Karen Uhlenhuth of Kansas City wanted to do more for the planet, so she started planting trees around her neighborhood (Suzanne King/The Beacon).
Karen Uhlenhuth always has a few gallons of water in the back of her Prius and an eye toward the side of the road.
When she sees one of the 80 or so saplings she recently planted looking thirsty, she’ll pull over and give it a drink.
“The real test is the first summer,” she said on a walk through Roanoke Park, where her tree planting work began more than two decades ago.
If the tiny native trees she has sunk into public easements across Midtown can make it beyond weeks of scorching temperatures and little rainfall, they’ll probably be around next year.
And every new tree, Uhlenhuth said, notches a win for the climate.
“Trees are just transformative,” she said, stopping frequently to point out the bur oaks and chinkapin oaks she’s planted over the years. Some, now tall enough to climb, shade large swaths of streets and sidewalks.
Scientists see planting trees as one of the easiest bets to help the ailing environment. Yet many cities, especially in poor urban neighborhoods, don’t have enough trees. And often the ones they do have are endangered or dying, and not being replaced.
Kansas City’s tree canopy
In 2018, Kansas City estimated that the shade canopy formed by its trees had room to double. And 60% of the city’s existing trees were rated as being in fair or worse condition.
That was partly due to age, part stress from the environment and part a devastating infestation by the emerald ash borer. That pest will wipe out most of the city’s ash trees, which account for about 9% of its public trees.
During the last year, city leaders have taken steps to protect and add to Kansas City’s urban forest.
In 2023, the City Council adopted a tree preservation and protection ordinance, intended to prevent unnecessary tree removal. The city also promised to plant 10,000 trees by 2026, and in October it accepted a $12 million grant from the U.S. Forest Service to support efforts to increase the density of the city’s urban tree canopy.
Olathe also got $1 million through the federal program. Under President Joe Biden’s administration, the Forest Service has designated $1.5 billion for urban forestry.
Any portion of those funds that hasn’t already been distributed is likely to be pulled back under the next Trump administration. And new funding for trees is unlikely. That’s bad news for the climate, said Vivek Shandas, a professor at Portland State University who serves on an advisory committee to the U.S. Forest Service on urban forestation.
“In terms of the climate, in terms of a lot of extreme events,” Shandas said, “we’re only going to see those increase in intensity and magnitude and frequency in the coming years.”
Why trees matter
The list of advantages of having more trees is long.
Trees can cool streets and asphalt parking lots, cutting temperatures in urban “heat islands” by as much as 20 degrees. They help filter pollutants from the air and absorb carbon, reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And trees mitigate soil erosion and improve stormwater absorption, lessening flooding.
Studies also suggest that trees contribute to improved mental and physical health, by making the air cleaner to breathe and increasing the chances people will spend time outside.
“Trees are solutions to a lot of the health issues that we have,” said Taylor Neff, a community forester with the Missouri Department of Conservation. “That’s why the federal government has invested an unprecedented amount of dollars into urban forestry. The science backs this up.”
Trees will be even more important as the climate continues to change, Neff said.
Kansas City’s tree dashboard shows the city is more than halfway to its 10,000 tree goal. The Parks and Recreation Department and its contractors are planting trees, and the city also has given away trees for residents to plant on their own properties in an effort to boost the city’s tree cover.
In 2023, the Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department planted 2,269 trees, but removed 2,100, it said in its annual report. It is unclear what those numbers will be in 2024. But during its Nov. 19 meeting, the Board of Parks and Recreation approved two $550,000 contracts for tree plantings using federal tax dollars.
The contracts — awarded to American Lawn and Landscaping Inc., a privately owned tree company, and to the Heartland Tree Alliance, a nonprofit affiliated with Bridging the Gap — each include agreements for planting 1,000 new trees.
At the same meeting, commissioners awarded a $1.7 million contract to Shawnee Mission Tree Service for tree maintenance.
Not planting enough
Uhlenhuth worries, though, that Kansas City’s planting efforts may be falling short.
“Our already somewhat small tree canopy is only getting smaller,” she told park commissioners during the public comment portion of the November meeting. “I’m still concerned that we’re just not planting enough.”
Uhlenhuth questioned whether the approximately $500 the city is paying per tree is too much.
“If we’re going to have any hope of maintaining our tree canopy,” she said, “we’ve got to figure out another way that doesn’t involve $500 per tree.”
The city could not be reached for a response.
Uhlenhuth gets her trees for free from a St. Louis organization called Forest ReLeaf. The group gets seedlings from the Missouri state nursery, lets them mature to a certain size and then ships the trees — all native to Missouri — across the state.
The trees are free, with just one string: They must be planted on public land. In 2023, Forest ReLeaf was responsible for almost 14,000 trees being planted around the state, including a truckload that arrived in Kansas City in October.
A church, neighborhood, nonprofit or individual accepting the free trees, planting them and making sure they get watered and cared for can make a big difference, said Meridith McAvoy Perkins, Forest ReLeaf’s executive director. Even someone who just plants one tree will help.
“It’s something that people can actually do,” McAvoy Perkins said. “We could never plant 14,000 trees on our own. All those exponential impacts roll up to a pretty dang lot of trees.”
A way to help
That’s exactly why Uhlenhuth, a retired newspaper reporter, decided to start planting trees around her Volker neighborhood.
After years spent writing letters and sitting in meetings talking about environmental policy, she realized that the words and letters weren’t doing anything toward actually helping the environment.
But planting a tree would.
So far, Uhlenhuth guesses she’s been involved in planting almost 200 trees in Kansas City. She started near Roanoke Park and the surrounding neighborhoods. But she’s also planted some trees Downtown and along The Paseo around 39th Street.
Every year she plants more. This year it was close to 80. And along the way she recruits people to help. That includes knocking on dozens of doors every summer to ask strangers if they will water a tree if she plants it in a nearby easement. Many say yes.
“Trees are generally a fairly easy sell,” she said. “People like trees for the most part.”
She believes her approach could be a model for anyone, like her, who believes the climate is in crisis and wants to do something. It could work for municipalities trying to replenish their forests, too, she said.
Uhlenhuth’s first trees, on the north edge of Roanoke Park’s sand volleyball court, already tower over the sidewalk below. The ones that went in the ground last month look like sticks sprouting out of mulch, vulnerable to passing lawn mowers and weed whackers.
But Uhlenhuth is confident many of those little seedlings will mature and some day shade the streets and houses nearby. She also knows that she probably won’t see that.
“Someone famous said, ‘We don’t plant trees for ourselves. We plant them for the people coming after us,’” Uhlenhuth said. “I totally agree with that.”
This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.