City of Trees

by Sophie Cunningham

  Blue gums were of particular concern because they used a lot of water and had a high oil content (though other trees including the California bay laurel have a higher oil content). It’s also fair to say that eucalypts don’t support local flora and fauna in the way native trees do, though they have been around long enough to begin to ingratiate themselves with the environment. When driving down to Los Angeles from San Francisco I visited monarch butterflies in a eucalyptus grove at Pismo Beach. The sight of clusters of orange and black butterflies lifting in a golden explosion as the morning sun hit the trees’ limbs was something to behold. Each year the eastern monarchs migrate thousands of kilometres from as far as Canada, down to Florida and Mexico. Their traditional habitats have been destroyed over the last century and now it is eucalypts that provide a winter home for them. Once numbered in the millions, the monarch butterfly population now sits at around twenty thousand. Pesticides, climate change and a declining eucalypt population are some of the reasons for this.

  There was a moment when the eucalypt’s fortunes swung from a ‘Wonder-Tree, Tree of Hope, Tree of Fulfilment’ (to quote Jared Farmer); to an invasive fireweed that needs to be ‘exterminated’, a ‘gasoline tree’. That moment was the Oakland firestorm of 1991. More than three thousand city houses and hundreds of apartments were destroyed. Twenty-five people died. Eucalypts and the fuel load they created were blamed. But if Eucalyptus really were responsible for the 1991 Oakland firestorm, why are so many organisations still arguing about what to do with them some twenty-five years later? In 2016, 5.67 million dollars was granted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for tree-cutting projects aimed at reducing the risk of wildfire. The City of Oakland, UC Berkeley and the East Bay Regional Park District were to share the funds. A number of parties—the Sierra Club, FEMA, UC Berkeley, the Hills Conservation Network and the City of Oakland—were at odds about how it should be done. The Sierra Club, which, along with the City of Oakland and UC Berkeley supported the removal of all non-native trees, and the Hills Conservation Network, a neighbourhood group that does not support the trees’ removal, filed suit separately after FEMA released a final version of an environmental-impact (EI) statement. Both parties found the EI deficient, though for different reasons. This was not the first time the fate of the eucalyptus was taken to the courts. Put simply the question under debate was: what replaces trees if you remove them? And will that environment be more fire safe? Litigation has considered that question four times, and four times the outcome has gone against tree removal.

  I wondered how much of this argument was a desire to avoid the fact that it costs money to manage the wildland–urban interface, money that the City of Oakland was reluctant to spend, or simply did not have? And, to get back to the blue gums of Strawberry Creek, where did UC Berkeley’s plan for expansion fit in?

  In an attempt to get some answers to these questions I interviewed one of the members of the Hills Conservation Network, Peter Scott. We sat in his house in the Berkeley Hills, which had been rebuilt after burning down in 1991. Peter set out his concerns about the ways in which developers were exploiting anxiety about fire. He pointed out to me that the university was looking to put up more buildings on campus and needed an excuse to remove the trees. They were less ready to focus on other fire-related issues such as empty reservoirs and the lack of standardisation among fire hydrants which led to mismatches between fire-hose attachments and fire-hydrant fittings.

  I asked Peter where he was on the day of the Oakland firestorm and he told me he had been working out of town. I commented that that would be quite a relief in one way as there was little he could have done to protect his house. He hesitated then said, no, not really: his mother had been living with him and his family. She’d called his sister three times asking her to organise help and his sister, in turn, had been on the phone to the fire department. This was to no avail, in part because of the empty water tanks and the incompatible fittings on hydrants and fire trucks. The house burned and his mother died as she waited for help.

  Peter went on to tell me that his daughter, who was a teenager at that time, had been so deeply traumatised by the death of her grandmother, the loss of their home and the instability of the years that followed that she eventually committed suicide.

  Peter was working hard to maintain a certain reserve. ‘I want to make it clear,’ he said to me, ‘that I don’t blame the trees.’

  During summer and fall, 2018, California experienced its greatest wildfires in recorded history. The worst of these, the Camp Fire, burned over six hundred square kilometres and destroyed more than eighteen thousand structures, most of them within the first four hours of the blaze. It claimed at least eighty-five lives. At the time of writing, more than two hundred people were still missing and thousands were living in tent cities. Significantly, the firestorm spread from house to house rather than from tree to tree. The pine trees of Paradise, the town most devastated by the fires, still had their canopies intact: winds pushed the fire along so fast it never rose into them. While the Camp Fire raged, a second fire system, the Woolsley, burned just south of LA. That fire destroyed 1643 structures and wildlife habitats and killed three people. Two southern mountain lions, P-74 and P-64, also died.

  Fire and environmental historian Stephen Pyne speaks and writes with the passionate conviction of a man convinced we are on the brink. When I lived in San Francisco I attended a lecture he gave on the importance of allowing fire to do its part in maintaining the environment. Low-intensity fires used to burn off undergrowth and other fire fuel were the way the ecosystem maintained itself; the way that Native Americans and Indigenous Australians used to manage their environment. In recent years American fire services have stopped doing prescribed burns because of the law and public and political anxiety on the subject. There is a tentative return to the practice in some states, including California, but prescribed burning remains underutilised.

  These days tens of millions of people are living in an environment known as the wildland–urban interface. In California it is mandated that people clear thirty metres around their houses, but that requirement stops at individual property lines and homes are still built close to one another. Fire policy also needs to distinguish between structure fires and wildland fire. For reasons that include increases in both temperatures and fuel loads, fires are burning hotter and becoming more dangerous. In Australia, as with California, the fire season is—according to fire agencies in both countries—now close to continuous throughout the year.

  When I discussed these issues with Peter Scott he reminded me that nearly all destructive California wildfires have been brush-and-grass fires, which move and change direction so quickly firefighters can’t contain them, as had been the case on Angel Island. Trees, in contrast, provide a canopy that shades the understorey, mitigates winds, raises the moisture at ground level, discourages the growth of weedy, flammable plants, and slows the progress of fire when it does ignite. When forests do burn, old-growth forests don’t do so as intensely as younger forests—but we are losing our old-growth forests.

  I’m leaving the last word on this to Peter—he’s had more reason than most to think about these issues. He was graceful about me using his words as the title for this essay, but not convinced. If you’re going to argue that you shouldn’t blame the trees, Peter said to me, you have to ask the question, why not? And the answer to that question is that trees are not the problem. Trees are the solution.

  ____________________

  1 ‘Quarantine Station North Head 1900–1984: A history of place’, Carmel Patricia Kelleher MA. PhD thesis, Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University, May 2014.

  2 ‘The Lost Poetry of the Angel Island Detention Center,’ Beenish Ahmed, New Yorker, February 22, 2017.

  3 Trees in Paradise, Jared Farmer, W. W. Norton, 2013.

  4 ‘Little girl, rose still in hand, found in coffin beneath SF home’, Steve Rubenstein, San Francisco C
hronicle, May 25, 2016.

  5 http://jacklondonpark.com

  6 Hay, p. 151.

  MEXICAN FAN PALM

  (Washingtonia robusta)

  The palm stands on the edge of space.

  WALLACE STEVENS

  VIRGINIA and I have driven Highway One, north and south of San Francisco, dozens of times. It felt like a privilege every time because it was clear to us that sections of the road would not last much longer. As I was writing this essay, a year after my return, I was not surprised to find out that my favourite guesthouse on that highway, the eighty-year-old Deetjans, with its cedar-lined rooms untouched by locks or internet connections, its fluffy doonas and open fires, had been seriously damaged in a mudslide. Swathes of the highway were closed south of Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park.

  When we drove north of San Francisco there were often flooded sections of road that sat below sea level. We once saw a family of otters dash along a sliver of beach by the highway before disappearing into a pile of rocks, heading I know not where. Virginia swam in Tomales Bay one warm spring day, only to be shown iPhone footage of the (non-great white) shark that was swimming close by. We’d been told many times about the great white breeding ground not so far away, which meant that in my imagination Tomales Bay was just a mass of great whites leaping out of the ocean with seal pups in their mouth, 24/7. Indeed a shark had recently been filmed doing just that by the ferry launch at Alcatraz.

  We’d opened fresh oysters and eaten them with a cold beer in the picnic grounds that hovered between sea and gutter. We’d wound around the coast, high up into the fog then down again, only to find, once we were below the fog line, that there was yet more fog, inverted over the Pacific Ocean, a veritable sea of cloud, catching the sun as it set in a rainbow of greys and dusky pinks, gold, violet and blue. An extraordinary sight; one I’d been lucky enough to see not once but twice in a single year.

  To the south of San Francisco we’d walked under the lichen dripping from cypress at Point Lobos and watched flocks of pelicans—smaller and darker than the Australian pelican—stream through the sky. Soon after that, for more than a hundred kilometres, cliffs plunged down into beds of giant kelp that lurched in the wild ocean below. They rose up on the other side of the road also, dotted with pampas grass, or with cypress, or the signs of recent landslides. There used to be more than a million sea otters in the world, but these days there are only a hundred thousand worldwide. Three thousand of those live on this coastline. We saw them holding hands and surfing. Rafts of ratbags, their squeals rising up the cliff to greet us. Ocean spray rose high up also, though it never made it to where we stood. The views were variously windswept and clear, or taken in through the filter of cypress leaves and branches. Just the once we saw a condor circling high above Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. Closer to Los Angeles, near Hearst Castle, we stopped to see the elephant seals: seals giving birth, Pacific gulls pecking at the pups as soon as they slid out, bull seals rolling on the newborns as they heaved themselves up to hump the mothers exhausted from giving birth, from feeding their young, from not eating. The beach stank of shit and blood and rang with the screams of hungry pups, assaulted mothers, horny bulls and bachelor seals vying for attention by crashing their chests together in the surf. We half-cried, half-stood back in amazement at this appalling sight. One of the young girls we were travelling with, our friend Elsie, turned to her mum and said she didn’t think she ever wanted a boyfriend. We tried to explain that things were different in the animal kingdom, but I don’t think any of us were convinced.

  On one of our trips to Los Angeles we abandoned Highway One and drove the more efficient I-5. As we were driving we saw a large semi-trailer carrying a mature palm tree. Virginia, an excellent supporter of @sophtreeofday, leaned out the window on the passenger’s side and took some pictures for me. It’s no easy task to transplant a mature palm. You need palm experts to tie up the fronds and excavate the root ball. It takes a crane to place the tree in its new home. The tree, having survived being uprooted from the soil where it first grew, needs to cope with being inserted into a concrete-lined street, with few fellow trees to protect it from the radiant heat. There are palms that are native to California, but most of the iconic palms that define Los Angeles streets are from Mexico. They were chosen by the Division of Forestry, looking for cheap, uniform street trees that could be planted by Depression-relief teams before the LA Olympics in 1932.

  The previous Los Angeles favourite was what Australians call the peppercorn, but it, like the ficus in San Francisco, got a bad reputation for buckling sidewalks. Melbourne folk are often quite sentimental about the peppercorn, and a stand of them runs the length of the Kensington stock route down from the Kensington Newmarket Saleyards on the corner of Racecourse and Smithfield roads. The saleyards opened in 1861, the year the Melbourne Cup was first run just across the road. Drovers used to walk the animals up from the ports, and eventually the roads were built to accommodate this. At its height of activity in 1944, 6.5 million sheep went through the saleyard. My mother tells me that my grandfather, a farmer from Tylden, purchased his sheep here during the late spring and summer sales. That there was a saying that went: ‘Horses never, cattle sometimes but you can always shear an income.’ The peppercorns that line the bluestone lanes between the saleyards and the Maribyrnong River were planted in the 1920s. Their job was to provide shade for the hundreds and thousands of animals that were herded along here for three and a half kilometres before crossing Lynch’s Bridge to the Angliss Meatworks in Footscray. As time went on the animals were herded at night because of concerns that local residents would be stampeded as they went about their daily business. I took to regularly walking that line of trees, under fronds and pink peppercorns that swayed in the breeze. Despite this bucolic scene, it wasn’t hard to imagine the sheep, the cattle, sweating, frantic, as they were driven towards a fearful death.

  ‘Older trees grow top heavy, can blow down in storms and are consequently no longer planted on public streets in Riverside, California for fear of lawsuits’, I read in a Victorian environmental impact statement that set out why Victorians should avoid the peppercorn as Californians now do. It has ‘potential to cause damage to property, though this appears not directly as a result of its growth habit. Its gum is also documented as causing damage to car duco.’ On the plus side: ‘In degraded locations mature trees may provide food and shelter to native animals including birds, bats and possums’ and ‘provide some assistance in food and shelter to desirable species’.

  When I read that my first thought was: fuck car duco and fuck fear of lawsuits. My second thought was that those peppercorns provided some much needed shelter to me at primary school. My third thought was that most of the planet could now be described as a degraded location.

  In 1931 alone more than twenty-five thousand Mexican palm trees were planted in Los Angeles. Many of these are reaching the end of their lives. Now palms, like peppercorns, will be replaced with trees that provide more shelter and use less water. Over the few days we were in Los Angeles I tried and failed to imagine the city without them; but I assume that one day there will be pictures of the palms of Los Angeles in a museum, much as there are pictures of the oaks of Oakland in the Oakland Museum. And some person in the future will look at that photo and think how strange Los Angeles looks with boulevards lined by tall palms, all slightly inclined towards the Santa Ana winds. For balance.

  IN THE LONG RUN THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS

  THERE are two men I refer to as my father, or call Dad. It’s a situation people find confusing so I’ll walk you through it. I was born in Melbourne in 1963 to Peter Nicholls and Sari Wawn. In 1968 they travelled to the US with my brother and me; the marriage dissolved fairly quickly once we got there and Saul, Mum and I returned to Australia. Mum met John in 1969. Peter stayed overseas until the late 1980s. John adopted my brother and me. I have two birth certificates. Sophia Alice Nicholls, Sophia Alice Cunningham. There are two versions of me, and the fathers
of both versions have died in the last two years.

  After John, who I called Dad, was diagnosed with frontal lobe dementia, I read an article that described how long it could take the symptoms of the disease to develop and the personality transformation that went with it. At the time I felt some relief that our interactions, increasingly repetitive and uncomfortable, hadn’t just been him, or me. (Whatever ‘him’ meant. Whatever ‘I’ am.)

  I don’t mean to imply that one day my dad was perfect, then he changed and the difficult things about him were merely symptoms. Life isn’t like that either. What I’m trying to say is that in 2002 my dad came to stay in my flat in Melbourne. A neighbour and friend told me that he kept making passes at her and she hid when she heard him coming. He got worked up about cyclists using the road; he got worked up about all kinds of things. He made rude comments about the food I cooked. I started to count the number of bottles left in the recycling and was shocked. I knew Dad drank too much but seriously, I’d had no idea.

  In 2003 I had a phone call from Jakarta. Dad wanted me to look at a flat he was thinking of buying. He needed me to see it in the next hour, despite the fact that I was at work, that I had meetings. I went and looked at the flat. It wasn’t right.

  In 2004 I had a call from Jakarta. Dad wanted me to check out a short-term rental unit for his next trip home. I did so, and then sent him an email about its various qualities. He called me again and asked me to go and visit it at different times of day so I could let him know how much sun it got through the day. He particularly wanted to know if the morning light would be good. I said no. When he arrived to look at houses for himself, he drank heavily, wandered the house all night and left the television on with the sound dialled up to full blast.