Podcast

Trees As Climate Superheroes

April 13, 2019May 17, 2019 Mike Nowak Chicago Region Tree Initiative, climate change, Colleen Murphy-Dunning, environment, gardening, healthy soil, Lydia Scott, Peggy Malecki, The Mike Nowak Show, The Morton Arboretum, tomatoes, urban forests, Urban Resources Initiative

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(April 14, 2019) In a world that is on the wrong carbon path, we’re all looking for climate superheroes, right? That’s why a recent study in the journal Science Advances is so important. As Yale Climate Connections summarizes,

America’s trees, soil, and wetlands each year capture around 11 percent of the nation’s emissions, according to EPA. The study’s researchers calculate that they could be harnessed to sequester up to 21 percent of net annual emissions of the U.S.

The authors of the study identify reforestation, replanting historically wooded settings that no longer have forests, as the natural solution with the most potential to capture additional carbon. And since, as I stated above, we’re looking for climate superheroes, that should be easy, shouldn’t it? As the Yale article states,

“For example, planting trees in cities is something that, if you were just looking at it from cost per ton of carbon stored, is relatively expensive. But that’s not why people do it; they do it because they like living near trees,” he said. “The amenity value of forests and trees is really high, so I think there’s a lot of opportunity to build political momentum around having more trees.”

Well, that’s a good first step.

Which leads us to an event at the Morton Arboretum this week called How Trees Can Help the World: Re-treeing Communities and Making the World a Cooler Place to Live. I was recently asked to be the moderator for a panel of PhDs and other folks who spend most of their waking lives considering climate change. Actually, I do, too, but I’m a radio host, not a PhD. Though I play one on the radio.

I’ve been told that the goal of this panel is to

educate and inspire the audience with tree-focused solutions to combat climate change, reduce habitat fragmentation, improve biodiversity, protect watersheds, improve public health, and increase access to nature. By presenting facts in a positive framework, the audience will be empowered to act and to help ensure a green future.

Piece. Of. Cake.

Here are the players.

Bill Schlesinger, PhD, is a biogeochemist and president emeritus at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. With a focus on environmental chemistry and global change, Schlesinger has authored or coauthored more than 200 scientific papers, among them research on human impacts on forests and soil, including the aforementioned study in Science Advances.
Jeff Walk, PhD, is the director of conservation at The Nature Conservancy in Chicago, where he leads a team of scientists in on-the-ground conservation initiatives, many of which address the challenges of climate change with nature-based solutions. These include protecting water quality in the Illinois River and other tributaries of the Mississippi River and expanding a monitoring program at Nachusa Grasslands, a tallgrass prairie conservancy in Franklin Grove, Ill., to better understand the impact of bison on prairie habitats.
Chuck Cannon, PhD, serves as the director of the Center for Tree Science at The Morton Arboretum. Cannon leads scientists and researchers at the Arboretum, connecting a large network of global collaborators to shape and expand knowledge of trees and forests around the world, and has long focused on the evolution and conservation of tree diversity. Ongoing projects include creating advanced and effective technologies for tree science as well as the development and implementation of a tree observatory platform for the collection of data on tree behavior, growth and status.
Colleen Murphy-Dunning directs both the Hixon Center for Urban Ecology and the Urban Resources Initiative at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies in New Haven, Conn. In her role, Murphy-Dunning partners with university faculty to lead field-based instruction on urban ecology for all incoming graduate students in the forestry and environmental studies program. Prior to her work at Yale, she taught agroforestry at the Kenya Forestry College and reviewed natural resource operations in Papua New Guinea for the Rainforest Action Network.
Lydia Scott is the director of the Chicago Region Trees Initiative (CRTI), a collaboration between The Morton Arboretum and approximately 165 partner organizations across the region. In leading the organization, Scott furthers CRTI’s mission to build a healthier and more diverse urban forest by 2050 as informed by findings from “Urban Trees and Forests of the Chicago Region,” a regional tree census conducted by The Morton Arboretum and the U.S. Forest Service.

The event is Wednesday, April 17 from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. at the Ginkgo Restaurant in the Visitor Center of The Morton Arboretum. You can register here. And you can have a drink while listening to us desperately search for answers to the climate conundrum. Won’t that be fun?

Two of the panelists join us on the show this morning. Lydia Scott has been here before, in June of 2017. We’re thrilled to have her back in studio. Colleen Murphy-Dunning joins us by phone from Connecticut.