Rivers are conduits of ecology.

The other thing that’s very interesting about that, too, is that rivers are conduits of ecology. For instance, the Flint River south of metro Atlanta is bringing the Coastal Plain environment north and the mountains environment south. Mountain species are traveling with the Chattahoochee.

A: I've never heard that phrased so well, that rivers are conduits of ecology.

Kolb That’s true everywhere. You’ll find these wild mixes of species along river corridors where you wouldn’t otherwise.

A: So many cities across the South and Appalachia were built at the confluences of rivers. There's a lot going on there in these urban-ecological interfaces. Speaking of those, I understand you've worked with Atlanta's city council to develop the city tree ordinance. Would you explain how that functions on public, private, and commercial property?

Kolb So the way the tree ordinance functions right now is that, if you are a private property owner, you can’t just cut down a tree because you just want to cut it down. You have to have a reason, then you can get a permit to cut that tree down. However, if you sell your property and a developer buys it, the developer can cut down any trees that they want.

So trees are basically protected once you own the property, but when the property is being developed, they’re not protected, which is a problem.

One thing we have in our tree ordinance that’s special in the city of Atlanta is an appeals process. If a developer buys a property, and they want to cut the trees down, and you live next door, you can actually appeal that on certain conditions, and sometimes you can get some of those trees protected. But the city typically signs off on widespread cutting and clearcutting of trees. They’re not necessarily supposed to do this, but they typically allow anything that a developer wants to take down.

The reason that this is happening isn’t because people just want to cut down trees. It’s because the real estate values in greater metro Atlanta are very, very high. So those older, even nice, modest-sized houses are being torn down, and they’re putting up much larger houses. When that happens, they grade the entire lot, which is the way the building trends have shifted.

One reason Atlanta still has so many trees is because, when homes were built before the 1960s, before air conditioning, people wanted big shade trees in their yards. It’s hot down here. So what would you do? You would clear a little area for your house footprint, build a foundation, and then build a house on that foundation. You didn’t grade that whole lot, so many properties still have original soils and old-growth forest remnants. They’ve been standing there, some of them, since the late 1800s. Some of them longer.

A: What roles or responsibilities do city governments have when it comes to managing urban forests? Do you feel like ordinances are the most effective tool?

Kolb Ordinances are really critical. I go to a lot of conferences on sustainability that talk about how important forests are—everybody gets a box lunch, there’s a cup of coffee, and everyone walks away fired up. But the ordinances on the books that people actually live by are coming out of the 1950s. So we have all the science, we have all the data, and we know that we need to create systems that integrate nature—it’s healthier for us, it’s healthier for the landscape, it’s creating sustainability and resiliency. But ordinances are complicated. People are bored when they read them. They don’t really want to deal with it. And the people who are financially benefiting from very weak ordinances are usually the only ones at the table, because they have a financial stake in the outcome.

What I’ve been trying to do is bring those things together. We’re not going to save every tree: that’s not the goal. The goal is to create a balance. Yes, people need to cut down trees to build houses, but we can’t cut them all down. And what’s happening now is we’re cutting down most of our trees. That’s not sustainable. We can do better. The suggestions that I’ve made are actually pretty modest at the end of the day, and they’re doable. We need to do the things that are practical, and we need to have a willingness to do them.

If you buy a car, it has to have an airbag in it, right? When airbags first came online, car companies spent millions and millions saying we can’t have airbags because the cost of cars will go up. We won’t be able to sell our cars, et cetera. The government said, ‘Well actually, we think you can do it, and we do need airbags, and we need to protect our people. So we think we’ll go ahead and require those airbags, and you figure out how to make it happen.’ And they did, and it works—we now have safer cars, and the industry is still making great profits selling them.

This is kind of similar. We can’t afford to lose all of our trees. We still need to earn money making houses, and we think there’s a balance. The role of government is to ensure that balance is there.