I’ve had an avocation in the field of environmental concerns since 1970 when I was one of the founders of Earth Day in Minnesota with another couple of people. [Around that time] I was quite interested in riverfront development in Minneapolis, and so I ran for the Park Board and was elected. And as a commissioner, I soon ran into the problem of Dutch Elm disease, which would present a major problem for the aesthetics and the environment of Minneapolis but also would have an impact on the budget of the Park Board since we were in charge of basically all the public trees in the city.

So I went to Chicago and Detroit to see what other cities were doing and it was quite a shock. … We looked into Chicago and there were zero trees, [zero] street shade trees. Then we turned around and looked back into Evanston [Illinois], which had these gorgeous, beautiful elms with their arching shape creating a pyramid over the street. So it was clear that the battle could be fought and won if you took the proper measures to keep the shade trees.

Then I went up to Detroit and that was even worse, because they had just thrown in the towel. They were looking down the street and they just said, “Well, sooner or later all these trees are going to get disease by root grafts, if nothing else, so we'll just take them all out now.” And they were just literally going down block after block clear-cutting these magnificent elm trees. It absolutely changed the entire city environment.

… I wrote a report for the Board that it was going to cost us a lot of money, but it was going to cost us more money if we did nothing, because this clear cutting was enormously expensive. So to the extent that we could, we decided to quarantine the disease in Minneapolis and then institute a reforestation plan. That was the progress that we had to make. So we had to raise our property tax levee. And, fortunately, Minneapolis is a city, perhaps unique in America, where the park system has its own tax levee which is not subject to the whims of the City Council. So we were able to do that.

... At some point we realized that something had to be done for trees on private property … taking the [diseased] tree down was an enormous cost for a homeowner -- and they didn't have a choice. The law was clear: if you had a diseased tree it had to be gone in 10 days. That was how we quarantined the disease … The state came up with some funding to assist homeowners [in taking the tree down]. But then we thought, what's going to happen now? The tree’s gone in their yard, their private tree. How are we going to get them to replant a shade tree and spend another $200 or $300 after they've already spent $500 or $600 to take the tree down?

So we started Tree Trust for a specific purpose, to provide shade trees on private property for low- and middle-income people that, otherwise, would not replant a tree. [We got some land from] the Metropolitan Waste Control Commission … and we planted nurseries. We used some of their sewage sludge and wood chips from the chipped-up elms to create decent soil compost for trees in the nursery and then started distributing trees. And continue to do so today.

… We decided to have a planting rotation over a 10-year period so that instead of having a mono-culture of all Elm trees we would plant different species on different blocks and so forth. We felt that the individual homeowner needed -- for energy conservation purposes, if nothing else – to replace that shade tree. Otherwise we thought the neighborhoods would look shabby. … Without the trees, this city of lakes and parks would look like a fairly unattractive place.

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