Transcript: How Trees Save Your Home from Floods and Landslides
CLARICE: Good morning, everybody, or whatever time of day you listen to the podcast. This is Environmentally Speaking.
MARISA: Hi, everyone. I’m Marisa Desautel, an environmental attorney here in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. And good morning, good afternoon, good evening, as well.
CLARICE: Yeah. I guess I don’t shout out the evening folks. Good evening. And I’m Clarice.
MARISA: Maybe people listen to this to go to sleep.
CLARICE: I would.
MARISA: I think I have.
CLARICE: I think my dad has made that joke a couple times, so.
MARISA: Thanks, dad.
CLARICE: You know what, good night, dad. I’m Clarice. I’m coming in with questions, topics. And today we’re talking about something that Marisa and I have jokingly called, well, duh. But there is this article, Marisa, that you found about how planting native trees can have a positive impact against erosion.
MARISA: I appreciate the PG-13 no duh.
CLARICE: Yeah.
MARISA: I’m just going to go ahead and say it, no shit.
CLARICE: Yeah, basically.
MARISA: When we were setting up the calendar for this podcast, that’s the title, I think, that you included in the subject line, no shit trees. So what am I talking about here. I think this goes for pretty much every property owner that — that I know with the exception of maybe one or two wetlands biologists that if a tree appears to be any kind of threat in any manner we cut it down. Oh, look, that tree is slightly rotted in the back. We should cut it down.
And I’m of the opinion as a trained biologist that that tree knows what it’s doing. It doesn’t need you to come in and cut it down. It knows how to die. There is ecological value to leaving a dead tree up and if it falls then so be it. You deal with that because the value associated with leaving trees alone to do their thing is higher than cutting it down and thinking that you’re some kind of landscape architect or biologist that should step in and assist the tree.
CLARICE: Absolutely. And, you know, we’ve talked about — specifically the article that we’re referencing, and of course we’ll include it in the show notes, is it looks like there is a study that was done out in Sydney, Australia talking about planting native trees to help fight erosion and just basically landslides, mudslides that happen during the rainy season. And I can’t help but say, yeah, I feel like we know that. So the fact that they’re — I don’t know.
I don’t know if this was part of a bigger process where they needed a study, they needed to put together the numbers because it’s common sense and I couldn’t tell you what the numbers are, but the fact that there needed to be a study done I’m hoping is a small step to a bigger initiative. But, otherwise, if we were doing the study just to find out if this does help, yeah, it helps, yeah. The roots are going to hold the dirt in. It’s going to anchor. It’s going to keep stuff where, you know, it is around the tree and will continue to do that instead of having mounds and mounds of loose dirt everywhere.
[0:03:36] MARISA: Given that you recognize and I recognize that this is a no duh topic, why do we keep cutting the trees down?
CLARICE: I wish I knew.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: And you know what’s interesting is the amount of times that we’ve now seen the effects and we’ve now mentioned the effects. I’m wondering if it’s becoming a no duh topic to other people where it’s just something that they didn’t think about. And we’ve referenced this before in our episode about graveyards in Rhode Island and how there’s been erosion and water damage and that has had some spooky and morbid consequences, but a lot of those areas don’t have a lot of trees.
If you go to your local cemetery, there are a couple of strategically planted trees to look nice, but depending on how that property is situated, if it is higher up on a hill and there’s no trees and we’re constantly, you know, overturning the dirt and messing with it in a way, yeah, eventually stuff is going to move. We talked about this again in California with the atmospheric rivers. There are huge areas in California where land is just disappearing because of a lot of native tree cutdown. And of course there’s that balance of housing development and all of that, but at some point it can’t be one versus the other. There needs to be some consideration for both sides because eventually there won’t be a ton of space and that space will wash away.
MARISA: Yeah. And in years where there is heavy precipitation, even here in New England without a root structure to hold stream banks and other natural land features in place that’s when you get massive landslides and slope erosion and issues that will impact your property’s value. So the irony here for me is people are cutting trees down. Oh, it’s too close to the house. I have to cut it down. I don’t want it to hit the roof. Okay. Well, then now you’re going to deal with flooding and storm water and infiltration into your basement and soil erosion. Even if you’re not that close to a river or a stream, trees provide a network of support underground.
CLARICE: Absolutely.
MARISA: And once you take that tree down, you’re now inviting flooding onto your property. So what’s the better deal here. Maybe leave the tree because it knows what it’s doing and it knows how to die. Even if it’s dead you leave the tree and you let the root structure continue and then you don’t have to deal with flooding. And if something falls on your house, then you just deal with that because I think that’s a lot easier than cutting the tree down and upsetting the entire ecosystem and foundation and potentially your house is a complete loss because it’s totally flooded.
[0:06:41] CLARICE: Yeah. It’s a tough balance. I completely agree. I think the idea of cutting down a tree just because it’s too close doesn’t work for me.
MARISA: No.
CLARICE: If your tree is shaky, if it is literally starting to lean too close, I can understand [inaudible] precautions. I can see the concern of avoiding that, but there’s —
MARISA: I do not. I am on the other end of that spectrum. I do not see it.
CLARICE: I don’t know, man. We’re going to agree to disagree on that one.
MARISA: Okay.
CLARICE: I can understand the concern there, but cutting it down when the concern does not yet exist is something that we overlap in and it just doesn’t make a ton of sense. So, I mean, we’ll link this in the show notes. It’s interesting in the sense that they talk about the types of native trees in this area in Sydney and the positive effect that they have and, I mean, the pictures of the trees are beautiful. If you’ve never seen a red gum, it’s beautiful.
MARISA: Do they have those in the U.S., or is that only —
CLARICE: I don’t know.
MARISA: — native to Australia?
CLARICE: I’m going to look it up.
MARISA: Interestingly, when I was looking at this topic I didn’t realize that the diameter of the tree roots are not as important as the depth of the tree roots.
CLARICE: Oh.
MARISA: So it matters in terms of keeping soil together and substrate together for purposes of avoiding landslides and mudslides that the roots’ depth is far more important that the diameter in which they’re growing and having a —
CLARICE: [inaudible] bigger anchor.
MARISA: Yeah. And having a diversity of plants and shrubs can also be of value for these situations.
CLARICE: Apparently, yes, red gums in America are called sweet gum.
MARISA: Oh.
CLARICE: And they hang out more towards warm temps, tropical kind of regions. I’ve never seen them. They’re cool looking. And, also, be sure to look up red gum trees because if you —
MARISA: And they’re in the south, right?
CLARICE: — just look up red gum — yeah.
MARISA: Oh, yeah.
CLARICE: If you just look up red gum, you get Big Red.
MARISA: Yeah. Sweet gums are mostly in southern U.S.
CLARICE: Uh-huh. Yeah. When we start to get that tropical warmth humidity kind of area, yeah.
MARISA: The land use portion of this topic is interesting to me in that I was recently with a friend going to — I forget where we were going, but the development — commercial development area that we pulled into had this incredibly massive retaining wall which was composed of giant concrete blocks and the wall was, I don’t know, 30 feet high and 50 feet long. And from an engineering standpoint, yeah, you look at it and you think, wow, look at that thing. That’s impressive. However, trees actually provide more construction support and engineering support than anything manmade like a retaining wall or other concrete infrastructure or anything else that humans have come up with.
[0:10:21] CLARICE: Uh-huh.
MARISA: And so I wonder to the engineers out there, why is it that developers are not looking to ecosystemic solutions and why they automatically jump to the manmade engineered solution? Why not just plant a ton of trees on a slope to ensure that you don’t have a landslide? Is there a way to do that, I guess, is my question?
CLARICE: I would love to hear if there are any answers out there. That’s an awesome question. Yeah. If this is your field, if this is something that you do, let us know. Yeah. Maybe there’s a barrier we’re not thinking of. Maybe there’s a barrier not being thought of or talked about in that field. I don’t know. Let us know.
MARISA: Because I imagine the cost would be less for planning trees or figure out an ecosystemic solution versus the concrete solution, right? I mean, that concrete thing has got to cost a fortune.
CLARICE: I think so.
MARISA: Yeah.
CLARICE: I don’t know what a mature tree costs versus like how much concrete or how concrete gets measured in that space.
MARISA: Yeah. If there’s an engineer out there that knows the answer, please let us know. I’m very curious about this.
CLARICE: I don’t even know how to begin Googling that.
MARISA: We’ve got other things to worry about. Let’s see if an engineer can give us the answer off the top of their head.
CLARICE: Yeah. Where is that engineer going to e-mail us?
MARISA: Oh, good segue. Please send me an e-mail because I’m interested in the answer. My address is info@DesautelBrowning.com.
CLARICE: And, also, if you would prefer you can reach out to us on the socials. We are on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Reach out to us on those places. Tell us. I don’t know how to research this. I’m not thinking of the right answers here, so you tell us.
MARISA: Please.
CLARICE: We’ll see you next week.
