Summary: Forest researchers say cities need
to plant different kinds of trees.
Many cities plant only a handful of
species. That means, one pest can
wipe out a big part of a city forest.
And... the Great Depression and green
jobs. Lester talks with the director
of a new PBS American Experience documentary
about the Civilian Conservation Corps.
More…
Cities need different trees.
This is The Environment Report. I’m Lester Graham.
Urban forest researchers say cities need different kinds of trees. Having too many of the same kind of trees encourages pests.
Pests have already wiped out native trees such as chestnuts, elms and now ash.
James Kielbaso is a forester with Michigan State University. He says native trees are great… but, one of his students has found some cities are too reliant on them.
“An urban tree population should not consist of any more than ten or fifteen percent of any one species. He’s finding the trees that are most over-used tend to be our native trees.”
In some cases, maples make up 30-percent of a city’s trees. That means if a disease or a pest hits maples, a city could lose a third of its urban forest. Kielbaso says people should plant tree species not already in the neighborhood and a few hardy foreign species could help diversify a city forest.
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This is The Environment Report.
Today we hear a lot of news calling this “The worst recession since the Great Depression…” Tonight PBS begins airing a series of documentaries from American Experience called “The 1930s.” The series looks back at the Great Depression including the stockmarket crash, the dust bowl… and the government’s response… such as President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Robert Stone directed one of the five documentaries. He looked at the Civilian Conservation Corps… the CCC. Stone says it was the first of Roosevelt’s work programs… but it also tackled the biggest environmental disasters.
“We’d spent hundreds of years just chopping down all of the forests in this country and over-using all of the farmland. The topsoil was all running into our rivers and off into the ocean. And it reached a sort of crisis point in the 1920s and early ‘30s.”
(((LONG-STONE)))
FDR had watched the forests disappear and soil erode near his home in Hyde Park, New York. Putting men to work correcting those problems made sense to him.
FDR: “We are planning within a few days to ask the Congress for legislation to enable the government to take on public works, thus stimulating directly and indirectly the employment of many others in well-considered projects.”
But this was new for government. At that time… helping the poor was something for charity… not government.
Harley Jolley is one of four CCC veterans who tell their stories in the documentary.
He says hiring unemployed young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps was new to politicians. But they saw it for the practical politics it was…
“And because all those politicians were well aware that they had young men in their hometown, in their home state that could vote for them next time around, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll go with you.’ And very quickly it came to pass.”
FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps was the first… but several work programs followed.
The CCC worked on soil conservation projects, built three-thousand state parks and replanted forests. The men in the CCC planted three-billion trees—that’s estimated to be half of the trees ever planted by humans in the U.S. .
But… the documentary’s director, Robert Stone says President Roosevelt faced a lot of opposition to his government green jobs program…
“Well, there were concerns very similar to what you have today with concerns about deficit spending…”
ARCHIVE “The national debt today is 30-billion as compared to 19-billions under Hoover. And God knows Hoover was bad enough.”
“So that was on the right. And on the left there were concerns about paying these people a dollar-a-day. The unions were upset about it. But the success of it was such that it really quelled most any opposition.”
The Civilian Conservation Corps documentary… like the other documentaries in the 1930s series looks at the connections between environmental damage and economic collapse in a way that still resonate today. History is preface.
Starting tonight “The 1930’s” series from American Experience runs for five Mondays on PBS stations.
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