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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and now for our July check-in with BLTrees, our year-long project to follow the life of a tree through the four seasons, looking at and learning about the trees around us, what they do for and to us, and what we do for and to them.

New York City and the surrounding area have millions of trees, we hope you pick one to follow this year as we've invited everyone to do, and have been tweeting us a photo each month using the hashtag BLTrees.

Now, last month, we talked about who takes care of the trees on your block, and today, we're going to look specifically at how trees take care of us. Trees as protection, like from what we're experiencing this week, with Monday's flooding, downpours, and today's heat advisory, plus the air quality alert that went into effect this hour until eleven o'clock tonight.

Trees can't solve climate change, but they do play a role in mitigating some of its effects. Back with us is our guide for this adventure, urban ecologist Marielle Anzelone, founder of New York City Wildflower Week, who proposed this project and has offered her expertise in putting it together. Hi, again. Marielle.

Marielle Anzelone: Hi, Brian. Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: She's joined this month by landscape architect and 2017 MacArthur Genius, Kate Orff, who founded SCAPE Studio and is a professor at Columbia where she directs the Urban Design Program and the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes. Kate, welcome to WNYC today.

Kate Orff: Hi. Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: Let me start with you because your work is centered around building resiliency, utilizing the tools that nature is already providing, like oyster beds and flood protection in New York Harbor as an example, we can get into specifics, but big picture, how do trees help with what we're facing with the climate?

Kate Orff: I would say trees are really a form of civic infrastructure in terms of the climate. On our coastal edges, they help to stabilize the shoreline, filter water. They provide this layered protection that along with oyster reefs and dunes, maritime forests help to buffer wave action and keep our shorelines intact. That's one way that they serve as ecological infrastructure.

Another way is just how they perform as a giant air conditioner, if you will. They have this incredible cooling effect in the urban landscape by providing shade for immediate relief. They reduce our heat and our heat island fairly dramatically and, of course, they helped us sequester carbon and also even absorb water like you mentioned, during Ida, we had a huge amount of water dumped on the landscape. If we had more trees and more intact civic canopy, we probably would have fared a little bit better.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we talked some about trees for hot days like today with the Manhattan Borough President last hour. I see that your firm studied the heat island effect, as it's called, in Queens. What did you learn?

Kate Orff: Yes, I'm a resident of Queens and we started to look at Forest Park which is an incredibly beautiful park of intact oaks and hickories. What's fascinating is that the actual on-ground temperatures in Forest Park can be up to three and a half degrees cooler than the surrounding areas. Say if you took a transect through and you locked through Woodhaven Ozone Park, you would literally physically experience that extreme heat in a much more direct way. It acts as a giant air conditioner.

Of course, these large parks are only in several areas. We have Central Park, Prospect Park, Forest Park. I think, moving forward, we need to think more about our shared streetscapes as almost this sort of the canopy and the tree canopy and the contiguous urban forest as a form of civic utility. It helps us lower energy bills, save energy, and really provide that immediate shade that we need on a hot day like today but really almost every day.

Brian Lehrer: Trees as infrastructure. Trees as civic utilities. Listeners, are you feeling the difference a tree makes in terms of providing shade or other sources of coolness on a day like this? Is it something you've taken into consideration when doing your own landscaping or choosing where to live if you have a choice? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 on this month's edition of BLTrees. Let's take a call right now. Divine in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hello, Divine.

Divine: Hello, you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Hi, there. Yes, I can hear you.

Divine: I'm in Castle Hill. They're cutting down trees in the province where I live. I'm wondering if anyone could tell me why they're cutting down trees. They're even cutting down bushes since we need so many more trees. The trees over here in our area, they don't even produce a lot of fruit like they used to produce. I've been over here for 45 years and the tree in front of my building doesn't even produce the fruit. All the acorn trees have been cut down. The squirrels have no nuts. We got to feed them peanuts. Squirrels in our projects carry bagels up to the trees. It's amazing.

Brian Lehrer: We were talking last hour, Marielle, about the city's ongoing effort to plant more and more trees in neighborhoods around the city. Divine is talking about they're cutting down trees in Castle Hill. You have any idea why?

Marielle Anzelone: I don't, unfortunately, but I appreciate hearing about that. There's definitely been stories over the past with the last administration, you'd hear about losing trees, trees would be cut down for reasons that were obscure. It's hard to know. Unfortunately, larger trees are really important to hold on to in the landscape, because they provide more benefits than the smaller trees do.

Trees that are healthy and tend to be over 30 inches in diameter remove a lot more particulates from the air than the smaller trees do, the ones that are about 3 inches. By a lot more, I mean like over 70 times. It's not even that once you're planting new trees-- Planting trees is always a good idea. It's always great, but you can't plant new trees and cut down old trees. That's not what we want. We want both. Losing trees is heartbreaking. I'm sorry to hear that.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Divine, we'll try to follow up on that and figure out why they're cutting down trees in Castle Hill, but I guess we can't answer it right at this moment. Here is Jack in East Orange. You're on WNYC. Hi, Jack.

Jack: Hi. Thanks for taking the call. Similar to Divine, I live in a neighborhood that has a small community park, and this past fall, it had about 20 old trees of 30 plus diameter taken down. The reason was they wanted to clear the trees and they took up all the natural grass to put down a synthetic turf field in the middle of a city block surrounded by houses. We lost all of our trees.

I'm just wondering if you have any comments about city initiatives where this is happening? I think New Jersey has something called Green Acres that they fund cities to rehabilitate parks, but a lot of times, it is to put down these turf fields and that requires removal of trees.

Brian Lehrer: Kate Orff.

Jack: I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about that.

Brian Lehrer: Kate Orff, for you.

Kate Orff: I guess I would just say in all cities, every square inch is contested ground, but I do feel like we need to strike a better balance a little bit more in favor of intact ecosystems rather than just clear cut and pave or clear cut and make recreational fields. We do need to plan our cities and manage our cities knowing that it's not just like a collection of trees, that this is a massive shared benefit that's important. Ideally, that sports field could be sited elsewhere like on top of a parking garage or in another more creative space that enables the natural systems to exist and thrive alongside us.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Kate, I think it's obvious to a lot of people how the shade from trees helps on a hot day like this, but the weather event just before this heatwave was the drenching downpours on Monday, and I think trees help with mitigating the severity or the effect of those two, don't they?

Kate Orff: Yes. If you have intact and contiguous larger soil areas, absolutely, that water will be absorbed. In Queens, for example, there's been a proliferation of expanding roadways, like Union Turnpike doubled in its width. You have individual homeowners paving their lots, and so that urban runoff when you have an extreme event, all of that water flows directly and much more rapidly into our system. Our systems cannot accommodate that.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I would say, we need to get into a different mentality of what I would call depaving, holing up areas of stream beds that we've covered over, and making sure that we have large percentage of planted and contiguous soil area on private lots. We all have to work together in order to get a much more absorptive ground plane and we'll be safer as a result.

Brian Lehrer: Jud on Staten Island, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jud?

Jud: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I know that there have been a number of studies recently come out demonstrating the enormous gap in the tree canopy in correlations with the income and wealth, so wealthier neighborhoods, obviously, have better, a much more substantial tree cover closer to these large parks that you're discussing.

In these discussions about needing more trees and a million trees project and all that Mayor Bloomberg started, there's a lot of controversy around improving the green space and planting more greenery in neighborhoods of color where people are concerned that it might price them out and increase gentrification. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.

Brian Lehrer: Marielle, have you heard that before? Planting trees as a sign of gentrification that's going to wind up hurting people who live there?

Marielle Anzelone: Yes, I have. That is something that's definitely discussed. That can be something that's an issue but at the same time, a lot of these neighborhoods are so much hotter than neighborhoods with tree canopy. Without the tree canopy versus with the tree canopy, they're so much hotter. There needs to be kind of a more expansive view of the way greenery is done. Greening up should always be done in conjunction with the community, but shouldn't be something that happens to people in a neighborhood. It should be something that's done in coordination with them, and so their thoughts and concerns are addressed.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, with community input.

Marielle Anzelone: That is something that comes up, unfortunately.

Brian Lehrer: Marielle, before we go, you want to give us a report on how your tree is doing this month? I will just remind people of the premise of the series. We started in November and we're having Marielle plus her invited special guests on once a month for a year talking about various issues and ideas around trees like we're doing today with how trees protect us, but also just following the individual trees that we have picked. How is your pin oak compared to in June?

Marielle Anzelone: My pin oak is doing great. it's huge, it's fully leafed out, all the leaves are really dark green, so they're fully matured. It's just providing a lot of shade, and, in fact, it's funny because in checking on it the other day, I saw people taking a little respite underneath it because it was really hot. They were enjoying the cooling benefits of the tree, it has a nice big canopy, so it's the perfect spot to do it.

Brian Lehrer: That's the last word for today from Marielle Anzelone, urban botanist and ecologist and founder of New York City Wildflower Week. We also thank Kate Orff, who founded SCAPE Studio and is a professor at Columbia where she directs the Urban Design Program and the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes. Kate, thanks for all the great information from you in this segment. Thank you.

Kate Orff: All right. Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: Marielle, I'll talk to you next month.

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Brian Lehrer: That's the Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, and Carl Boisrond with Zach Gottehrer-Cohen who edits our Daily Politics Podcast, and Juliana Fonda at the audio controls on Brian Lehrer.

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