Managing Our Green World

Did you ever fly coast-to-coast on a clear day? Our “green world” is also brown, blue, white, and other colors, depending on the season and your point of view. Yet, the United States has a greater variety of plants (grasses, herbs, shrubs, and trees) than any other country in the world. Within our ecosystem, there is a constant biological tug-of-war; nevertheless, green plants are essential to all life. We are totally dependent on them.

Actually our green world is a dynamic everchanging scene where a daily struggle for survival rages: for room in the sun, for moistures, for soil nutrients, and for air. For millions of years, there has been a recurring cycle of growth, decline, and regrowth.

We face many critical choices in working with nature. What we do, or what we fail to do, determines how successful we are in making these choices and managing our green world. Recent EPA statistics show encouraging improvements in both air and water pollution, and our developing technology can further this trend. But economic factors must continue to be part of the cost: benefit formula.

Abundant energy, modern medicine, and other characteristics of our private enterprise system, together with mechanization, pesticides, genetics and improved green world technology, have provided us with a longer life span, better standard of living, and more free time than any other country in the world, in all history.

To continue enjoying the benefits of our abundant green world, without detrimental side effects, we must utilize the results of available research. To control pests that pollute our environment (the worm in your apple, the rot in your tomato, and the blight that ruins your tree), we need to continue managing our environment with the technology available to us today. While doing so, we can also look for improved methods for tomorrow.

Yet, banning of sprays for agriculture, forest, and economic pests, prohibition of clear-cutting and prescribed burning in forest management, and other efforts of hard-core environmentalists, hamper opportunities to assure continuation of our standard of living. These same over-restrictive campaigns are frequently directed toward modern utility, municipal, and commercial vegetation management methods.

A national survey has documented how appreciated and desired this green world is by everyone. Green survival and “green all around us” is given a 95% importance rating — more than nearby schools, churches, shopping centers, or even good neighbors!

Within our green world, trees are the oldest, largest, and most important life forms. They provide shade, beauty, screening, historic, and sentimental attachments with the past, recreational opportunities, living air and water filters for our effluent discharges, as well as adding financially to real estate values by as much as 20%.

In selecting trees, shrubs, and other green plants, consider foliage, flower, fruit, bark, branching habit, pest resistance, hardiness, growth rate and size at maturity, and other characteristics suitable to your situation or requirements.

Nature with its hurricanes, freezes, droughts, floods, fires, epidemics, and other disasters, causes more damage to the environment than does man. However, man’s “progress” may cause problems when he bulldozes, burns and clears without careful planning, and intelligent implementation of the plan.

With 50 states, 3,000 counties, and more than 50,000 municipalities, government agencies themselves sometimes do the wrong thing at the wrong time, through ignorance or apathy. Nevertheless, govern ment regulations and guidelines overwhelm us with an avalanche of paper. This results in our forced submission of a responding paper avalanche. Dollar signs are even attached to so-called “lost opportunity” and “mitigative costs” in the cost: benefit evaluation. But when will this end (or even slow down)?

Answers to offsetting these increasing costs of vegetation management, are found in working more closely with nature. Instead of wasteful pruning practices, misdirected removal policies, and spray over-kill, opportunities exist to relate natural methods to vegetation management. These concepts are often overlooked by the traditional engineering, forestry, or landscape architecture approach.

Natural pruning, selective removal, chemical growth inhibition, and manipulation of plant communities, reinforced where applicable by realistic local ordinances, can save substantially in budgeting and performing this work. Vegetation managers can manage their green world in harmony with the environment, and in harmony with ecologists, property owners, and government agencies at each level.

We can benefit from application of nature’s inherent self-healing and self-maintaining ways. Unnecessary costly expenditures can thereby be reduced. Written policy statements and manuals must be supplemented by indoctrination, training, and continual supervision in the field by competent technicians. Theoretical concepts must be applied differently for each existing situation.

So, to continue enjoying the benefits of our abundant green world, we must utilize all the applicable results of available research. Hopefully, we can then continue managing our environment — for ourselves, our children, and generations yet to come.

• © 1978, International Society of Arboriculture. All rights reserved.