Kevin Bingham, June 11th, 2024
Title
Kevin Bingham, June 11th, 2024
Description
In this interview, Kevin Bingham describes the effects of various environmental factors on the canopy of Detroit, and on Michigan in general. He discusses his views on how the environment can be protected and improved through policy and individual actions.
Publisher
Detroit Historical Society
Rights
Detroit Historical Society
Language
en-US
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
Kevin Bingham
Brief Biography
Kevin Bingham moved to Detroit from Colorado in the 2000s, moving into the Grixdale Farms neighborhood in 2003. He became an ISA Certified Arborist in 2001, founded Singing Tree Detroit in 2008, and started the design company Singing Tree Rope Tools in 2012.
Interviewer's Name
Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo
Date
6/11/2024
Interview Length
49:07
Transcription
Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo: I'm Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo, it's June 11th, 2024, and I'm here with, please say your name.
Kevin Bingham: Kevin Bingham.
DLT: And how do you spell your name?
KB: K e v i n B i n g h a m.
DLT: Thank you. And do you live in the city of Detroit?
KB: Yes.
DLT: What neighborhood do you live in?
KB: Grixdale Farms is what it's called.
DLT: How long have you lived there?
KB: Since 2003.
DLT: Have you lived in any other neighborhoods in Detroit?
KB: I lived briefly on Goethe and Field for a few years before moving to that neighborhood.
DLT: Do you work in the city of Detroit?
KB: Yes.
DLT: What career are you in?
KB: I'm an arborist.
DLT: And what's the name of your business?
KB: Singing Tree.
DLT: Can you spell that, please?
KB: S i n g i n g T r e e.
DLT: And how long have you had it?
KB: It's been 15 years.
DLT: Where is it located?
KB: Also in Grixdale Farms.
DLT: And how did you start up this business?
KB: Well, I just was working as an arborist for other companies and felt a need for one based in Detroit, looking at the needs of the canopy of Detroit. I was spending a lot of time working out in the suburbs, and I wanted to bring my work closer to where I lived. And, yeah, I mean, I've always I've worked in the tree industry since I graduated high school and even a little bit before that too. So, it's just something that I've always done. And it kind of naturally led into starting my own business.
DLT: And what were some of the canopy needs that you had identified in Detroit?
KB: Well, Detroit is really a special place as far as having a pretty awesome canopy. There's a lot of older trees that have been neglected for a really long time. And so many of them are hazardous. But they're still good trees. But since they haven't been maintained, and limbs have fallen on houses and fences, they've ended up getting a bad reputation. The city lost a lot of trees with the Dutch elm disease that hit in the 60s and 70s and 80s. We lost a huge amount of our canopy with that. We replaced them with the emerald, we replaced them with ash trees, almost, you know, where elm was we put in an ash tree. And so the city had a lot, a lot of ash trees.
And when I was starting my career here in— I moved from Colorado right after, basically, I turned 20. I moved here. And when I landed here we were pruning ash trees. And then we're pruning them more, and all this deadwood. So then it turned out to be the Emerald ash borer, which was started on the Detroit River, from pallet wood brought in from Asia. And that epidemic now has killed millions of ash trees across the country. So that was a big part of, you know, between 2003 and 2009, I was just, I mean, it was like ash trees were being cut down left and right. But, you know, there's still a lot of oak trees, which are struggling, too. We've got oak wilt in the neighborhood. That is a threat. We have, you know, the pines aren't doing very well. There's various diseases hitting pines.
It's a rough time to be a tree in general. But, I think, you know, they're still growing as well. So, planting new trees, planting, getting— That's one of the problems that we've had. We have an older canopy with not a lot of replacement. The landscape architects in general seem to be, have moved toward planting small ornamental trees in people's yards. So we have a lot of old trees that were not killed by the Dutch elm disease or the ash borer. But then there's not a lot of, you know, middle generation trees because basically, over the past 40 years, people have moved away from doing that, where it was sort of a people— I mean, if you notice, the nicer neighborhoods have a lot of really nice canopy, and that went along with the nice houses and the nice environment that people— But for some reason, we've kind of moved away from doing that, and a lot of the new, newer construction is focused around small ornamental plantings. And it's more of an industrial maintenance style where you have, you know, you have a 20 foot tree and it's weed whipped and the lawn is fertilized in pesticide. And then in 20 years, the tree dies because and you put in a new one, kind of thing, you know, you make a bunch of money spraying these little trees. They're planted too deep.
So we have had a hard time where our kids are going to not have as nice of the canopy as we do, for sure. I mean, I don't have a nice canopy, as our parents did. The canopy that we look at today is, you can only dream about. I mean, you can find it in little pockets. But it is, it's definitely degraded. A lot of the canopy that we see today is, basically fence line trees that have been left to grow. So we look out and see, oh, the trees, you know, it's green out there! But then what we're looking at is people who haven't cut down their, maintained their fence lines and it's Siberian elms, mulberries. Which are fine trees, and they could be, they could be ornamental trees, but they weren't, you know, there's not a, they’re there out of like a, you know, neglect the most. Right? And so then they also give trees a bad reputation, because a lot of times people will cut them down, cut them down, cut them down, and then they grow up and there's like eight trees growing out of where one tree should be. And they get big, and then they split apart, and they take down your power and your, you know, and then you're like, oh, trees are, so we got to cut down all the trees! And then so, basically, yeah. It's a tough time to be a tree in the city. But, as far as an arborist goes, there's definitely a huge amount of opportunity to both maintain the canopy we have and try to get a new canopy going the down the line.
DLT: And what are some of the potential consequences of this canopy loss for the city and its residents?
KB: Well, I mean, trees make life comfortable, basically. Without trees, it's hot, it's humid, it's swampy. Trees move water out. Like, we have flooding issues, and the best remedy for flooding issues is to have trees pulling that water and getting it back to the atmosphere instead of it sitting in the ground. Obviously, oxygen filtering, pollutants. Noise reduction, they dampen the sound. Like, if you go into an amphitheater, there's all those things that they ornament the walls with to absorb sound. Trees absorb sound for us. Without trees, things are louder, they hurt our ears more. They, they’re habitat for insects, which feed birds, that feed hawks. You know, there's a whole, there's squirrels, there’s an amount of bats, all these that eat insects. There's just so many benefits. I mean, really, without them, we're done for. And Detroit is lucky because it's green and there's a lot of open, there's not officially a lot of green space, but Detroit has a lot of green space. So, and there is a canopy made up of these weed lines which were, you know, so we do have a canopy in Detroit. It's, in a lot of instances, it's an unintentional canopy, which is less than ideal for when you're living with people. Like, if you're humans, you have to maintain your canopy. You can't just, like, go live in the canopy and things will be okay because you're going to get— You know, the Native Americans maintained their canopy. They harvested the nuts, the, you know, walnuts are edible. That's the native tree. Acorns are edible. Even the seeds of silver maples are edible. Tapping the trees for, so the trees were an integral part of, like, everyday life. And that forest was maintained for that purpose of, you know, you're not looking at the tree as just shade. You're also looking at it as food. You're going to keep it maintained. They used fire, they pushed their animals through there to graze. But with the idea of keeping, you know, the forest here was, it was an intentional, cultivated forest for thousands of years.
And we have that legacy. I mean, there was that in Belle Isle, before the flooding. Palmer Park still is a, goes back to that era. You can see it in Rouge Park. But in all of Michigan, you know, there’s like these little tiny corners. There's a little place in Westland, I believe, that is going to be bulldozed because it's on private property. But it's one of the last little pockets of where you can see these trees that go back to the time when it was a, you know, a forest with this— This area has been populated by people for a very, very long time. And there was a definitely a interaction between the people here in that forest that goes back thousands of years. And there's, we have little vision, little pockets where we can see remnants of that era still. Palmer Park. Used to be Belle Isle. These little places, there's a couple places down the river. But, yeah, it's really— In all of Michigan, you drive across Michigan. There's very, like tiny, tiny amount of acreage that you can find trees that go back to that era. Paul Bunyan and his friends leveled the entire state of Michigan. Like, complete, it was like, you see the pictures of the Amazon rainforest now, that was Michigan in the 1900s, the late 1800s. It's what was the first boom for the city of Detroit, really, was just the money made off of cutting down the trees, because it was like this endless expanse that just seemed to go on forever. And then it's interesting, you know, after that was cut down, we had these huge fires. And it's interesting because all the huge fires that you see out in California and Oregon kind of are in the similar time range between the huge fires that you saw in Michigan and then the huge fires that you're seeing in California in the last few years in relation to when they leveled all the trees out there. And it's like, if you go and level a forest like that, what comes back is the bramble. You know, it's this whole thing of succession and it's just, like, really hard to control. So you, you just throw everything out of whack, and then you get this big tinderbox that grows back. So, and that's what happened in Michigan. And there's these massive, the biggest fires in the history of the country were in the Midwest, around that time.
So, yeah, I think trees are, trees are really cool to work with. Because when you, they are old and so they go back, If you're in a, even a young tree, that's like, okay, this trees 40 years old, it's maybe 50ft tall. 40, that's like, I'm 46, so. But you can think about, like, this tree, right? This, like, little tree right here was, I was six when it was born, basically. And then, how long, it would take, it would take 40 years for that tree, for another tree, if I planted it, to be like that little tree. I mean, it's like this is a tree that I could, like, cut down and throw in the chipper in, you know? But it took 40 years for it to get that big. And if I plant another tree, it's not going to be a real tree until I'm dead, right? Like I can plant a tree, but it is not really a tree that does anything. Or it's like, I'm not going to be able to appreciate that tree because it's going to be 40 years before it's just an average tree. Like a tree that, well, that's a tree. I mean, there's trees that you see and you're like, holy cow, that's a huge big old tree! And that tree's like 250 years old. There's trees in Palmer Park, a lot of trees have been coming down there, too, because it's now, you know, it's having a rough time as an old forest that hasn't had the maintenance it probably should, that it grew up expecting. So a lot of trees are coming down now. But, we counted a tree that, gosh, it maybe, 24in in diameter, 25. Not a huge tree, but with 250 rings in it. So, you know, and that's older than the city of Detroit. It's older than the state of Michigan. It's, things were a lot different 250 years ago. And there's, I imagine there's trees in there that are, because there's some trees in there that are huge and, you know, maybe they're 350 years old, you know? So they're a cool connection to the past.
DLT: And would you say, your business, Singing Tree Detroit, is affected by climate change?
KB: I mean, climate change is a tricky one because it's so many things. Like, climate change happens when you cut down trees and it gets five degrees hotter. So, people are cutting down trees and it's getting five degrees hotter. There's more asphalt going in the ground, like, there's less, there's salt. There's, like, these are all climate change, you know, people dumping salt all winter long. They're exposing the asphalt all winter long. They're putting salt into our rivers. The problem in Flint was salt pollution, right? And they sell it at the gas station. Climate change is dumping all this lawn chemical into our lawns. It flows into the water that causes, you know, that's our climate that we're living in. And it's changing. We're dumping all this CO2 into the atmosphere, which is a, but we're also dumping all this smog and rubber parts and plastic. I mean, that's like, you go around in Michigan and you can't find any fish. You, all the rivers have don't eat the fish signs or eat this limited amount of fish. I mean, like, that's not, that's climate change, right? Like if I can't eat the fish, my climate is, that's my climate. I, you know, so. And trees dying, you know, you can— Climate change is the Emerald ash borer coming over and wiping out an entire species, basically. I mean, we do have ash trees now. We're going to see, they're still there, but in a sort of a different form. But we had ash trees in the city of Detroit that were, you know, as big around as this room. Massive. And this was 20 years ago. And you don't, you don't see that. The biggest pump— There was a pumpkin ash on Belle Isle that was killed by the ash borer. And it was the largest pumpkin ash ever found anywhere, so. But those are all gone. And that's in the last 20 years. And then we, before that we had, of course, the chestnuts disappeared. The American elm is in a vastly different form also. You see it as weed line tree, but it gets up to about 30 or 40 years and then it dies. So that's a different tree than we used to have.
And those things are climate change. And they affect our climate. They affect what the, you know, you lose it, you lose all the chestnuts. And then that's the food source for a whole, that's the staple. It's like if all of a sudden, you know, flour disappeared, right? And we'd have to find a new staple. That was chestnut for both humans and wildlife in the eastern part of the United States. Not so much up, up this way, but, you know, down in the whole Ohio Valley was just solid chestnuts. And if you, I mean, so it's a different, different world. So that's, that's climate change. Dragging brush, I'm always like, the worst thing. It'll be like 90 degrees, and you have to drag the brush from the backyard past somebody's air conditioner, and it's like blasting heat out into the atmosphere. And I'm like, that's global warming, right? Because I'm literally walking by heat getting blown out into the atmosphere like, oh. And I just, you know, you've got all these trucks driving around. It might be a simplistic way to view global warming, but like, I can't imagine— You've got all these cars, and you look at a freeway, and every single one of those cars is running at 400 degrees or whatever. Like, you couldn't touch, they're hot. Like, there's explosions going doodoodoodoom and just pumping heat out of like, man, that's global warming right there. You don't have to, like, track the carbon dioxide. I mean, it's hotter on a freeway. It's hotter on an airport. And we’re building more airports, we’re building more freeways. You stand next to a car and it's hot. Like, you walk, you cross the street at Palmer Woods and you enter into that forest. Even if you enter into the golf course area, like, the temperature just drops. It's like. It's such a difference. Hot day, I'm dragging brush past the air conditioner. And then I walk, I get home and I walk across the street with my dog into Palmer Park and just like ahhh, you know, and that's the shade and the— Like, those little pockets, that was Belle Isle. And then now that's not there anymore. And that's climate change. So, yeah. I guess it's something that we're definitely dealing with and we haven't, nobody's ever experienced— Like, we don't have anything to go off of because nobody's lived through this life of not having that canopy that we had. Nobody's lived through this life of not having clean water. So I guess it's just a, we'll have to explore, and find out what the next 20 years are going to bring.
DLT: And do you feel that combating or alleviating this climate change is an important part of your work?
KB: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, I look at it like I'm not going to be able to do anything about global CO2 emissions. I ride my bike everywhere, I took the bus here, I started my tree service with a bicycle. It grew to having trucks and chippers. So, definitely was, you know, it's hard to see smoke billowing out of the chipper when you start it up. But I think defending the forest that we have is, trying to convince people not to cut down our canopy, I think it is definitely a driving factor. I think, you know, trees to me are the ultimate answer. And also working closely with, you know, trees aren't the answer in Arizona. And they may even, you know, there's people that move to Phoenix and they plant trees everywhere, but they probably just shouldn't move to Phoenix [Laughter] because there's not water to do that with. And then you're sucking, you’re desertifying the whole state, basically, growing trees in Phoenix. But it’ll be, yeah, I think about it. And trees, there's so much other things to think about in terms of trees than climate change, but it is a part of what I think about.
DLT: And earlier you mentioned Detroit's issues with flooding. Can you talk a little bit more about those?
KB: So there's this, we've had flooding. We have highly impervious surfaces. So water can just, when it rains, it doesn't have anywhere to sink into the ground. And so we get these massive rainstorms that have come more frequently and louder. So they come and, you know, poor drainage, clogged up drains. We haven't been able to really— And it's gotten worse with the more paved surfaces. It's really interesting. I like to fish a lot. And the Clinton River was an excellent trout stream for years and years. But basically, with the construction of The Palace and the Silverdome in Pontiac, and they, both right on the banks of the Clinton River, huge parking lot, and it raised the temperature of the water during the runoff. Because the water would just land and rush all into the Clinton River. And it flows out it, you know, salt heat, you know, it lands on a hot parking lot on a summer day. That water goes in there really hot. And trout can't live in that water. So they built those parking lots and then the Clinton River— Now they try to stock it and stuff, but you can't really get a population to survive. And not only that, you've added all these other highways. When they built 475, or whatever, 375, extension out in the Waterford area. That whole, the five, I guess it is. That's happened out there too. You build a big freeway and all the rainwater rushes down and chokes, I mean, and it comes really fast. Bust out banks, it causes erosion. And that's happened.
And then that water backs up places, gets into people's basement. So, it's sort of a, and then as the storms have gotten more and more violent, that becomes more of an issue. So flooding is— And, I think, see, you know, a lot of people will point to climate change and not actually address the quicker issue, which would be not putting a big free-, like, the freeway causes this, just putting a parking lot next to the Clinton River causes it to flood and destroys the whole creek and the fishing in the ecosystem and everything. And then you just say, oh, it's climate change. But no, these are like specific— It's like people say, oh, all the trees on Belle Isle died because of climate change. No, it's because they had an idea that they were going to connect the lakes, and they opened up the water, open up the island and flooded it and left it underwater for two months. It was like a human, one human action that killed an entire forest. And then they said, oh, it was climate change. There was a flood. There's been floods in the past. There's, if you look at the water levels of Detroit River, it's gone up and down and there's been floods in the past that reached that stage, that flooded the forest, that didn't flood the forest because the forest wasn't opened up to the—
And so, you know, there is definitely climate change occurring, but there's also these other things that are, we actually do have control of. Like how much asphalt we put out there, how much rainwater we can, you know, and if you just say it's climate change, then you're not dealing with these other issues that you can't actually like, tangent— You know, we can control the water so it doesn't flood. We can bring it back to systems that absorb the water into our ground, that slow the water down, that keep the Clinton River cool. These are known things that we could do. But if we put all our energy into reducing, you know, electric cars or, you know, it's not really addressing, there's still a parking lot there, right? And nobody uses it, and it's actually getting better because all the, if you look at it it's like, all the weeds are growing up through it and making holes and so maybe it's shaded now, maybe you can bring back the Clinton River, the state of the Rouge River. Like, those are things we could fix. Way simpler than we could fix global CO2 emissions. And it would make a huge difference for our direct life. I mean, I think a little bit of investment in the Rouge River to clean it up, get its flow back, absorb some of that stormwater. You figure out how to remediate that water, come running off of the freeways. Like, if you look at a freeway, they're just massive, right? And you build another one and you build another lane for it. And then all the structure, the, how much— If you look at aerial view of all the parking lots in the city, I mean, it's just crazy. It's just how much space we've wasted on, on asphalt in our life. And that's heat. That's like literally like, asphalt is hot. It causes flooding. We know it causes flooding. Even the water department charges you if you have asphalt, which is a good thing, right? Because it's encouraged people to get rid of their unnecessary asphalt, but they charge you money for your asphalt.
We can, you know, if we relied more on rail and public transportation, we wouldn't be putting all the salt in the road to keep our tires from slipping. Because cars and cars need salt to operate in Michigan, although they don't very much anymore because we haven't had any snow in so long. But the amount of salt dumped out into the rivers is just like, it makes me, I get so— Because it kills the trees too, right? People are like, why is my tree sick? And there's like a huge bag of salt, and every day they'll shovel their snow with their, like, don't want to shovel so they'll just throw salt out there [Laughter] and then they'll throw it all over the street so they can— It's like, man, that stuff is toxic. Like if you want to kill plants in your cracks of your driveway, you put, like, the salt kills it. So there's all those things that would be so— If people stopped dumping all this herbicide and pesticide on their lawns, it would make such a huge difference, for our clean water and survival. So, I don't know. There's a lot of there's a lot of levels to looking at the solutions and the problems. The forest on Belle Isle was really tragic because it was completely preventable. But it was a, and like, a loss of a— Just, you know, there's basically the largest and only forest of that type left and development, like progress, killed it without a lot of thought to the consequences. And the project was supposed to introduce, or rehabilitate the lakes. But I used to fish there all the time and it was great for crappie, and you’d see the whole lake shore surrounded by people fishing. All the Bengalis would come down there. But there's no fish in those lakes anymore, [Laughter] unfortunately. Maybe they'll come in at some point, but like, and you don't— We used to go ice fishing out on Blue Heron Lake and just catch buckets of perch. And now, I mean, the last two winters, we haven't been able to go ice fishing, but it doesn't seem like there's any perch in the lake there either, so.
DLT: And how does your company, in its own way, educate people about these environmental problems and solutions?
KB: Well, I think it's been hard, and I'm actually moving away from being a residential tree service because I have felt like I haven't really been able to do— But in that regard, in a sense of being a service that needs to pay employees and it needs to, and I'm trying to meet customers’ expectations, which are often not my own expectations. So, we've, as a company, we've always told people, like, if they want to cut down their tree and it's a good tree, you're going to have to find somebody else to do it. Well, I think a lot of companies say, well, if I don't do it, somebody else will. And I'm like, well, somebody else can do it and have that on their conscience. So we really, really try to walk away from any unnecessary removals. We encourage habitat creation in trees. And it's one of the difficult things, is that there is this lawn and tree conflict. And sometimes I feel like, man, I would be better off being, because people care more about their lawn than they do about their trees, and so if I was able to enter from the lawn aspect and convince them that they don't need a lawn or, like— It's a tricky conflict because getting people to want habitat is hard too, because habitat is often in, like, the dead branches. And so here I am, an arborist, and I'm going and telling people, no, no, you know, I could charge you $8,000 to cut down this tree. And then they're like, well, no, I'm not going to do that. And then they're like, well, what about cutting out those dead branches? And I'm like, well, that's a really good branch for habitat. There's obviously some things, well, so I end up talking myself out of work a lot.
And so, in a sense I feel like, being able to impact— A lot of, the way the tree industry is set up, it's set up to remove canopy, right? And that's what I've, I am part of the tree industry. And it's a much harder sell and a much harder thing to get people to plant trees, especially the trees that I want planted. I get asked to, like, plant little dogwoods, which are fine. But we also need trees that get big. You know, like, I want big trees and then, like, well, how tall does it get? Well, hopefully it'll get like, 100ft tall. Oh, I don't want that. But I mean, they'll be dead by the time it's 100ft tall, but it would be nice to— So, what happened at Belle Isle has inspired me a lot. There's another thing, and there's no money in this, but a lot of our forests are threatened right now. And after seeing what happened to Belle Isle, there was a huge oak tree in Port Huron. That the rings were counted at close to 500 years old. And it was cut down for the sake of a skate park. You know, in the central park of, you know, they wanted a Tony Hawk skate park in Port Huron. And there was this tree right in the way where they wanted that done. So it got cut down and it's like, oh, my gosh, we just lost something completely invaluable for a skate, for more concrete. And I like to skate, but, I think we're losing that acknowledgment of where— How, how could we— People protected that tree for as long as there was people in Port Huron. The people who are in Port Huron, when they got there, they cut down a lot of trees, but they didn't cut that that tree down, right? For some reason, like, it survived because people protected it. They didn't allow it to be cut down. But then all of a sudden, the city and the people and the, you know, oh, a skate park is more important than this tree.
The same thing is happening, and this was in, at Brennan Pools at the Rouge Park. They’re building a rec center. I don't know if you've heard about this. They're building a rec center adjacent to the pools. And Rouge Park is the other jewel of Detroit. Beautiful park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, or parts of it, who specifically planted,100 years ago, a grove of oak trees. And in order to build this rec center they want, they're going to cut down half of them. Which is like, how could you, how could the city be so stupid to not recognize this— Like, the people of Detroit in 1900 or in 1924, whenever they built Brennan Pool and designed that neighborhood or that park, they were like, for the people of 2024, we are giving you this grove of oak trees. But they're not, they didn't plant it for themselves because then it was just like these little twigs that you see out, you know, that are nothing. But they planted those oak trees for us and we're like, oh, thanks [Cutting sound]! And you're like, I don't know. So, they, you know, in the Climate Initiative thing, they wanted to build solar panels and the city decided, oh, we're going to, there's all this empty space. Let's build 50 acre solar panels around this, solar panel farms around the city. And like, solar is cool, right? But then you're like, oh, we're going to come into this neighborhood, which was Brixdale Farms. And put 40 acre solar panel in the middle of a neighborhood. And if you go to this neighborhood, it's like, full of big old, it’s like this old neighborhood in Detroit that planted these trees. Like, this is a nice neighborhood, we're gonna have big oak trees in this neighborhood. And so in order to put the solar farm, they would have had to cut down, gosh 30 150-year-old oak trees?
And luckily, our neighborhood was able to tell the city: no, not here. But you look around in some of the neighborhoods. They probably will be building these big solar panel farms, which will be compacted soil, heat like heat emitters. So the people in those neighborhoods are going to experience a heat rise in their specific neighborhood. And solar is cool, but, they wouldn't be great to live next to because they don't have any, there's no shade, unless it's, like, a solar panel is giving you shade. But a lot of our canopy will be lost for that. So, one of the things that I have started to realize, like, I think you can be easy to think about, oh, people care about the environment now. Like, you hear about stories from the 60s and 70s of how bad Lake Erie was and it got fixed. But all that stuff is, you know, things get moved around, but you have to have people, like, advocating for them. I think, as far as our clean water goes, people are maybe fishing less or spending less time on the water, so they're not as connected to how threatened our water supply is as maybe they were in the 60s or 70s, but you don't see a movement to protect those basic life sources like our water supply, like maybe you did when it was really bad. Or maybe it's because we did clean things up, and now it's not so obvious, but there's definitely, things are getting worse again. And people are still cutting down really big trees, and now it's even more important than it was then, because, like, we've been cutting those important resources down for so long, there's just precious few of them left.
So, I want to spend more energy, you know, talking about with people. Because in Port Huron they didn't even understand that it was a big tree anymore. So how do you give awareness to how precious, like, a big tree is, and how few of them there are left? Driving across Michigan, you're like, oh, the whole place is a forest. It's not a forest. It's an ecological wasteland that we're slowly, slowly recovering from. But we're not going to, this is what you're looking out when you drive across Michigan is like basically complete destruction relative to what it was before. And then when you do have little pockets of big trees, like how precious that is. In Palmer Park we had an issue, just recently. Another manmade flooding disaster, through progress, the tennis courts— Well, a variation of things, but new tennis courts were put in at the— The old tennis courts were flat, right? And they put in new tennis courts, which was great because tennis is awesome. But when they did that, they kind of backed up, staved off, they essentially built a dam on the south side of the forest, and that water backed up in there and killed, gosh, 30, 40 trees over the past two years. And just now we've been able to, like, drain, open up where it should flow through again. But it was just, like, you change the hydrology of a place or you do a construction, you don't know the consequences, and you leave a forest underwater for 18 months and all the trees will die, like, every single tree.
And that happens so much. You build a new road and it sloughs off water in a different direction and floods the pocket or something. And you move the water around you dam up— Part of, so, on Belle Isle there was, the forest flooding from the Friends of the Detroit River project, where they opened it up but didn't allow it to be released, and it flooded into the water, into the forest. And that was the Canada side of the forest. But, in the 90s, they had built a road through the forest on this side, and that dammed up, that changed the hydrology on that side. And that killed, like, the US side tree death. There was a big pocket of forest that died because of that road that was put through. And it was either 90s orearly 2000s that that happened. And then that problem kind of spread around that side of the island too. And Palmer Park, they put in a new trail where they ripped out the fence between where the golf course was, and in doing so, they sort of created a little berm to get the machinery back there. And that blocked up water that flooded an area. You know, I mean, all it took was to open it up again. But just a simple thing like that can, you know, you could lose a whole— So, yeah, I think there's a lot of work to do. As far as my company goes, I'm not sure. You know, that's more of a job, and so it gives me an avenue to talk to people and educate people about trees. But, yeah. And at the end of the day, it's like everybody else. It's just a job that I have to go to.
DLT: And was there anything else you wanted to discuss that wasn't brought up by any of my questions?
KB: I can't think of anything. I mean, I think the state of the trees in the city of Detroit is, should be our, I mean, my opinion is it should be the basis for our policy decisions going forward. Like what is going to help us get a nice canopy of trees? Healthy canopy, a multi-species canopy, one that is habitat for birds, bugs, gives us shade, sucks up water, gives us food, filters our air, filters our water. And so, I mean, those policy decisions go all the way down to what are the enemies of this vision of a healthy city, like car dependency, parking lots, salt, our obsession with grass. I don't know. I think that those are where our policyIf you’re thinking about trees, like what, what makes us, then you get good answers that on the road down help the big issue of climate change, but with small tangible actions that immediately, like, you can immediately affect our water quality. Like there could be policy decisions tomorrow that could clean up all the phosphorus and nitrogen clogging up our lakes. Like, you could fix that problem. We could fix this water runoff problem. We could fix the parking lot problem. We could fix— We can plant trees. We can protect our old trees. And so those are things that, like, there's no excuse for us not fixing.
And I think people, you get caught up thinking about the big picture of climate change, then you're just going to be paralyzed and do stupid things, like, cutting down big forests to put in solar panels, or like, oh, we'll make electric cars and replace the gas cars. And you're like, thinking about carbon emission. And you're not thinking about, oh, we're still having a car. We're increasing, like we're not helping— You put all these solar panels to put cars on the road and you're not thinking about, is that making the water cleaner for me right now? Is it making my temperatures cooler for me right now? Like, what are the things that we're gonna make— Because, like, I'm concerned about my climate, right? The big climate, I think if we worry about our personal climate, like, we'll make the right decisions for the bigger climate. And I want fresh fish, healthy trees, clean air. Yeah, and, you know, we do all those things and we get the water cool enough so there should be trout in southern and southeastern Michigan. And there's policy things that we can do to make that happen. And I think if we do those things on a, if we do those things and everybody starts doing those things, we're going to start getting our ice back in the wintertime, so. But, that's all you can really do. I think.
DLT: All right. That was all the questions I had for you today. Thank you so much for your time.
KB: Thank you.
Kevin Bingham: Kevin Bingham.
DLT: And how do you spell your name?
KB: K e v i n B i n g h a m.
DLT: Thank you. And do you live in the city of Detroit?
KB: Yes.
DLT: What neighborhood do you live in?
KB: Grixdale Farms is what it's called.
DLT: How long have you lived there?
KB: Since 2003.
DLT: Have you lived in any other neighborhoods in Detroit?
KB: I lived briefly on Goethe and Field for a few years before moving to that neighborhood.
DLT: Do you work in the city of Detroit?
KB: Yes.
DLT: What career are you in?
KB: I'm an arborist.
DLT: And what's the name of your business?
KB: Singing Tree.
DLT: Can you spell that, please?
KB: S i n g i n g T r e e.
DLT: And how long have you had it?
KB: It's been 15 years.
DLT: Where is it located?
KB: Also in Grixdale Farms.
DLT: And how did you start up this business?
KB: Well, I just was working as an arborist for other companies and felt a need for one based in Detroit, looking at the needs of the canopy of Detroit. I was spending a lot of time working out in the suburbs, and I wanted to bring my work closer to where I lived. And, yeah, I mean, I've always I've worked in the tree industry since I graduated high school and even a little bit before that too. So, it's just something that I've always done. And it kind of naturally led into starting my own business.
DLT: And what were some of the canopy needs that you had identified in Detroit?
KB: Well, Detroit is really a special place as far as having a pretty awesome canopy. There's a lot of older trees that have been neglected for a really long time. And so many of them are hazardous. But they're still good trees. But since they haven't been maintained, and limbs have fallen on houses and fences, they've ended up getting a bad reputation. The city lost a lot of trees with the Dutch elm disease that hit in the 60s and 70s and 80s. We lost a huge amount of our canopy with that. We replaced them with the emerald, we replaced them with ash trees, almost, you know, where elm was we put in an ash tree. And so the city had a lot, a lot of ash trees.
And when I was starting my career here in— I moved from Colorado right after, basically, I turned 20. I moved here. And when I landed here we were pruning ash trees. And then we're pruning them more, and all this deadwood. So then it turned out to be the Emerald ash borer, which was started on the Detroit River, from pallet wood brought in from Asia. And that epidemic now has killed millions of ash trees across the country. So that was a big part of, you know, between 2003 and 2009, I was just, I mean, it was like ash trees were being cut down left and right. But, you know, there's still a lot of oak trees, which are struggling, too. We've got oak wilt in the neighborhood. That is a threat. We have, you know, the pines aren't doing very well. There's various diseases hitting pines.
It's a rough time to be a tree in general. But, I think, you know, they're still growing as well. So, planting new trees, planting, getting— That's one of the problems that we've had. We have an older canopy with not a lot of replacement. The landscape architects in general seem to be, have moved toward planting small ornamental trees in people's yards. So we have a lot of old trees that were not killed by the Dutch elm disease or the ash borer. But then there's not a lot of, you know, middle generation trees because basically, over the past 40 years, people have moved away from doing that, where it was sort of a people— I mean, if you notice, the nicer neighborhoods have a lot of really nice canopy, and that went along with the nice houses and the nice environment that people— But for some reason, we've kind of moved away from doing that, and a lot of the new, newer construction is focused around small ornamental plantings. And it's more of an industrial maintenance style where you have, you know, you have a 20 foot tree and it's weed whipped and the lawn is fertilized in pesticide. And then in 20 years, the tree dies because and you put in a new one, kind of thing, you know, you make a bunch of money spraying these little trees. They're planted too deep.
So we have had a hard time where our kids are going to not have as nice of the canopy as we do, for sure. I mean, I don't have a nice canopy, as our parents did. The canopy that we look at today is, you can only dream about. I mean, you can find it in little pockets. But it is, it's definitely degraded. A lot of the canopy that we see today is, basically fence line trees that have been left to grow. So we look out and see, oh, the trees, you know, it's green out there! But then what we're looking at is people who haven't cut down their, maintained their fence lines and it's Siberian elms, mulberries. Which are fine trees, and they could be, they could be ornamental trees, but they weren't, you know, there's not a, they’re there out of like a, you know, neglect the most. Right? And so then they also give trees a bad reputation, because a lot of times people will cut them down, cut them down, cut them down, and then they grow up and there's like eight trees growing out of where one tree should be. And they get big, and then they split apart, and they take down your power and your, you know, and then you're like, oh, trees are, so we got to cut down all the trees! And then so, basically, yeah. It's a tough time to be a tree in the city. But, as far as an arborist goes, there's definitely a huge amount of opportunity to both maintain the canopy we have and try to get a new canopy going the down the line.
DLT: And what are some of the potential consequences of this canopy loss for the city and its residents?
KB: Well, I mean, trees make life comfortable, basically. Without trees, it's hot, it's humid, it's swampy. Trees move water out. Like, we have flooding issues, and the best remedy for flooding issues is to have trees pulling that water and getting it back to the atmosphere instead of it sitting in the ground. Obviously, oxygen filtering, pollutants. Noise reduction, they dampen the sound. Like, if you go into an amphitheater, there's all those things that they ornament the walls with to absorb sound. Trees absorb sound for us. Without trees, things are louder, they hurt our ears more. They, they’re habitat for insects, which feed birds, that feed hawks. You know, there's a whole, there's squirrels, there’s an amount of bats, all these that eat insects. There's just so many benefits. I mean, really, without them, we're done for. And Detroit is lucky because it's green and there's a lot of open, there's not officially a lot of green space, but Detroit has a lot of green space. So, and there is a canopy made up of these weed lines which were, you know, so we do have a canopy in Detroit. It's, in a lot of instances, it's an unintentional canopy, which is less than ideal for when you're living with people. Like, if you're humans, you have to maintain your canopy. You can't just, like, go live in the canopy and things will be okay because you're going to get— You know, the Native Americans maintained their canopy. They harvested the nuts, the, you know, walnuts are edible. That's the native tree. Acorns are edible. Even the seeds of silver maples are edible. Tapping the trees for, so the trees were an integral part of, like, everyday life. And that forest was maintained for that purpose of, you know, you're not looking at the tree as just shade. You're also looking at it as food. You're going to keep it maintained. They used fire, they pushed their animals through there to graze. But with the idea of keeping, you know, the forest here was, it was an intentional, cultivated forest for thousands of years.
And we have that legacy. I mean, there was that in Belle Isle, before the flooding. Palmer Park still is a, goes back to that era. You can see it in Rouge Park. But in all of Michigan, you know, there’s like these little tiny corners. There's a little place in Westland, I believe, that is going to be bulldozed because it's on private property. But it's one of the last little pockets of where you can see these trees that go back to the time when it was a, you know, a forest with this— This area has been populated by people for a very, very long time. And there was a definitely a interaction between the people here in that forest that goes back thousands of years. And there's, we have little vision, little pockets where we can see remnants of that era still. Palmer Park. Used to be Belle Isle. These little places, there's a couple places down the river. But, yeah, it's really— In all of Michigan, you drive across Michigan. There's very, like tiny, tiny amount of acreage that you can find trees that go back to that era. Paul Bunyan and his friends leveled the entire state of Michigan. Like, complete, it was like, you see the pictures of the Amazon rainforest now, that was Michigan in the 1900s, the late 1800s. It's what was the first boom for the city of Detroit, really, was just the money made off of cutting down the trees, because it was like this endless expanse that just seemed to go on forever. And then it's interesting, you know, after that was cut down, we had these huge fires. And it's interesting because all the huge fires that you see out in California and Oregon kind of are in the similar time range between the huge fires that you saw in Michigan and then the huge fires that you're seeing in California in the last few years in relation to when they leveled all the trees out there. And it's like, if you go and level a forest like that, what comes back is the bramble. You know, it's this whole thing of succession and it's just, like, really hard to control. So you, you just throw everything out of whack, and then you get this big tinderbox that grows back. So, and that's what happened in Michigan. And there's these massive, the biggest fires in the history of the country were in the Midwest, around that time.
So, yeah, I think trees are, trees are really cool to work with. Because when you, they are old and so they go back, If you're in a, even a young tree, that's like, okay, this trees 40 years old, it's maybe 50ft tall. 40, that's like, I'm 46, so. But you can think about, like, this tree, right? This, like, little tree right here was, I was six when it was born, basically. And then, how long, it would take, it would take 40 years for that tree, for another tree, if I planted it, to be like that little tree. I mean, it's like this is a tree that I could, like, cut down and throw in the chipper in, you know? But it took 40 years for it to get that big. And if I plant another tree, it's not going to be a real tree until I'm dead, right? Like I can plant a tree, but it is not really a tree that does anything. Or it's like, I'm not going to be able to appreciate that tree because it's going to be 40 years before it's just an average tree. Like a tree that, well, that's a tree. I mean, there's trees that you see and you're like, holy cow, that's a huge big old tree! And that tree's like 250 years old. There's trees in Palmer Park, a lot of trees have been coming down there, too, because it's now, you know, it's having a rough time as an old forest that hasn't had the maintenance it probably should, that it grew up expecting. So a lot of trees are coming down now. But, we counted a tree that, gosh, it maybe, 24in in diameter, 25. Not a huge tree, but with 250 rings in it. So, you know, and that's older than the city of Detroit. It's older than the state of Michigan. It's, things were a lot different 250 years ago. And there's, I imagine there's trees in there that are, because there's some trees in there that are huge and, you know, maybe they're 350 years old, you know? So they're a cool connection to the past.
DLT: And would you say, your business, Singing Tree Detroit, is affected by climate change?
KB: I mean, climate change is a tricky one because it's so many things. Like, climate change happens when you cut down trees and it gets five degrees hotter. So, people are cutting down trees and it's getting five degrees hotter. There's more asphalt going in the ground, like, there's less, there's salt. There's, like, these are all climate change, you know, people dumping salt all winter long. They're exposing the asphalt all winter long. They're putting salt into our rivers. The problem in Flint was salt pollution, right? And they sell it at the gas station. Climate change is dumping all this lawn chemical into our lawns. It flows into the water that causes, you know, that's our climate that we're living in. And it's changing. We're dumping all this CO2 into the atmosphere, which is a, but we're also dumping all this smog and rubber parts and plastic. I mean, that's like, you go around in Michigan and you can't find any fish. You, all the rivers have don't eat the fish signs or eat this limited amount of fish. I mean, like, that's not, that's climate change, right? Like if I can't eat the fish, my climate is, that's my climate. I, you know, so. And trees dying, you know, you can— Climate change is the Emerald ash borer coming over and wiping out an entire species, basically. I mean, we do have ash trees now. We're going to see, they're still there, but in a sort of a different form. But we had ash trees in the city of Detroit that were, you know, as big around as this room. Massive. And this was 20 years ago. And you don't, you don't see that. The biggest pump— There was a pumpkin ash on Belle Isle that was killed by the ash borer. And it was the largest pumpkin ash ever found anywhere, so. But those are all gone. And that's in the last 20 years. And then we, before that we had, of course, the chestnuts disappeared. The American elm is in a vastly different form also. You see it as weed line tree, but it gets up to about 30 or 40 years and then it dies. So that's a different tree than we used to have.
And those things are climate change. And they affect our climate. They affect what the, you know, you lose it, you lose all the chestnuts. And then that's the food source for a whole, that's the staple. It's like if all of a sudden, you know, flour disappeared, right? And we'd have to find a new staple. That was chestnut for both humans and wildlife in the eastern part of the United States. Not so much up, up this way, but, you know, down in the whole Ohio Valley was just solid chestnuts. And if you, I mean, so it's a different, different world. So that's, that's climate change. Dragging brush, I'm always like, the worst thing. It'll be like 90 degrees, and you have to drag the brush from the backyard past somebody's air conditioner, and it's like blasting heat out into the atmosphere. And I'm like, that's global warming, right? Because I'm literally walking by heat getting blown out into the atmosphere like, oh. And I just, you know, you've got all these trucks driving around. It might be a simplistic way to view global warming, but like, I can't imagine— You've got all these cars, and you look at a freeway, and every single one of those cars is running at 400 degrees or whatever. Like, you couldn't touch, they're hot. Like, there's explosions going doodoodoodoom and just pumping heat out of like, man, that's global warming right there. You don't have to, like, track the carbon dioxide. I mean, it's hotter on a freeway. It's hotter on an airport. And we’re building more airports, we’re building more freeways. You stand next to a car and it's hot. Like, you walk, you cross the street at Palmer Woods and you enter into that forest. Even if you enter into the golf course area, like, the temperature just drops. It's like. It's such a difference. Hot day, I'm dragging brush past the air conditioner. And then I walk, I get home and I walk across the street with my dog into Palmer Park and just like ahhh, you know, and that's the shade and the— Like, those little pockets, that was Belle Isle. And then now that's not there anymore. And that's climate change. So, yeah. I guess it's something that we're definitely dealing with and we haven't, nobody's ever experienced— Like, we don't have anything to go off of because nobody's lived through this life of not having that canopy that we had. Nobody's lived through this life of not having clean water. So I guess it's just a, we'll have to explore, and find out what the next 20 years are going to bring.
DLT: And do you feel that combating or alleviating this climate change is an important part of your work?
KB: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, I look at it like I'm not going to be able to do anything about global CO2 emissions. I ride my bike everywhere, I took the bus here, I started my tree service with a bicycle. It grew to having trucks and chippers. So, definitely was, you know, it's hard to see smoke billowing out of the chipper when you start it up. But I think defending the forest that we have is, trying to convince people not to cut down our canopy, I think it is definitely a driving factor. I think, you know, trees to me are the ultimate answer. And also working closely with, you know, trees aren't the answer in Arizona. And they may even, you know, there's people that move to Phoenix and they plant trees everywhere, but they probably just shouldn't move to Phoenix [Laughter] because there's not water to do that with. And then you're sucking, you’re desertifying the whole state, basically, growing trees in Phoenix. But it’ll be, yeah, I think about it. And trees, there's so much other things to think about in terms of trees than climate change, but it is a part of what I think about.
DLT: And earlier you mentioned Detroit's issues with flooding. Can you talk a little bit more about those?
KB: So there's this, we've had flooding. We have highly impervious surfaces. So water can just, when it rains, it doesn't have anywhere to sink into the ground. And so we get these massive rainstorms that have come more frequently and louder. So they come and, you know, poor drainage, clogged up drains. We haven't been able to really— And it's gotten worse with the more paved surfaces. It's really interesting. I like to fish a lot. And the Clinton River was an excellent trout stream for years and years. But basically, with the construction of The Palace and the Silverdome in Pontiac, and they, both right on the banks of the Clinton River, huge parking lot, and it raised the temperature of the water during the runoff. Because the water would just land and rush all into the Clinton River. And it flows out it, you know, salt heat, you know, it lands on a hot parking lot on a summer day. That water goes in there really hot. And trout can't live in that water. So they built those parking lots and then the Clinton River— Now they try to stock it and stuff, but you can't really get a population to survive. And not only that, you've added all these other highways. When they built 475, or whatever, 375, extension out in the Waterford area. That whole, the five, I guess it is. That's happened out there too. You build a big freeway and all the rainwater rushes down and chokes, I mean, and it comes really fast. Bust out banks, it causes erosion. And that's happened.
And then that water backs up places, gets into people's basement. So, it's sort of a, and then as the storms have gotten more and more violent, that becomes more of an issue. So flooding is— And, I think, see, you know, a lot of people will point to climate change and not actually address the quicker issue, which would be not putting a big free-, like, the freeway causes this, just putting a parking lot next to the Clinton River causes it to flood and destroys the whole creek and the fishing in the ecosystem and everything. And then you just say, oh, it's climate change. But no, these are like specific— It's like people say, oh, all the trees on Belle Isle died because of climate change. No, it's because they had an idea that they were going to connect the lakes, and they opened up the water, open up the island and flooded it and left it underwater for two months. It was like a human, one human action that killed an entire forest. And then they said, oh, it was climate change. There was a flood. There's been floods in the past. There's, if you look at the water levels of Detroit River, it's gone up and down and there's been floods in the past that reached that stage, that flooded the forest, that didn't flood the forest because the forest wasn't opened up to the—
And so, you know, there is definitely climate change occurring, but there's also these other things that are, we actually do have control of. Like how much asphalt we put out there, how much rainwater we can, you know, and if you just say it's climate change, then you're not dealing with these other issues that you can't actually like, tangent— You know, we can control the water so it doesn't flood. We can bring it back to systems that absorb the water into our ground, that slow the water down, that keep the Clinton River cool. These are known things that we could do. But if we put all our energy into reducing, you know, electric cars or, you know, it's not really addressing, there's still a parking lot there, right? And nobody uses it, and it's actually getting better because all the, if you look at it it's like, all the weeds are growing up through it and making holes and so maybe it's shaded now, maybe you can bring back the Clinton River, the state of the Rouge River. Like, those are things we could fix. Way simpler than we could fix global CO2 emissions. And it would make a huge difference for our direct life. I mean, I think a little bit of investment in the Rouge River to clean it up, get its flow back, absorb some of that stormwater. You figure out how to remediate that water, come running off of the freeways. Like, if you look at a freeway, they're just massive, right? And you build another one and you build another lane for it. And then all the structure, the, how much— If you look at aerial view of all the parking lots in the city, I mean, it's just crazy. It's just how much space we've wasted on, on asphalt in our life. And that's heat. That's like literally like, asphalt is hot. It causes flooding. We know it causes flooding. Even the water department charges you if you have asphalt, which is a good thing, right? Because it's encouraged people to get rid of their unnecessary asphalt, but they charge you money for your asphalt.
We can, you know, if we relied more on rail and public transportation, we wouldn't be putting all the salt in the road to keep our tires from slipping. Because cars and cars need salt to operate in Michigan, although they don't very much anymore because we haven't had any snow in so long. But the amount of salt dumped out into the rivers is just like, it makes me, I get so— Because it kills the trees too, right? People are like, why is my tree sick? And there's like a huge bag of salt, and every day they'll shovel their snow with their, like, don't want to shovel so they'll just throw salt out there [Laughter] and then they'll throw it all over the street so they can— It's like, man, that stuff is toxic. Like if you want to kill plants in your cracks of your driveway, you put, like, the salt kills it. So there's all those things that would be so— If people stopped dumping all this herbicide and pesticide on their lawns, it would make such a huge difference, for our clean water and survival. So, I don't know. There's a lot of there's a lot of levels to looking at the solutions and the problems. The forest on Belle Isle was really tragic because it was completely preventable. But it was a, and like, a loss of a— Just, you know, there's basically the largest and only forest of that type left and development, like progress, killed it without a lot of thought to the consequences. And the project was supposed to introduce, or rehabilitate the lakes. But I used to fish there all the time and it was great for crappie, and you’d see the whole lake shore surrounded by people fishing. All the Bengalis would come down there. But there's no fish in those lakes anymore, [Laughter] unfortunately. Maybe they'll come in at some point, but like, and you don't— We used to go ice fishing out on Blue Heron Lake and just catch buckets of perch. And now, I mean, the last two winters, we haven't been able to go ice fishing, but it doesn't seem like there's any perch in the lake there either, so.
DLT: And how does your company, in its own way, educate people about these environmental problems and solutions?
KB: Well, I think it's been hard, and I'm actually moving away from being a residential tree service because I have felt like I haven't really been able to do— But in that regard, in a sense of being a service that needs to pay employees and it needs to, and I'm trying to meet customers’ expectations, which are often not my own expectations. So, we've, as a company, we've always told people, like, if they want to cut down their tree and it's a good tree, you're going to have to find somebody else to do it. Well, I think a lot of companies say, well, if I don't do it, somebody else will. And I'm like, well, somebody else can do it and have that on their conscience. So we really, really try to walk away from any unnecessary removals. We encourage habitat creation in trees. And it's one of the difficult things, is that there is this lawn and tree conflict. And sometimes I feel like, man, I would be better off being, because people care more about their lawn than they do about their trees, and so if I was able to enter from the lawn aspect and convince them that they don't need a lawn or, like— It's a tricky conflict because getting people to want habitat is hard too, because habitat is often in, like, the dead branches. And so here I am, an arborist, and I'm going and telling people, no, no, you know, I could charge you $8,000 to cut down this tree. And then they're like, well, no, I'm not going to do that. And then they're like, well, what about cutting out those dead branches? And I'm like, well, that's a really good branch for habitat. There's obviously some things, well, so I end up talking myself out of work a lot.
And so, in a sense I feel like, being able to impact— A lot of, the way the tree industry is set up, it's set up to remove canopy, right? And that's what I've, I am part of the tree industry. And it's a much harder sell and a much harder thing to get people to plant trees, especially the trees that I want planted. I get asked to, like, plant little dogwoods, which are fine. But we also need trees that get big. You know, like, I want big trees and then, like, well, how tall does it get? Well, hopefully it'll get like, 100ft tall. Oh, I don't want that. But I mean, they'll be dead by the time it's 100ft tall, but it would be nice to— So, what happened at Belle Isle has inspired me a lot. There's another thing, and there's no money in this, but a lot of our forests are threatened right now. And after seeing what happened to Belle Isle, there was a huge oak tree in Port Huron. That the rings were counted at close to 500 years old. And it was cut down for the sake of a skate park. You know, in the central park of, you know, they wanted a Tony Hawk skate park in Port Huron. And there was this tree right in the way where they wanted that done. So it got cut down and it's like, oh, my gosh, we just lost something completely invaluable for a skate, for more concrete. And I like to skate, but, I think we're losing that acknowledgment of where— How, how could we— People protected that tree for as long as there was people in Port Huron. The people who are in Port Huron, when they got there, they cut down a lot of trees, but they didn't cut that that tree down, right? For some reason, like, it survived because people protected it. They didn't allow it to be cut down. But then all of a sudden, the city and the people and the, you know, oh, a skate park is more important than this tree.
The same thing is happening, and this was in, at Brennan Pools at the Rouge Park. They’re building a rec center. I don't know if you've heard about this. They're building a rec center adjacent to the pools. And Rouge Park is the other jewel of Detroit. Beautiful park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, or parts of it, who specifically planted,100 years ago, a grove of oak trees. And in order to build this rec center they want, they're going to cut down half of them. Which is like, how could you, how could the city be so stupid to not recognize this— Like, the people of Detroit in 1900 or in 1924, whenever they built Brennan Pool and designed that neighborhood or that park, they were like, for the people of 2024, we are giving you this grove of oak trees. But they're not, they didn't plant it for themselves because then it was just like these little twigs that you see out, you know, that are nothing. But they planted those oak trees for us and we're like, oh, thanks [Cutting sound]! And you're like, I don't know. So, they, you know, in the Climate Initiative thing, they wanted to build solar panels and the city decided, oh, we're going to, there's all this empty space. Let's build 50 acre solar panels around this, solar panel farms around the city. And like, solar is cool, right? But then you're like, oh, we're going to come into this neighborhood, which was Brixdale Farms. And put 40 acre solar panel in the middle of a neighborhood. And if you go to this neighborhood, it's like, full of big old, it’s like this old neighborhood in Detroit that planted these trees. Like, this is a nice neighborhood, we're gonna have big oak trees in this neighborhood. And so in order to put the solar farm, they would have had to cut down, gosh 30 150-year-old oak trees?
And luckily, our neighborhood was able to tell the city: no, not here. But you look around in some of the neighborhoods. They probably will be building these big solar panel farms, which will be compacted soil, heat like heat emitters. So the people in those neighborhoods are going to experience a heat rise in their specific neighborhood. And solar is cool, but, they wouldn't be great to live next to because they don't have any, there's no shade, unless it's, like, a solar panel is giving you shade. But a lot of our canopy will be lost for that. So, one of the things that I have started to realize, like, I think you can be easy to think about, oh, people care about the environment now. Like, you hear about stories from the 60s and 70s of how bad Lake Erie was and it got fixed. But all that stuff is, you know, things get moved around, but you have to have people, like, advocating for them. I think, as far as our clean water goes, people are maybe fishing less or spending less time on the water, so they're not as connected to how threatened our water supply is as maybe they were in the 60s or 70s, but you don't see a movement to protect those basic life sources like our water supply, like maybe you did when it was really bad. Or maybe it's because we did clean things up, and now it's not so obvious, but there's definitely, things are getting worse again. And people are still cutting down really big trees, and now it's even more important than it was then, because, like, we've been cutting those important resources down for so long, there's just precious few of them left.
So, I want to spend more energy, you know, talking about with people. Because in Port Huron they didn't even understand that it was a big tree anymore. So how do you give awareness to how precious, like, a big tree is, and how few of them there are left? Driving across Michigan, you're like, oh, the whole place is a forest. It's not a forest. It's an ecological wasteland that we're slowly, slowly recovering from. But we're not going to, this is what you're looking out when you drive across Michigan is like basically complete destruction relative to what it was before. And then when you do have little pockets of big trees, like how precious that is. In Palmer Park we had an issue, just recently. Another manmade flooding disaster, through progress, the tennis courts— Well, a variation of things, but new tennis courts were put in at the— The old tennis courts were flat, right? And they put in new tennis courts, which was great because tennis is awesome. But when they did that, they kind of backed up, staved off, they essentially built a dam on the south side of the forest, and that water backed up in there and killed, gosh, 30, 40 trees over the past two years. And just now we've been able to, like, drain, open up where it should flow through again. But it was just, like, you change the hydrology of a place or you do a construction, you don't know the consequences, and you leave a forest underwater for 18 months and all the trees will die, like, every single tree.
And that happens so much. You build a new road and it sloughs off water in a different direction and floods the pocket or something. And you move the water around you dam up— Part of, so, on Belle Isle there was, the forest flooding from the Friends of the Detroit River project, where they opened it up but didn't allow it to be released, and it flooded into the water, into the forest. And that was the Canada side of the forest. But, in the 90s, they had built a road through the forest on this side, and that dammed up, that changed the hydrology on that side. And that killed, like, the US side tree death. There was a big pocket of forest that died because of that road that was put through. And it was either 90s orearly 2000s that that happened. And then that problem kind of spread around that side of the island too. And Palmer Park, they put in a new trail where they ripped out the fence between where the golf course was, and in doing so, they sort of created a little berm to get the machinery back there. And that blocked up water that flooded an area. You know, I mean, all it took was to open it up again. But just a simple thing like that can, you know, you could lose a whole— So, yeah, I think there's a lot of work to do. As far as my company goes, I'm not sure. You know, that's more of a job, and so it gives me an avenue to talk to people and educate people about trees. But, yeah. And at the end of the day, it's like everybody else. It's just a job that I have to go to.
DLT: And was there anything else you wanted to discuss that wasn't brought up by any of my questions?
KB: I can't think of anything. I mean, I think the state of the trees in the city of Detroit is, should be our, I mean, my opinion is it should be the basis for our policy decisions going forward. Like what is going to help us get a nice canopy of trees? Healthy canopy, a multi-species canopy, one that is habitat for birds, bugs, gives us shade, sucks up water, gives us food, filters our air, filters our water. And so, I mean, those policy decisions go all the way down to what are the enemies of this vision of a healthy city, like car dependency, parking lots, salt, our obsession with grass. I don't know. I think that those are where our policyIf you’re thinking about trees, like what, what makes us, then you get good answers that on the road down help the big issue of climate change, but with small tangible actions that immediately, like, you can immediately affect our water quality. Like there could be policy decisions tomorrow that could clean up all the phosphorus and nitrogen clogging up our lakes. Like, you could fix that problem. We could fix this water runoff problem. We could fix the parking lot problem. We could fix— We can plant trees. We can protect our old trees. And so those are things that, like, there's no excuse for us not fixing.
And I think people, you get caught up thinking about the big picture of climate change, then you're just going to be paralyzed and do stupid things, like, cutting down big forests to put in solar panels, or like, oh, we'll make electric cars and replace the gas cars. And you're like, thinking about carbon emission. And you're not thinking about, oh, we're still having a car. We're increasing, like we're not helping— You put all these solar panels to put cars on the road and you're not thinking about, is that making the water cleaner for me right now? Is it making my temperatures cooler for me right now? Like, what are the things that we're gonna make— Because, like, I'm concerned about my climate, right? The big climate, I think if we worry about our personal climate, like, we'll make the right decisions for the bigger climate. And I want fresh fish, healthy trees, clean air. Yeah, and, you know, we do all those things and we get the water cool enough so there should be trout in southern and southeastern Michigan. And there's policy things that we can do to make that happen. And I think if we do those things on a, if we do those things and everybody starts doing those things, we're going to start getting our ice back in the wintertime, so. But, that's all you can really do. I think.
DLT: All right. That was all the questions I had for you today. Thank you so much for your time.
KB: Thank you.
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“Kevin Bingham, June 11th, 2024,” Detroit Historical Society Oral History Archive, accessed January 12, 2025, https://oralhistory.detroithistorical.org/items/show/1016.