As engineers and landscape architects working in the built environment, we are increasingly faced with retrofit situations that must work with and around a variety of existing conditions and constraints. As stormwater requirements increase, requiring more storage or larger footprints, we must think creatively to locate and design systems to fit into an already constrained… More
Today marks the eighth and final episode of season 1 of Remarkable Objects (sob). Since this podcast is all about the intersection of nature and the urban environment, I wanted to use this last episode to talk about engaging ordinary citizens to create a better urban forest. As much as policies and regulations shape our… More
Public space is more than just a pleasant amenity in our towns and cities, it is an important connection between our homes, businesses, institutions, and the rest of the world. It’s where we bump into each other and wave hello. It’s also where nearly half of violent crimes happen (Bureau of Justice Statistics), where people… More
I’ve been a fan of Kaid Benfield’s writing for years, so I was incredibly excited when he agreed to be interviewed on Remarkable Objects. I was first introduced to his work as a reader of “Switchboard,” the blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council. His posts stood out to me because of their conversational tone,… More
As a consulting arborist, I am often called upon to diagnose and help “sick” trees in a landscape. The primary cause of health problems for many of the trees I look at are related to impacts from a landscape renovation or home remodel. Despite best intentions, many bad things can happen to trees during development… More
Our surroundings have the power to shape our emotions, health, and well-being. We can feel this in our bodies – our tensions heighten while driving in city traffic, and relax while walking in a park – and research supports it, too. The lights, sounds, and colors of the environment in which we live and work… More
Soil is not something I spent a lot of time thinking about before starting to work for DeepRoot. But in that time, I’ve come to see and appreciate soil as an almost-magical substance. Soil is foundational to so many things: the biological processes of billions of organisms, carbon sequestration, plant life, and the built environment… More
All across the globe, it has been getting ever hotter with each passing year. With this heat comes serious health risks, including severe heat exhaustion and poor air quality, which disproportionately impact children, those who are ill, and the elderly. Heat-related impacts also disproportionately impact poor and minority communities, which tend to have less access… More
Hey there! “Environmental justice” was a relatively new term for me when I interviewed today’s guest, Shannon Lea Watkins. Shannon is a post-doctoral fellow who studies (in, uh, layman’s terms) how trees influence people and how people influence trees, and she recently published a study that asked an uncomfortable but important question: Is tree planting… More
This summer we surveyed arborists and designers about the issues they encountered buying trees free from uncorrectable root defects. We published the results of that survey on this blog. To review: nursery-grown trees, especially those in containers, can have root defects such as girdling, circling and diving roots which contribute to tree health problems or… More
Trees influence meteorological and climatic effects at all scales of a city, from pocket parks to entire neighborhoods. However, while research has been done on the effect of trees canopies on urban environments in general, we are only now beginning to understand how urban canopies affect climate at all scales of the city – from… More
(We’re bringing you this week’s episode of Remarkable Objects a little early, since Thursday is Thanksgiving here in the U.S. We’ll resume a normal publishing schedule next week.) After a decade of working in urban forestry (and editing this blog), I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the biggest challenges trees in cities face. There… More
Soil. Stormwater. Sustainable Infrastructure.
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