The Urban Forest Initiative

Hare-brained scheme number one

Ah, the ideas that have been bandying about in my head — if only people would heed my advice! Of course, I haven’t told anyone my advice, so I can’t really blame people for being idiots. After this blog, they'll have no excuse.

First, a little background. I grew up on Long Island, in the suburbs of New York City. Within the years of my adolescence I saw the number of farms in Nassau County dwindle to zero. Yes, zero — a sobering thought now that I live in a place with a seemingless endless number of farms, but that number seems to be quickly dwindling, too.

I’ve lived in several places, including Sonoma, California, that never seem to have a shortage of pilgrims willing to set up stakes. And with these pilgrims come problems: We’re growing too fast! We’ve got rich outsiders coming in, and they’re changing things! Real estate values are skyrocketing!

Don’t get me wrong — these are all real issues that I often complain about myself. But there are parts of this country that would love to have these problems. Outsourcing and the global marketplace have shut down factories in the Midwest. In Montana, we’re all familiar with the played-out mining towns, of which Butte is the most notorious example. It always amazes me that the house Bob Dylan grew up in recently sold for the princely sum of $60,000. That’s in Hibbing, Minnesota, which was a mining town way back when, but isn’t much of anything now. And big agribusiness has shuttered small farm towns across the nation. Go to any rural area, from sea to shining sea, that doesn’t benefit from either tourism or a not-too-far metropolis, and you’ll see empty storefronts and empty houses. Those of us who live in places where too many people are moving in don’t have it so bad after all.

My co-worker Tim Omarzu was from Detroit, which is surely America’s most egregious example of a city gone south. Tim would share tales of Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween, in which people would go around Detroit torching abandoned homes. Hundreds would burn each year. The city that once was the greatest testament to American manufacturing might now has abandoned neighborhoods with pheasants and packs of wild dogs roaming free.

Which is horrible in some ways, but full of potential in others. Growing up, I always took solace in that one lone patch of open space, the woods at the bottom of my street, that somehow had escaped the backhoe. It has since been developed, and I look at that with sadness, as if my special place is gone forever. But is it? Is any of it?

Civilizations come and civilizations go. Some cities have been around for thousands of years, but there are plenty of once-great cities that have diminished to near nothing. Wars, disease, famine, floods, progress, open markets, and bad juju all take their toll. A historian might say it’s part of the natural ebb and flow of civilization. The hardest part is the transition from urbane vibrancy to urban blight, suffering through mass unemployment and plunging real estate values, seeing people’s hopes and dreams take off in a moving van.

I know that most of the city fathers and mothers hope and pray that one day the city will return to its former glory. And in some cases they’re right. I know that Cleveland and Pittsburgh have undergone renaissances of sorts, rebuilding themselves from the shells of their former soot-covered selves. But in other places…

Is it really so bad that a place become as wild as it had been a hundred years earlier? That is the dream many of us hold for our new hometowns — that they retain open-space, trees, and maybe even wilderness. We don’t want the builders to come and ruin what we love. But what if they’ve already come, and they’re long gone? Can we get it back?

In the grand scheme of the earth’s history, homo sapiens are but a wink. We have come, and, most agree, we will go. The earth will carry on, with us or without us. All our cities will eventually succumb to the oceans or the forest or the dust. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it just is. And, as nationwide open-space initiatives suggest, we all could do with a little more wilderness in our lives. So why not help the inevitable along a little?

This is what I propose: the Urban Forests Initiative. Basically, cordoning off plots of land — or even entire neighborhoods — that have been abandoned, and planting native trees to make them into forest once again. Not preserving open space, but building it from the ground up. Trails could be built connecting the plots, using right-of-ways through private property of people who continue to live there.

I’ve got a vision for many of the details of this plan, but that’s the crux of it: just helping along what’s already going on. Detroit and other cities can still survive; it’s just a matter of rethinking them as smaller places. It’s time to rethink how we use land.