Jon Nessle

Jon Nessle

ISA Certified Arborist

 

Sebastian Krupa: To get started maybe you could introduce yourself again and mention the things you’ve done over the years.

 

Jon Nessle: I am an ISA certified arborist. I’m a former member of the Tennessee Urban Forestry Council, and a former member and a former chairperson of the City of Chattanooga Tree Commission.

 

Sebastian: To start off, the most interesting thing that I found you mentioned was how you didn’t have free time to be a volunteer so you decided to make a business out of it. So tell us a bit about your business and how it related to environmental protection or conservation and anything you’d like to share with us.

 

Jon: I got started in arboriculture as a young person because I loved trees at the time and never put 2 and 2 together. But as I progressed in my career and started to figure things out, it became clear to me that environmental conservation was becoming a very important issue, especially a few generations after me. I’m probably near the end of the baby boomer generation, born in the ‘50s, so our generation wasn’t so environmentally aware, very much like the generation before us. Obviously during the industrial revolution during the ‘30s and ‘40s, nobody knew or cared about what effects it had on the environment. But since the social revolution of the ‘60s, environmental awareness has really been changing.

As I got along in my career, I realized I’m not just doing tree work because climbing trees is fun or it’s cool work, but that it really helps. As I got further and further along, it became apparent especially here in Tennessee that urban forestry or urban arboriculture (forestry not for forest products) has become far more important because of energy conservation. Energy is the issue of the day. Recently fresh water is going to become a big important issue of the day. Trees are exceptionally important in that. That sort of merged in my mind. I’m already doing something that I like and now I know how important it is. That’s where it came into being.

 

Sebastian: How difficult was it to start a business like this? When exactly did you start this?

 

Jon: I started my own business in 2001 when I moved here. I moved to Chattanooga in 2000. Personally it wasn’t that difficult because my wife has her own business. We’re both independent entrepreneurs.  Her income was able to support our family and I was a stay at home dad. We just knew that somebody, some parent had to at home. So I started my business part time doing some tree work; whatever I could handle by myself. Mostly doing tree work is dangerous. It takes a crew of several people well trained in aerial rescue. Flying around in a tree at 60 feet up with a chainsaw on your hip is not really safe if you’re not prepared. Providing for myself was not that hard because of my wife’s income. However, I’ve built it slowly over the years.

I work really part time myself now more as a consultant, now, than actually doing tree work. It wasn’t that tough for me, but it is a tough business to get into. I’ll tell you this though, there’s only 2 states in the nation that I know of, New Jersey and Maryland, that require a test or examination of some form and a state licensing for arboriculture. Every other state it doesn’t matter. You pay your 30 bucks or whatever for a business license, you don’t have to prove any knowledge or anything, and you can go to work just like any landscaper. You don’t have to have any expertise to get a license in landscaping. You go to your local county office, say “I need a business license”, pay a few bucks, and you’re allowed to go. There are very few regulations in the tree care industry and that’s frightening.

 

Sebastian: Yeah, that sounds really wrong I would say. I noticed that you had an education in this field, and it seems fairly strange that others aren’t required a similar kind of knowledge. What has your experience been? Have you found that a lot of the people out there doing arboreal work just don’t know what’s going on or it’s a fairly self-selective kind of field?

 

Jon: No, I would say 90% of companies that call themselves tree service companies are uneducated and don’t continue their education and in all honesty don’t really care.

From what my experience has taught me, it really comes down to budgets. Everybody budgets everything. When companies or individual homeowners start to budget, tree care and landscaping are some of the last things on the list. That’s understandable. I want sewers, I want electricity, I like flushing toilets. These are more important things, so that’s where the money goes first. Then those that have a little extra income, some will spend money on their trees and their tree care. If you are a typical suburban, middle-class homeowner, budgeting for tree care can get expensive because it takes a couple thousand bucks. But it pays off so much in the long run.

The change now, in the last 10 to 20 years, is that most municipalities are going to start requiring that you keep storm water on your site. It’s a new development. The new federal permits from the EPA is going to say that the first inch of rain water that comes on your property must stay on your property. It can’t go out into the culverts and streets and driveways. The old infrastructure we had to handle all that stormwater just can’t handle as much development as we’ve had. Well, the developers don’t care about this, the developers want to develop. That’s the nature of what they are as developers. Now the federal law is coming into place and it’s going to trickle down to the states that if you’re going to develop, you have to build in an environmental consciousness as to how does this affect the environment. That’s a huge change.

That comes in from guys like your age who have been taught this kind of thing since you were in grade school. Think about it, when you were in grade school did you hear about environmental awareness?

 

Sebastian & Casey: Yeah Definitely.

 

Jon: It was common all the way through your school career. When I was in school, no. Nobody cared. It’s the same way with cigarettes, now everybody knows cigarettes are dangerous, so if you want to smoke, it’s your choice, but you know what’s going on.

It’s the same thing with trees and the environment. We now know that everything we’ve done in the past has been so destructive environmentally. We all have to live in it. Whether you are rich or poor, black, white, green it doesn’t matter; we all have to live on this planet. When you consider it’s maybe 7 billion people on this planet now, we are running out of resources. The way of the future is going to have to be recycling and repurposing. We can’t keep harvesting raw resources and turning those resources into waste and living in that waste. Any living organism with a population that does that has collapsed. Fortunately the environmental awareness has really taken hold. That’s the biggest success, environmental awareness, that started 25-30 years ago. That started with grade school aged children. Fortunately, most teachers are of that mindset that environmental awareness is good. It’s just manufacture and production without consideration can’t take place. And that’s a good thing.

 

Casey: I was wondering, could you go into what it means to be a certified arborist? How long did that take and what did you learn?

 

Jon: Becoming a certified arborist is simply taking a test. It’s not an easy exam, but it’s not tough either. It’s very much like a training exam for an electrician or plumber. You do have to take an exam and you do have to go to conferences and continue your education to keep that certification. The certification is awarded by the ISA, the International Society for Arboriculture. It’s a worldwide organization. They set the standards saying, “Here’s what’s the minimum amount of information that you need to know to pass the test and become certified.” Back when I started 30 years ago, that was like the pinnacle of your career. If you became and ISA certified arborist, you were the top of the line. Now, it’s considered the baseline level to be a tree care worker. But, like I said, only two states have requirements by law, so it’s a buyer beware market. It’s truly American capitalism at its most refined. You better beware, you have to watch out when purchasing that service because if you just take anybody’s word for it and don’t get the education, you’re gonna get your trees hacked and topped, destroyed and damaged, and that’s permanent.

 

Sebastian: You mentioned how only two states have this kind of requirement. Is that at all changing? Are people pushing for any kind of reforms in that? Have you been pushing for maybe stronger regulations?

 

Jon: In our Tennessee Urban Forestry Council, we have a board member called Patrick Haller. We have tried to go to the state legislators and say “Look, we need to do something about this.” There was virtually no response. The legislators don’t really care, and I understand because that’s once again way down on the priorities list. Where it becomes important and what really gets their attention is when we have storms. Is one of you guys from Chattanooga?

 

Sebastian: Yeah, I’m from Chattanooga.

 

Jon: So you remember the storms of 2011 when the tornadoes came through.

 

Sebastian: Yeah.

 

Jon: Fourteen people died, that’s what gets the attention. The challenge is that people will start to blame trees. Saying “Oh my God, the trees crushed that house.” Sorry, no the trees are just in the way of the storm. The storm is going to damage everything. There is no guarantee ever that storms won’t destroy even the healthiest tree. But you can go a long way in protecting the trees on your property through proper tree care using ISA certified arborists with tree pruning, cable bracing. It depends how important the tree is to you. What we truly try to do now instead of appealing to people’s emotional sides saying “do you love your trees?” Everybody loves their trees until you say “Ok, well it’s going to cost $3000 to take care of this tree.” Well forget that. But then you tell them, “Well if you don’t take care of it, that’s going to have to come down and that’s going to cost you $5000.” That’s when it clicks. “I either take care of it for $3000 or remove it for $5000. What am I going to do?” How much do you want the tree? That’s what it really comes down to with homeowners. Those with some disposable income at the upper scale middle-class neighborhoods, yeah they’ll spend the money on it.

And cities like Chattanooga, Gene Hyde is our city forester, the best investment the city ever made was forestry canopy cover. The fact of the matter is, the residents of Chattanooga insisted on this 25 years ago, saying “Look we need to turn around, we aren’t going to be known as the dirtiest city in the US. We’ve gotta stop that.” The number one thing we did was once those manufacturing plants went out, Siskin Steel and Wheland Pipe, for any new manufacturers coming in, now the municipality of Chattanooga says “Wait, you cannot keep polluting like this. We have very limited resources.” We have the Tennessee River, and the little bowl of a valley that we live in holds the air, so we have to be really careful. To me that’s the really positive thing: that most Chattanooga residents, old and young, want this. Where that challenge comes in is when the politicians get in and listen to developers. Once again, I don’t blame them, it’s who they are. If you pick up a rattlesnake, the rattlesnake’s going to bite you. When you deal with developers, that’s where they make their money. They want to develop. What we have to do is tell them “If you’re going to develop, do it in an environmentally aware way with a low environmental impact, and we’ll all be happy.” They can still make money, as a matter of fact, usually they’ll make more money.

 

Sebastian: You mentioned how a lot of Chattanoogans are environmentally aware. Have you found that if we can’t get state legislature passed to be more protective of trees or things like that, that the city council has for example been taking a lot of this role where the state has been failing us?

 

Jon: The state of Tennessee has 50 Tree Cities USA. “Tree City USA” is a designation by Arbor Day Foundation. It’s all a voluntary kind of thing. It’s a nice designation for a town to be called a Tree City USA. There are certain parameters you would have to follow to be designated that, but it’s a nice selling point. For instance, “Come to Cleveland, Tennessee because we’re a tree city USA.” Chattanooga, Tennessee has been a Tree City USA for 20 years. That’s a selling point for tourists or businesses or whatever. The city council supports that and has supported our forestry division because Gene Hyde our city forester is so experienced and has such a great reputation that when he brings something to city council, they listen because he is such a top expert. Gene Hyde is known across our nation as one of the best city foresters including places like Chicago, New York, L.A. Well he’s a small town guy but he’s really knowledgeable and experienced. Everybody in the nation, when he says something, they listen because of his expertise.

So the city council doe listen to him, but when it comes to regulating the business of tree care, no. They’re not going to regulate a business. They’re going to say “It’s a buyer beware market. Trees are expendable.” That is somewhat true. Trees are renewable. The change comes in is that, if I’m living in a property and I have a 75 foot oak tree over my house shading my home keeping me 15 degrees cooler and reducing my energy usage, that tree’s absolutely important to me. But, if something happens to it or it dies and I gotta take it down, I know I can plant a new tree.  I’ll never see it, but maybe my grandkids will enjoy it. That kind of renewability sits in the mind of most politicians. If we’re gonna put a building here and a tree’s in the way, that tree is going to go and the building will stay. The building is going to get priority over trees. And I can understand that because the tree can be replanted somewhere else.

Some cities are considering tree replanting programs. For instance here in Chattanooga when the Volkswagen plant came in, they took down maybe a hundred thousand trees at least. And it was an open area that was pretty wild and overgrown. Yeah, that clearly has a high impact on that particular small area; however, were we going to say “Volkswagen, no, we want save our trees.” No reasonable person is going to say that. Even as a tree lover I understand. They’re going to put a factory here. At least Volkswagen’s corporate model does some things correctly. What do they want to do for a living? They to build cars. Do they care about trees? Not really. But they will do something that says to the community “We’re going to replant some of the trees.” So they replanted about half of those trees throughout the city in different locations. They also took a section of their property and put it aside saying “Here’s Enterprise Park. We’re going to help fund it.” It’s a nature park people get to enjoy. That’s great, its several hundred acres. So there’s that combination of yes, we still got the factory, we’re still employing a bunch of people, yeah we lost a bunch of trees, but here in this particular region we can afford to lose those trees for that. Let’s make the environmental impact and then we’ll move on.

Did you know that the Volkswagen plant is the only Platinum Certified LEED manufacturing building in the world?

 

Sebastian: Oh really? I was not aware.

 

Jon: So that tells me right away that at least somebody at the top corporate level is saying “we want to do this” if for no other reason than community relations. That’s all it takes. If that’s the reason, that’s the motivation, wonderful. I think there’s a little more than that.

If you look into Volkswagen’s history and their plants around the world, they’re environmentally aware. Then it goes back to their German sensibilities too. In Germany, you have very limited space. It’s not that big a country and their resources are very limited. We’ve gotten sort of spoiled here in America in the fact that we’re a pretty wide country with diverse environmental regions all over the place. We’ve sort of taken that for granted. But the turnaround is already set in place. I think we’re really getting there. Guys like you are starting to get into the business world, you start taking this mindset into your thinking when you do business, what’s the impact on the environment? That’s all big. That’s a huge, huge change, and its only happened in the last 20 years.

 

Sebastian: Would you say that the business environment in general is changing a lot, or is it only a small handful companies, like Volkswagen, that are pushing for this kind of environmental consciousness?

 

Jon: I think right now, we’re all at the crest of the wave. I think it has to change and those largest corporations are well aware of that now. Look at all the electric vehicles out there. They couldn’t sell then 10-15 years ago. Now they’re selling. Are they a whole lot different? Not really. We know, and car manufacturers know, we have the technology to make virtually every car on the road for private use electric. If we did that, think what that would do for our oil reserves. Don’t get me wrong, oil and coal got us through the industrial revolution like no other energy resource could. You could not get that industrial production with wood. And keep in mind up until about 1900, wood was not only your building resource, it was your only fuel resource. Until they discovered oil in Pennsylvania, nobody knew about that. Maybe they’d seen it before, but they didn’t use it much. But when that fossil fuel harvesting started in earnest in the early 1900s, well that’s the industrial revolution, because of that energy production.

Well guess what? We’ve gone through that now. We can’t afford to do that anymore. Everybody is now aware of carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning. The whole debate on climate change, I don’t care how many scientists tell you “Oh human activity has not changed the climate, we’re not in global warming.” I don’t care about any of that. I’m of Arabic descent and the old Arabic saying is you don’t eat where you poop. When you’re a nomad in the desert, when you’re Bedouin, that’s my heritage, you don’t put your tent where you’re going to have your camels. You just don’t live in your waste. You have to learn to manage waste. And I think most large industries are getting there. Maybe not in every country, but the US has to lead the way because we are the leader in industrial production bar none for the past 70 years, and I don’t see that ever stopping. It is changing. Production is moving out of the US continent. It doesn’t mean US companies aren’t getting the money from it, but manufacturing and production is moving to those other countries that don’t have regulations in place. However, that is changing. My wife, who has her own business, just visited China, and she said the air pollution there is incredible. What I would think is news is China’s reaction to that. The air pollution in China is incredible, but they know, everyone is well aware they can’t keep doing this.  They’ll go through their period of industrial revolution, but they can’t keep doing that and keep a healthy populace. We all know smoking is bad for you. We all know carbon emissions and pollution is killing us. When it kills the people who make money, the big decision makers, that’s when things will change. But things are changing. That’s a really positive aspect, everything worldwide is changing. Guys like your age, you’re going to get up there and say “Oh, now I’ve got the money and the power. Now I’m going to make a difference.”

 

Sebastian: So you seem very optimistic about the future of environmentalism and the plan, in general. Would you say that the hardest part of environmentalism is behind us, getting people educated, or do you think there are still a couple really large road blocks ahead of us?

 

Jon: There are several large roadblocks ahead. Not to get too political, but look at the recent midterm elections where we have a complete Republican congress. In my opinion, Republicans represent manufacturers, Democrats represent service personnel, including labor unions. Democrats get their money from those people that do things. Republicans get their money from those people that make things. Don’t get me wrong, I love things that are made. I like living in a comfortable home, flushing toilets, having lights. I like all those kinds of things. Where the challenge comes in is educating people, “We can have all that and we can do it in a way with low environmental impact. Here’s how.” The challenge is getting people to stop and listen. The good news, which is why I am really positive, is that even the really conservative ones who support manufacturers are saying, “You know what? It saves us money.” That’s how you have to educate, because they really don’t care about the environment. The way most manufacturers look at it is, “We’re impacting the environment, but it’s not that big of a deal, the earth will take care of itself.”

Well now they’re seeing things differently, as in “We are polluting, and I’m living in that pollution. That’s not so good.” At least they’re coming around that way. I think there are some very major obstacles to overcome, but, as older generations who are so used to thinking, “It doesn’t matter.” How many of my generation’s grandparents held onto things because they just were not going to throw them away? Now, we live in such a “disposable” society. As a great example, if you buy a string of Christmas lights for a couple of bucks, and it only half lights, what do you do? Do you try to preserve all those wires and light bulbs? No, you toss them out and go get new Christmas lights. That kind of disposable thinking permeates all of manufacturing. The change has to be, “We can’t afford to just throw that away. Not, only do we not have the space to put that trash, that’s a resource.” That’s the huge change: everything’s going to have to be recycled.

We cannot harvest coal and oil at the rate we’ve been doing and still do it economically. It just can’t happen. We are already running out. That’s what fracking is all about. It’s the cheapest way to get that oil and gas. We can’t keep doing that because the cost is too high. The only way the cost will really come down is to recycle and repurpose. That’s where I see the future. By the time you guys are my age, in my opinion, there’s going to be laws that say “You can’t just throw things out. You have to recycle everything. All aluminum has to go here. All steel has to go there to be repurposed. All plastics etc.” People are so much against plastics, saying “It’s an oil-based product.” Well, the great thing about plastics is it can be reused: you don’t have to toss it out. It doesn’t have to go to a landfill. It’s going to click, that someday everybody’s going to be required to recycle. They’re going to set up a system so that you have to do it that way. Right now there’s mostly volunteer systems, throughout the entire nation. There are a few states that have stringent recycling rules like Florida, California. Look at their laws for recyclables, you gotta recycle. That’s going to happen worldwide by the time you guys get to have grandkids. It has to. I don’t see any other way to do it.

 

Casey: So you are part of of the Tennessee Urban Forestry Council. I was wondering if you could go over a little bit of what you do on that, and what change you’ve made by being on this council.

 

Jon: One of the reasons I joined was to get involved with tree care throughout the state. That’s an organization that advises municipalities, counties, whomever on good tree care practices. The idea is to promote municipalities into doing things like tree protection ordinances. The city of Chattanooga has a tree protection ordinance, but the tree protection ordinance only covers trees owned by the city, or the taxpayers of that town, so they’re mutually owned by everybody. So that’s the protection we have.

There’s no protection for trees on private property. If you have a gigantic historic tree on your property and you decide, “I don’t like it. I’m going to take it down,” there’s no law that says you can’t. There’s no legislator anywhere that wants to interfere with that private property right. We understand. We all get that. But the Tennessee Urban Forestry Council’s whole purpose is to advise and educate people as to “Here’s why you don’t want to do that. Here’s the value for you.” That’s what our purpose was and that’s what I serving on the council for, because we got to do that in the municipalities. One of the things I did was on the statewide speaker’s bureau, and basically says, “any municipality who wants one of our experts to come over and talk to about trees to your city council, to a group meeting of any kind, we’ll send. It doesn’t cost you anything.” And that was fun. That’s an interesting thing to do. We did try to go to the state legislators and introduce a bill, but there was so much roadblock and there’s so much you have to do ahead of time that that put that on the backburner. We haven’t got time for that.

Right now the Tennessee Urban Forestry council handles programs that I think are really nice, but they’re sort of fluff compared to any kind of law. We have the certified arboretum program. If you have a property and you want to have an arboretum, there are certain rules, regulations and guidelines. You can call yourself a “TUFC certified arboretum.” Are you familiar with the Chattanooga Nature Center over in Lookout Valley?

 

Sebastian: I am not

 

It’s over in lookout valley, in the west side of Chattanooga. They were, at one time, a TUFC certified arboretum at level 4, it had a bunch of trees. That has to be recertified every 5 years. Their 5 year certification just ran out. The new executive director called me and asked me about that and I informed her, “That’s an official designation from the TUFC. You can call yourself an arboretum all you want. You just can’t say you’re a TUFC certified arboretum.” What they want to do is market themselves and sell, “We’re an arboretum.” Well what do they call themselves now? The Chattanooga Arboretum and Reflection Riding, so they call themselves an arboretum anyway. So, once again, the TUFC has these programs in place, and they’re nice, but they’re not really anything that’s going to be regulatory. We just try to inform people of the beauty and value of trees. That’s what it’s all about: the value of trees as a resource.

 

Sebastian: What would you say the future holds for the TUFC?

 

Jon: I don’t know, because the TUFC was founded with a federal grant back in 1991. It was an annual grant and about 2 or 3 years ago they said, “The federal grant’s going to another party.” The TUFC no longer receives that federal grant. Well, that means we have to hire a different kind of executive director, which is part time as opposed to full time. All the funding has to come from either memberships or donations. The board that’s on there now is trying to figure out ways to get funding. Right now they’re publishing a new book where some of the funds go to TUFC programs. The funding is going to get really really tight. That’s going to be a special issue: we’ll see of the Tennessee Urban Forestry Council’s stays alive that way. So far it’s survived on bare bones to keep it going. They’ve had to reduce their programs. They would call me and say, “So-and-so in Chattanooga would like to have an arboretum. Can you do an inspection?” As a certified arborist, I can do an inspection. I would be looking for hazard trees, which you can’t allow. I’d know the identity of the trees and verify the names and the spellings. They ask an expert to do that. In the past, we had to pay people to do that. Now, we ask them on a volunteer basis. I have no problem with it. If they call me, if it fits in my schedule, I’m glad to do it, no problem. I have volunteer time to give to TUFC. But, that’s not always in everybody’s schedule. You can’t afford to do that. That’s where the TUFC is going to find some real struggles. As long as we have an annual conference and we have a few other programs like the arboretum going on, I think the TUFC will survive, but you won’t see much of them. There won’t be a whole lot of marketing. There won’t be a whole lot of public relations. There won’t be a whole lot of advertisements, because that all takes dollars.

 

Sebastian: Have you guys thought about some kind of community fundraising or trying to get local communities like the Chattanooga community involved with the TUFC to help out with the funding or things like that?

 

Jon: Not so much in that direction. What we have done in Chattanooga has pretty much stayed in Chattanooga. A couple of years ago, before I got on the Tree Commission of the City of Chattanooga, the tree commission started a program called Take Root. They got the Benwood Foundation and the Lyndhurst Foundation, two philanthropic foundations here in Chattanooga, and they begged them for money. They started that Take Root, tree planting, program with seed money from each of those two organizations of about $20,000. That’s huge. Those were big donations. We said, “OK, we can go buy trees,” and that’s what we did, but we did it under the direction of Gene Hyde. At the time we had a young guy named Preston Roberts, who we got the City Forestry Department to hire a year later, because he was volunteering for one of these programs, basically taking the funds, purchasing trees and planting them in open spaces in the city. They’re city owned trees on city properties: long streets, 23rd avenue and all over the city, basically just staying in Chattanooga. By the ordinance that was passed for that Take Root program, that’s all that money can get spent on: planting trees or educating the public.

Since then, we’ve planted between 2,000 and 2,500 trees in the city of Chattanooga. It’s great. We’re meeting our tree canopy goals, easily, and I’ll talk to you about that in a minute. The Take Root program has money and that money is basically going towards programs that are specifically connected to the city forestry department. In other words, it’s under Gene Hyde’s jurisdiction as to where we’re going to go with that money. That’s all really positive, because we would rather have Gene have discretion for those funds and be able to use those funds. Those funds don’t go to the TUFC to help the rest of the state. The stay in Chattanooga and help Chattanooga. It’s mostly to educate. I think they’re trying to work on the ordinance where they can use some of that money for actual maintenance tasks: pruning, trimming, treatments and things like that, but I don’t know where that stands or if that stands at all.

What I’ve done on the Tree Commission just last year, which was the biggest program we were working on, was a “Notable Trees of Chattanooga” program, just bringing attention to historic, giant, notable trees of Chattanooga, and tapping into that emotional thing that most people have for trees. You know you’ve felt it. You might go home and walk along somewhere and come upon some gigantic, large tree. Everybody reacts. I don’t care if you hate trees. If you see a 90 ft. oak with a 100 ft. spread, you go, “Wow, that’s a big tree. My guess is it’s been here a long time.” And you’re right. Trees like that were here when Native Americans were doing ceremonies and Europeans weren’t even thought of. When you have trees that have seen that much history, it connects to people emotionally. That’s what we tried to do with this program. There are some really notable trees. Do you know where you get your registration for your vehicle, your local Bonny Oaks Drive?  Have you ever seen the gigantic tree right there?  That big giant oak is a state champion, largest willow oak in the state, but it’s got a great history. That tree was a giant tree back in the 1800s, whenever the guy who named it Bonny Oaks because the area had so many great oak trees. That tree has been there for 300 years.

Everybody attaches themselves emotionally to that. So if you can get that emotional attachment to certain trees then people start paying attention and realize trees in general are good, and not just in the way. Then, they start paying attention to things like, “If you don’t clear cut everything when you build houses. When you do one way in and one way out and do root preservation on most of those trees, guess what? These trees shade your house.” When you shade your house, you reduce your energy. That’s where you take it. You take it from that emotional connection of “I love trees” to “Oh, it’s actually saving me money.” And that they start to look at trees as having monetary value. There’s been a lot of studies on what is the true monetary value of trees to a particular city. I can even send you an attachment to a thing called Benefits of Trees, but it’s a lot of scientific jargon as to particulate matter and pollution. It doesn’t matter, you really have to boil it down to, “You know you love trees. There’s more reasons than just emotions. Here’s what they do for you beneficially.”

 

Casey: You wanted to tell us more about the canopy goals that you had for the city.

 

Jon: Yes, there’s an organization called American Forests. It’s pretty much a voluntary organization. They were started maybe a hundred years ago and they dealt with the forestry industry: forests as a product for harvesting. But, it merged into covering everything. Now, there’s a big difference between forestry products (like what Weyerhaeuser makes) and the urban forestry as a resource. The resource is not harvesting the wood, the resource is how these trees are saving us money: shade reduces energy, roots mitigate storm water runoff. If we can mitigate storm water runoff into our culverts and our grey infrastructure areas, then we don’t have to rebuild that and it saves us all money. That’s where that value comes in.

So, canopy coverage was recommended by American Forests. Canopy coverage recommendations are for the downtown district to have 15% of that area covered with tree canopy. We’re at that now. We’re at right about 14.7%, and it will increase. For the city in general, the recommendations are that 35% of your city is covered by tree canopy. We’re at well over 50%. When you start talking about outlying areas, for Chattanooga, the city core would be from the Tennessee River to the I-24 and I-27 up to Missionary Ridge. That’s the square. That whole area is easily covered by 35% tree canopy. So, the city of Chattanooga well meets their goals. Most smaller municipalities easily reach their goals. Where the challenge comes in is places like Nashville. Knoxville does a pretty good job. If they’re not meeting their goals already, they’re pretty close. If you look at the city of Atlanta, they have a program called Trees Atlanta, planting trees for more tree canopy coverage, and they have requirements to make sure that trees get planted in certain areas. But you are still not going to cover 15% of that downtown core district. So, what about green roofs? Well those are nice, but people are just not accepting that. In places like Holland, if you have a roof with so much square footage it has to be a green roof. I understand that there are different countries throughout the world that are starting these different things for different reasons. If you investigate why they are doing it, it really comes down to: “It costs us more to do it any other way.” So, the tree canopy coverage recommendations by American Forests are 15% of the business district and 35% total. Most cities can meet that rather easily if they start taking a look, but for the smaller towns like Murfreesboro or McMinnville, as they develop and grow we want to make sure we can preserve some of that.

 

Sebastian: Well, thank you so much, this has been great.

 

Jon: Take this away from it. I’m really positive about the future. One of the greatest things that I think that has happened is the digital connection throughout the world. So, guys like you can talk to guys like me across the nation, instantly. You can talk to associates across the world and you can exchange information instantly. So, it’s harder for corruption and deviation to hide. Everybody can be find out. Everybody’s got a camera so if you’re trying to hide something, somebody’s going to find you, some way. So that’s where environmental awareness, I think, is going to be positively changing the world as we go forward, simply because, once everybody’s aware of all the information, who doesn’t want a cleaner world? Nobody wants to live in filth. We can have development, we can do it. We just have to manage it better. Any creatures that are as active as we are is going to develop waste. How we manage our waste is desperately, hugely important. So, if everybody becomes aware, that would keep it going. Let everybody know everything. Sooner or later, everything becomes transparent. Nobody cares about things like, “Are you gay?” Who cares? Back when I was a kid, if you were gay, you hid like crazy, because of things like, “Oh, it’s such a sin.” Now that everybody really knows, being gay doesn’t really do anything. Who cares? Gay is not an issue. That’s the ideal, that environmental awareness isn’t an issue because becomes actual. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it always should be, and I’m very positive that we’re going to get it that way. I don’t think I’m live to see it, but I see that change is already taking place, and I’m really pleased about that. I can go retire now. All right?

 

Sebastian & Casey: All right. Thanks you so much. This has been a very interesting perspective.

 

Jon: Have a good day. Keep in touch. By the way, if you get back in Chattanooga, just give me a call. I have a 9 hole disc golf course on my property. When we have a whole lot of family coming in for Christmas, we do disc golf every day. And you can turn around and go the other way and you can do all 18. We have some disc golf tournaments that are a lot of fun. It just goes to show you, see we have a 5 acre wooded property, very little lawn. That’s one of the great things I promote in my business. I tell people, “You don’t have to spend a lot of money keeping your property, and you don’t have to have lawn.” You can utilize your property. If you have a big lawn area, unless it’s a big baseball field or football field or golf course, why? Why do you pay all the money to fight nature to put a lawn. A lawn doesn’t grow naturally. I have the woods. I have horseshoes, I have disc golf, I have a golf cart I run around on. You can make your property fun without the environmental impact of landscaping. In my business, that’s how I can really make a difference. I can take individuals at a time and through grassroots, say “Let’s change your property from high expense high environmental impact to low impact, minimal cost.” It usually sells.