Posted on February 2, 2020
Trees are so, so important. They absorb noise, pollutants, and carbon dioxide (one of the greenhouse gases that is changing Earth's climate!). They provide shade, homes for wildlife, wood, oxygen, fruits, nuts, cork, rubber, syrup, and on and on - so many important things! They hold soil with their roots and therefore stop erosion, and they provide fallen leaves that creates the mulch, or rich organic material, that makes that soil capable of nourishing young plants. Trees can even give people privacy and block wind!
Of course, trees are also beautiful!
But trees can also create problems for people - especially the trees growing in cities and towns. Through the year, living, growing trees drop pods, needles, leaves, fruits, cones, pollen, and seeds - and the people responsible for raking up all that tree debris can get cross about the never-endingness of the task. Birds sitting in trees may poop on our cars and sidewalks. Tree roots may break a sidewalk or porch, and sometimes branches break during storms and threaten to fall on whatever is below.
In Melbourne, Australia, city officials wanted residents to be able to report problems or dangers with specific trees so that they could fix the problems. In order to make reporting easy, each public tree (the trees planted along the streets and in the parks, for example) was assigned an ID number, and then each tree was given its own e-mail address. If a man realized that a branch on #5318993 was in danger of falling, he could email the city workers using that tree's e-mail addy. If a teenage girl saw that a tree root was beginning to lift up a sidewalk in a way that would be dangerous for people with strollers and wheelchairs, she could report via e-mail as well.
The system worked - but there was a very nice, unintended result as well as the reports about tree problems:
Residents of Melbourne began to write love letters to their favorite trees!
Thousands of love letters!
Here are a few quotes:
"...I was struck, not by a branch, but by your radiant beauty. You must get these messages all the time. You’re such an attractive tree..."
"Dear Algerian oak, Thank you for giving us oxygen. Thank you for being so pretty..."
"Dear 1037148, You deserve to be known by more than a number. I love you. Always and forever.”
It's so nice when unintended consequences are good rather than bad!
In other words, in some forests there is almost an entire rooftop of branches and leaves, but the full-grown trees don't QUITE touch one another. Looking up, you can see channel-like gaps of sky between the trees.
