To stop California’s 6 million urban trees from downing power lines, crushing homes or toppling streets when they die, humans must step in.
This week, a handful of arborists and members of the Long Beach Conservation Corps gathered on a scrappy patch of land in a corner of a city park to do just that.
Early in the morning, troop members used a construction vehicle to grab one of dozens of logs from under the shade structure and throw it onto a giant orange lumber milling machine.
“You know what happened – the same routine,” Tito Leulusoo, the regiment’s chief of staff, shouted to the group. “Should be easy. Let’s go get it.
The saw whirred to life. Legion members slowly and cleanly cut the bark from one side of the log. The piece of wood, once a thick eucalyptus tree that lived in the city, will one day become a bench—perhaps in a city park in Long Beach.
This was the germ of the Legion’s dream a few years ago. The Corps has begun planting trees Since its establishment in 1987, Now it hopes to care for the trees after they die, turning them into usable wood for homes, tables, benches, sculptures and more.
“The only limit is your imagination,” said John Mahoney, urban timber manager for West Coast Arborist. “It’s humanity’s favorite building material, and whether you look back or look forward to the future – it’s the warmth of wood.”
Dan Knapp, executive director of the Long Beach Conservation Corps, would like to see the program grow even more. For now, they’re working on and off with some borrowed equipment, but Knapp would like to see a group of corps members working full-time on the project, their own mill and kiln to dry the wood, and a storefront to sell the wood — all Located on the same plot of land.
For every tree the Legion grinds, it hopes to plant two.
The amount of wood available in cities is not small. each year, More trees fall More trees are cut down in cities than from national forests, and researchers estimate urban trees could replace about 10% American annual wood consumption.
After receiving a $1 million grant from Cal Fire in 2022 to launch the project, the Corps immediately turned to one of the state’s longtime leaders in urban timber: West Coast Arborists.
The group quickly agreed to help the Legion. The city is rich in timber resources. “We’d be foolish to think we could take on this alone,” Mahoney said. “It’s going to take everyone to drive the movement. … As long as you don’t need credit, you can save the world.
West Coast arborists say their urban wood ends up in the homes of A-list celebrities (who they are not authorized to name) if acoustic guitar body and appeared at the Los Angeles County Fair as part of A man balancing on a log rolling across the lagoon).
“You never hear where the wood was grown,” Mahoney said, “but for us it’s cool to think that trees planted in Long Beach are now in Architectural Digest…what the heck, This is so cool.
Mahoney comes from a family that loves trees, and he’s full of interesting facts about them—from how fungi dye wood any color of the rainbow to the correct way to calculate a tree’s age. (Always add five years to the ring count; the first few years will be squeezed into the center of the tree, he said.)
During the milling process, Mahoney and a colleague instruct corps members as they operate the giant milling machine.
For Knapp, it’s not just the environmental benefits that are exciting about urban wood, but the opportunity to reach young people who are unsure of how to move forward in life and provide them with employment and career opportunities.
“I think we attract young people and that’s a key part of their lives,” Knapp said. “You could be a high school dropout. You could have been incarcerated. You could be all of those things, and you would come to us.
The Corps provides members with opportunities to complete their GED, attend college or trade school, and meet with employers.
“I’m a classic story of how you’re on a bad path,” LeRusu said. “The Legion steered me on the right path.”
High school wasn’t easy for Leulusoo, who was born and raised in Long Beach. Some of his family members were in the military, so he decided to join.
Marco Navarrete and Madisen Tanore both joined the Legion after starting their college education. They couldn’t ignore their desire to get their hands dirty and make a direct impact on their communities.
“Legion, they let you try anything you want,” said Navarrete, who grew up in Los Angeles and is studying psychology but hopes to go into project management. “It’s going to help me here … whether it’s in the Corps or anywhere in Long Beach, really.”
For some of the five players on site, it was their first day in the yard. They’ve previously worked on road construction, irrigation, and various other Corps projects, and today join the pragmatic Leulusoo and the giddy Mahoney in learning the art of wood milling.
The Corps has even developed a 40-hour training program with West Coast Arborists designed to prepare Corps members for entry-level jobs in the field. Knapp’s hope is that if they don’t end up finding work as West Coast arborists, they can use their skills to perform sustainable logging in Southern California forests, which are becoming overwhelmed. flammable vegetation.
Building an urban wood project from the ground up is not easy, and it is an even more difficult challenge if cities want to take full advantage of the 10% of wood consumption that urban wood can meet.
First, cities need to know where the dying trees are. Lara Roman, a research ecologist with the Forest Service, said cities can take two approaches: proactive and reactive.
“Reactive management, where all you can do is respond to the latest emergency, is generally not considered an ideal system in urban forestry,” Roman said. “The ideal system is that they already have an up-to-date inventory and know where all the most at-risk trees are.”
By taking an inventory of all the trees in an area, the city can send crews to remove dangerous trees when severe storms are approaching, or to remove specific tree species that are susceptible to the pest, which is spreading across the country toward Southern California.
But these inventories are difficult and expensive to create and maintain. “Doing a tree inventory is very, very expensive. You have to pay someone to go down every street and measure every tree. “It’s a lot of manual labor. “
Even if an organization receives word of a fallen tree, saving it for lumber processing requires extra care, and not all trees can still be used as lumber, especially if they succumbed to disease or pests.
In this case it is usually cut into mulch and composted, as California Residents prohibited (include companies and governments) from sending dead trees to landfills.
However, this negates one of the main benefits of urban trees: they capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their wood.
“Urban trees sequester carbon for a very short time,” Love said. “If a tree grows for 30 years, that means it has 30 years of carbon sequestration, but if the city comes and chops it down and turns it into wood chips, and then those wood chips rot, then the carbon goes back into the original Location.
However, arborists can still keep carbon out of the air if they use felled trees as mulch to support gardens, new trees or other plant life.
“Mulch is awesome,” Mahoney said, launching into another tree fact. “What is the highest use for a tree?” he said, referring to which end-of-life use would sequester the most carbon. It turns out Mulch is second only to woodfirewood comes third and landfill comes last.
“Am I opposed to mulch? No. In urban wood, “we’re basically picking pearls.” “
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