Box's view prevailed. The final ordinance, passed by the city council later that month, raised the fine to $2,000 but made its actual levying unlikely. According to the new ordinance, any number of small trees could be removed (even clear-cut) without penalty, and bigger trees could be removed as long as they were later replaced with trees equivalent to the trunk thickness of what had been cut. That meant five 10-inch-thick oaks, with all their attendant benefits—large, older trees release more oxygen, provide more shade and absorb up to 70 times more air pollution than young trees—could be replaced by 50 1-inch saplings. Developers could avoid replanting if they chose to mitigate by donating trees to the city or paying into the reforestation fund. The enacted version also did away with the city forester and tree board, making enforcement nearly impossible since the task of overseeing all trees in Dallas fell to just four city arborists.
The ordinance's passage in 1994 accentuated the split between environmentalists and "developers," which in environmental circles had become as nasty an epithet as "tree-hugger" was to the other side. John Giedraitis, the urban forestry program manager for the Texas Forest Service, a state agency focusing on tree-related issues, views the city's tree ordinance as "a development ordinance," not only because of its lax regulations and slap-on-the-wrist disciplinary measures, but also because of development's perennial role in shaping the city's history.
Mark Graham
A plastic fence separates shady, wooded yards from a once-forested lot that developers of Grady Niblo Estates clear-cut to make room for a new subdivision (above). Trees, apparently, weren’t on the list of things the developers wanted to preserve in the development, which neighbors describe as a moonscape.
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Although the ordinance seemed a triumph for developers, there was one hitch: Development and trees would have to co-exist, if not for aesthetic reasons—it is no coincidence that the priciest neighborhoods in Dallas also boast the nicest trees—then for environmental ones.
In 1990, the EPA found that ozone levels in the Dallas area were unacceptably high. The agency gave the Dallas-Fort Worth area until November 1996 to comply with federal air standards; it failed. The EPA extended the deadline to 1999; it failed again. (Dallas achieved partial compliance in 2007; the deadline for full compliance has been extended to 2010.)
Although nonprofit groups like the Texas Trees Foundation would later begin planting trees near state highways to gauge their effects on air quality, the scientific community has long been aware of the beneficial impact of trees on the atmosphere. Trees store (sequester, in scientific circles) carbon dioxide and release oxygen. In breathing, humans are just the opposite: We use oxygen and release carbon dioxide, so trees are perfect breathing partners. But since global climate change and the harmful effects of atmospheric ozone became widely accepted in the late 1990s, scientists have been looking to trees for answers. In addition to carbon dioxide, trees also sequester harmful air pollutants—ozone, particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide—many of which, in Dallas, derive largely from vehicle emissions.
"In particular with global climate change," explains Janette Monear, executive director of the Texas Trees Foundation, "we need to be planting now for the future, and doing research around which trees can tolerate more drought, which trees can sequester more carbon dioxide, [and] which trees can take up the most amount of water."
In cities such as Minneapolis, urban forestry programs have been around as long as women's suffrage, and the benefits are striking. Minneapolis has nearly 1 million trees that cover almost a quarter of its urban area, saving residents $6.8 million in energy costs and injecting an additional $7.1 million into its property values every year, according to a recent study by the U.S. Forest Service. Giedraitis, of the Texas Forest Service, says a similar study in Houston found that a tree raised the property value of a house by an average of $4,000—a number Houser likes to throw out when he advocates that Dallas fund an inventory to value the trees in its own urban forest.
"It's like me giving you this portfolio of stocks, and you don't know what's in it," Houser says. "How can we manage an asset we don't understand?"
The perpetual push by tree activists for the city to provide meaningful tree protections gained some traction at City Hall after Laura Miller was elected councilwoman in May 1998.
"She became a real advocate," says Seaman, who joined forces with Houser after the Presbyterian Hospital imbroglio. "When we had issues that came up, we could actually pick up the phone and call a council person. We'd never been able to do that before."
Yet having a friend in a power position wasn't enough to stop two incidents that seemed to corroborate continuing local government indifference to nature preservation.
One day before dawn in July 1998, the city of Carrollton took a bulldozer to an egret breeding ground, citing complaints about the noise and "offensive odor" emanating from the area. Many Carrollton residents were outraged; the Morning News published a series of vituperative letters to the editor calling the action a "horrible slaughter" and a "dark-of-night atrocity." Speculations abounded that the rookery had been bulldozed to clear the way for a new senior center.
In response, some Carrollton residents formed an advisory Wildlife Task Force. Nothing could bring back more than 300 dead birds—among them cattle egrets and herons—but "it was a way to help resolve the issue," Houser says. A year after the incident, Carrollton was ordered to pay the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service $70,000 for its violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
