Eric Oldar doesn't have to go far to find the alarming evidence. He lifts his sizable 6-foot-5 frame out of his office chair, walks 20 paces to the door, steps outside and glumly eyes the culprit: a spindly crape myrtle tree. A whole row of them bordering the Riverside parking lot.
Actually, crape myrtles aren't trees. They are shrubs that grow to look something like trees in miniature.
And that, in short, is the problem. That is what puts a knot in Oldar's jaw and leaves him muttering: "People want quality lives and communities -- they say so. But subtly, all around them, they're losing one of the essentials."
Our grand city trees are disappearing.
The towering trees that provide us cooling shade and save on air conditioning; the trees that give roost to birds; the broad-shouldered trees that soak up the heavy rains before they gather into floodwaters; the trees that cleanse our air and muffle the roar of metropolitan life; the great trees that inspire the poet in our battered urban hearts; the trees that soften the sharp corners of crowded living and connect us to the majesty of nature -- the trees are going away.
In their place: pygmy stands of crape myrtles, or clumps of even smaller bushes. Or just beds of redwood chips scattered atop plastic sheeting to make sure that even weeds don't grow.
"We're eliminating trees," says Oldar with a deep sigh. "We're letting them become trivialized; without really paying attention, we're letting them disappear."
Oldar is a forester and a pioneer in California's tiny urban forestry program, which is tucked away with firefighters in the state Department of Forestry. He has devoted most of his 27-year career to promoting urban forests, a concept that makes all the sense in the world if we think about it, which, let's agree, not many of us do. How many of us were even aware that Sunday was Arbor Day in California, the day for celebrating and planting trees?
In our mind's eye, if not in reality, cities of the United States are made glorious by their trees, and always have been. In the imagination of entrepreneurs, the city groves are a vast, untapped and profitable stock of spectacular hardwoods and softwoods for furniture, floors and home architectural details.
In truth, though, our cities are turning from green into gray -- at an alarming rate and with surprisingly costly consequences:
