Tree Speech

San Antonians got another dose of bad news today from the Express-News. A jury’s $15.5 million fine against a homebuilder who was caught

clearing what inspectors later determined were more than 14,000 significant trees and 1,455 heritage trees

was overturned.

Instead,

Continental Homes of Texas…will have to replant thousands of trees, 166th District Judge Martha Tanner ruled Monday.

Tanner struck down a $1,000 per tree civil fine the jury assessed based on arguments by the defendant that San Antonio cannot levy fines in its extra-territorial jurisdiction. However, she did stipulate that Continental is to plant 108,000 diameter-inches of new trees.

Newly planted tree that died on development site

In other words, Continental’s punishment is simply to do what developers do anyway, replant saplings after they level the mature trees. This “penalty” reinforces a popular myth; trees are a renewable resource and so it’s OK to simply mow them down.

What is wrong with this thinking?

1. Old heritage trees that are hundreds of years old can never be replaced. For a variety of reasons, their loss is irreversible.
2. Trees require substantial room (e.g. land) to grow. Once the land is paved over, there’s not going to be much “renewing” going on there.
3. Planted trees die frequently, have shorter life spans, and take decades to provide any significant environmental benefits.
4. When a site is mass-graded, all the native understory trees and plants are destroyed along with the canopy trees. Replanting small canopy trees can never restore the plant associations that formed a healthy ecosystem on that site.

In a story titled Why suburbs will never have tall trees, a reporter notes that modern development techniques and machinery leave soil in such poor shape that

It may be decades before the place will begin to support the kind of trees the homeowners want.
“Its really not the first generation of trees thats going to be this spectacular canopy that you see in those old neighbourhoods of any town or city,” says Richard Ubbens, chief of urban forestry for Toronto. “Its going to be the second generation that starts to form that canopy.” In other words, it could take more than a century — and generations of homeowners — before that subdivision starts looking like verdant Riverdale.
The problem: The kind of soil that trees need and the way they actually grow both happen to run counter to a lot of popular misconceptions, and headfirst into modern building techniques.

That’s why Tanner’s decision spells trouble for trees.

Also read “Americas Builder” is pleased with $15.5 million fine