you know, beauty, wealth, fame, celebrity sex, glamour, luxury, that is really unique to Southern California, especially Los Angeles, especially like Hollywood or the idea of Hollywood in the mid to late 20th century. And so an ancient living thing took on a new role as currency in a strange new economy. Southern California became, you know, the great movie and TV capital of the post-war world. Today, Los Angeles has one of the most diverse urban canopies in the world with tree species drawn from environments all over the planet. But as we've learned so far, the process that brought them here was anything but planned. It wasn't collective decision making that shaped LA's urban forest. It was the drive for private wealth and the shared desires it created. LA's trees are there, in large part, thanks to an Anglo-American fantasy of wealth and weather. That's what it means to say that they're a visual history of conquest. It also means that today, LA's trees reflect the inequality and the profound injustice of the city's history. If you look at a map of the tree cover in Los Angeles, it is, in a sense, a historical record of how race and class in place interact. It's the richest, widest parts of Los Angeles that had the most trees and the most canopy and the most shade. As Farmer told us during our conversation, there's no such thing as an innocent landscape. But that doesn't mean LA's trees have to go. Instead, understanding how the past shaped the landscapes we live in can equip us to shape better landscapes for the future. LA's not going anywhere. It's the city we have. It's a city I love. It's a city so many people love and care about. It needs trees. It just needs, yeah, probably different trees, a different assemblage of trees and a more intentional, comprehensive kind of community approach to the urban canopy. An intentional community-driven approach to the urban canopy is a pretty much perfect way to describe the Los Angeles Area Organization Tree People. Founded in 1973, Tree People worked with homeowners and communities all over LA to enrich the city's urban forest. We spoke with Maria Adame and Miguel Vargas about this work. Maria explained why they see planting trees as a vital part of redressing America's history of racial injustice. It all goes back to what everyone's been talking about, you know, the how redlining is still continuing to impact the communities that we live in. You know, I live in Van Nuys. Miguel, you live in Huntington Park and these are historically redlined communities and that's essentially where we see that that we're missing that that tree coverage. Miguel explains how trees aren't important infrastructure for climate adaptation. So I just think that we want to balance everything else as we go into these cities basically by planting more trees and by saying that okay so not only those people could have the shade that they think they deserve, all of us should be able to be able to appreciate nature and be able to have the shade that we that we can have throughout these these heat waves and these droughts and stuff like that. Trees also support physical and mental health. Recent research suggests that people living near a green space are more active, healthier and less likely to struggle with mental illness. Just being around trees just tranquilizes just which basically makes people more I guess aware and just makes everyone I can't even find the words to explain it but it just helps everyone get at ease like with themselves and with the world and it's just a very peaceful time to be around trees and nature. They fight climate change, they clean our air and water, they cool hot neighborhoods and in LA it's low-income black and brown neighborhoods that are the hottest. They bring people together creating what sociologists call community cohesion. We have a list called the 22 Benefits of Trees and among them are you know mental health benefits and urban heat benefits. It's all tied together and it's very I don't even I'm at a loss of words to express how important I think they are. The more you learn about just how good trees are for people in place, the more deeply you recognize the injustice of LA's many tree poor neighborhoods. In fact in the last few years the LA city government has begun to recognize the city's unequal tree cover as an environmental injustice. In 2018 the city announced the creation of a new position to address this issue, city forest officer. Los Angeles hired Rachel Mallidge to fill this role and take charge of all the city's trees. Can it be an equity? It was part of the reason I started doing tree work in the first place. It's what drew me to this field and it's been a focus of every role that I've played in urban forestry. It's been talking about how do we better engage the public in these areas? How do we do a really good job of listening to them and what they see as the barriers having an improved urban forest in their area? Part of Mallidge's job is to help select trees that bring real benefits to the people who live alongside them. She's working toward an LA with more trees, with bigger shadier trees, trees that do the best job cleaning the air, that are least likely to drop a branch on your car, and that live up to each neighborhood's sense of place and beauty. In a sense Mallidge is overseeing a collective reimagination of the city especially if a just resilient future in LA means leaving the iconic palms behind. So tree people has planted over three million trees in its 40 year history and the city of Los Angeles has charged Mallidge's office with overseeing the planting of 90,000 new trees in neighborhoods that badly need greater canopy coverage. These numbers are impressive and heartening but the impact of even thousands and thousands of trees on public property is limited by one central fact. 90% of trees in Los Angeles are on private property and the city is a lot more limited in what it can do to protect those trees. We should be making it easier for people to plant trees. We should make it you know it's easy for people to plant trees that is easy for them to cut them down. I guess that's the kind of you know libertarian property rights that this country celebrates in general. But if we're gonna do that I would like to say that it should be just as easy for people to plant trees. Rachel Mallidge told us a story that reflects how difficult it can be to protect the public benefits of private trees. It's one of these really terrible things where one person's decision one day has a irreversible impact that they might learn from but never get to actually behave differently from. So you I think about a neighbor who had a tree on the south side of their building again they recently moved in and thought oh I'm gonna you know take this out and redo this area. And within a week of taking out the tree went oh my gosh I didn't realize how much that was keeping my house cool. There's nothing we can do at that point the tree is gone. The neighbors that were benefiting also from the shade on their side of the fence don't have it. And by the time a new tree grows to be that large they may have forgotten or someone else may be living there. So there needs to be public education about one the fact that one person with a chainsaw can cause irreversible damage on a long-term asset. You know they come one afternoon and do a trimming job that doesn't follow best management practices. They damage the structure of the tree. They expose it to pest and disease. Policy changes could help mitigate the irreversible damage of tree removal. Namely strengthening protected tree ordinances would help to stem the tide of urban deforestation on private property particularly in historically underserved undergreen neighborhoods. I think similar to having feelings about tree species people have strong feelings about what they can do on their own private property. And so we want to approach that really carefully but we want to be able to have a conversation of okay well what what is again a reasonable limit and how can we make sure that these benefits stay in place. There's a study that was done by Sujin Lee and Travis Longcore that looked at a 10-year period in LA and saw that there was a canopy decline during that time period in every municipality except for I believe Pasadena. And Pasadena has a really strong protected tree ordinance. They they protect all species over a certain size and actually have it broken down by specific sizes for specific species of trees. And if it's over this many inches in diameter it's going to be protected. And that's not accidental. I mean there's the reason that they did not have a decline in tree canopy I believe is because of that that policy. And so we have to have a policy that functions we don't want to obviously in in terms of an area that's experiencing also a housing crisis we don't want to make development harder or more burdensome but we also want this area to be livable at the end of the day. So finding a way to balance all of those needs is the challenge but it's again why I'm really glad that I get to work on it full time. In contrast to Pasadena's robust expansive tree protection ordinance which includes dozens of tree species LA's only list protection for four California native tree species. So bolstering existing ordinances may not be enough especially since these four species are not as commonly found outside of already affluent neighborhoods in the foothills and hillside areas. Angelenos may need to begin to consider expanding the number of tree species receiving legal protection but this could meet resistance for private property owners who want to preserve their autonomy over their land. How do we bridge this divide? How do we balance the rights of the individual with the needs of the collective? Trees cast shade across property lines and the air they clean reaches lungs far beyond the piece of land they're rooted in. There's a great collective benefit to keeping all of LA's trees alive and healthy but with so many living on private property law and the policy can only go so far. Ultimately LA's tree canopy is a cultural and political issue an issue for public deliberation and collective meaning making. We don't we aren't going to have any kind of shift in how our urban forest is functioning if we don't have the public with us or that we're not you know enacting things that match with what the public wants to see. Obviously I think trees are a huge answer for a lot of our urban problems and I want to see more canopy cover but we have to be all on the same page about what that looks like. Like Rachel Mallorich, tree people knows that to protect and improve LA's urban forest a groundswell of public support is necessary. That's why they consider education to be essential to its mission as planting trees. As an Org I think we've planted over three million trees in LA County but one of the most important pieces to that is actually the education piece and making sure that we know how to care for those trees. It wouldn't do us any good to have planted those three million trees if there was no one to properly care for them and that's that's another really big piece to to know how to communicate with the communities and how to let them know that it's actually not that expensive to water the trees in your parkway and here is how how you prune a tree properly and that piece and knowing how to convey that information and to let them know that this is something that is for them it is a really big part of it. Tree people's work isn't just about knowledge though. Every tree a person plants or cuts down or cares for shapes our shared forest so the ideas emotions and values we associate with trees will have material effects for ourselves and for future Angelinos. It matters how we feel about trees. Trees are the only piece of our infrastructure where we have so much public feedback and feelings right. No one is going out there and telling me that the hydrant is like the wrong color or shape you know or our street lights. Obviously we just had that street light competition but in general there isn't this reaction oh you know sometimes people don't like the placement of certain pieces of infrastructure but no one is again stop lights are fine and stop signs are fine unless they're blocked by a tree but trees they do they they create this reaction. So how should we feel about trees? Rachel Malloridge calls LA's trees a man-made system, a key piece of infrastructure for our city's resilience which we have to plan deliberately and that plan should include an important factor that has been largely overlooked by planners until recently the public's emotional investment. I was listening to a conversation there was a series a three-week series of one-hour segments on it was called an ecosystem approach to urban forestry that was highlighting some work that had been done in Tampa Florida and one of the things that one of the presenters shared that I just loved because it captured something that I already knew but he said it way better which is essentially that the the social feeling about trees and the social perception of trees the inventory of that feeling in the community is almost as important as your physical your biophysical tree inventory what species where are they what's their condition. That inventory and and the public sentiment towards trees is something that you have to track over time and that you should prioritize as almost as much as you would a tree inventory. Jared Farmer called LA's palms an aesthetic infrastructure and an heirloom of conquest an expression of LA's unique cultural history. Tree peoples Miguel Vargas and Maria Adame stressed their importance to our physical and mental health and the role they played in our communities. I used to say at every single one of my eco tours with trees need people and people need trees it goes both ways it's you know the the friendship of life the number one friendship we need to protect it and care for it and everybody is a tree person if you've experienced a tree helped planted one taken care of one then you then you are a tree person yourself and we welcome you as part of our little you know tree people community. Of course there's one other way to think about trees as living things living alongside us. So I think trees again to me they are our companion species in the floral realm and we should use them unlike cats and dogs our companion species in the animal realm that live much shorter lives than us like our companion animals in the floral realm outlive us and again they're they're a kind of people. The trees of California today are heirlooms of conquest I want to say like I hope that you know the trees 100 years now people will look back and say that these are heirlooms of the people who try to do better than conquest right who try to in some cases make up for conquest or to remediate or to make amends to make a you know a more equitable but still beautiful California.