The city of Atlanta, aptly nicknamed “The City in a Forest”, is looking significantly thinner these days. Giant hickories are on the ground, hundred-year-old oaks are dying and thousands of less recognized trees have ended up in the woodpile following a brutal season that arborists describe as a “perfect storm” for the city’s famous tree-abundant landscape.
In most any city, people would probably complain about blocked roadways or damaged roofs, but in Atlanta, trees mean more. With 27% of the city covered with trees, Atlanta charges up to $1,000 to remove a single one, even with permission. As Jasen Johns, a city arborist, observes, “Trees define Atlanta.”
The city’s residents are concerned that Atlanta is losing trees at an unusually rapid rate, with multiple causes to blame: a severe drought, a series of powerful storms, an invasion of invasive pests and diseases and the natural deaths of older trees planted in the early 1900s. Steadily bad weather has been the biggest factor in the deforestation, which some residents are now calling the ‘Treepocalypse’. Although Atlanta was spared the spring tornadoes that left its neighbor to the west devastated, it caught residual winds above 50 miles an hour that tore through the city, bringing down trees that had been alive since the 19th century.
The situation has created a backlog of work at the city’s parks office, with arborists sometimes working 24-hour days. Soon will come the daunting task of replanting, but for now it is too hot, according to Trees Atlanta, a nonprofit group that has planted 75,000 trees around the city since the 1980s. The group is currently signing up volunteers for the fall and holding fundraiser events to support buying and planting more trees.
“We’re in emergency mode,” commented Johns, “I’ve never seen this many down trees.” The city does not usually track the number of lost trees, but everyone from the Georgia Forestry Commission to the telephone companies that send out repair crews, Atlanta’s residents are noticing the disappearance of the once prominent canopy.