Wild Society

Updated tree regulations took effect January 1, 2015, as part of the City of Portland's efforts to clarify existing code and meet its tree canopy goals. Revisions protect the urban canopy, provide consistency and improve customer service. 

The changes create new protections for trees on public and private property, and tough penalties for those who don’t follow them. The new rules, we hope, are less confusing and easier to interpret and follow.

Perhaps the biggest change is that permits to remove trees are now required on all private properties. 

All tree regulations can be found here. A new website, hotline, and email address provide direct connections to staff who can answer tree-related questions.

A little history:

The City of Portland has been managing the urban tree canopy since 1972. The 2007 Urban Forest Action Plan first spurred the effort to revamp Portland’s tree regulations. An advisory committee worked diligently with City of Portland staff to develop the updated code, which was adopted by City Council in 2011. However, the financial downturn in 2011 meant insufficient funds to implement the new regulations. 

Fast forward to June 2014, when the City Council was able to approve funds for implementation in 2015. 

What do these changes mean for the average property owner in Portland? 

If you have a tree on your property that is 12 inches or larger in diameter, you will now need a permit to remove it. Planting, pruning, or removing street trees also requires a permit. Planting and pruning permits are free. Removal permits cost $25 and will be available at the City of Portland Development Services Center. Or applications may be mailed with an enclosed check. In many cases, permits will be issued the day of application. 

Since there are some nuances to the rules, we encourage everyone to have a look at the website or give us a call to see if they need a permit. 

What about new development?

In development situations, such as a new home or a substantial exterior alteration, requirements for tree preservation and planting may be triggered. When regulations apply, a portion of the trees on site must be preserved using specific protection methods, and tree canopy density standards must be met through preservation of existing trees and planting new trees. There is an opportunity to pay a fee in lieu of preservation and/or planting. 

Tree Resources

website: www.portlandoregon.gov/trees

email: trees@portlandoregon.gov

hotline: 503-823-TREE (8733)

Development Service Center hours and information: www.portlandoregon.gov/bds/37988

In the next century, it is predicted, we'll see 70 percent of the globe's population residing within the modern city. At the same time, population-growth projections say we’ll need to produce 70 percent more food for an additional 2.3 billion people by 2050. Historically, food systems and infrastructure have been ignored as a function of city, county or local governments. Unlike civic systems such as transportation, water, wastewater and housing, “food” has generally been outside the civic agenda. 

Since the early 2000s, however, food as a policy matter has established itself as an important consideration for local governments. Food systems are fundamentally linked to issues such as health, equity, environmental sustainability and economic development. 

The Portland area’s urban growth boundary has established a clear and divided relationship between urban areas and farms, where farmlands are protected and occupy areas outside the boundary line. While the UGB defines urban areas and farms as separate entities, nature is the bridge that crosses and connects. A holistic approach to sustainability must engage all three major identities in the metro region: urban, rural and nature. 

Bringing together these separate identities are “food parks.” A way for urban residents to share time in a rural setting, food parks connect us to the farm and to the adjacency of nature interspersed throughout our rural areas. Their proliferation could compel a complete rethink about food: from the soil it grows in, to the preparation of a meal for the table, to the understanding that all food is nature and comes from nature.  

This recent trend takes us back to an old idea: that we should grow food on a scale larger than a home or community garden, in a place with proximity to nature so that we connect with the natural world around us. The concept of food parks has been found in Europe for hundreds of years in the form of seasonal migrations from lower to higher elevations; through managed forests shared by communities; and in the Russian dachas of the last few centuries. 

Dachas are typically pieces of land divided into small strips for cooperative communities, on the edge of the city or town. They provide an opportunity for local communities to grow fruits and vegetables away from their homes, and give residents time on weekends to plant seeds, tend beds and gather herbs. Each family has a small cabin they can stay in overnight, so a weekend or weeks in the summer can be devoted to personal food production. In Britain, these spaces are called “allotments;” in Greece they are “terraces.” In all countries, these food parks are adjacent to forestland, creeks or hills, affording the supplementation of grown food with foraging or hunting. 

Today we are seeing the emergence of food parks in the U.S., from managed forests and community fruit tree orchards, to small organic farms that teach children where food comes from. In 2012, Seattle launched its first urban food forest, the Beacon Food Forest. As a 7-acre public plot, it will give the working-class neighborhood of Beacon Hill the chance to harvest plants, including apples, pears, plums, grapes, blueberries, raspberries and more, that are scattered throughout the park. 

More and more food parks are emerging. They are diverse in setting and types of products, but all follow the principle of connecting people directly with their food sources. A few examples, both here and abroad:

• Marion-Polk County Food Share
• United Kingdom Farm Allotments 
• Luscher Farm 
• Kelsey Creek Farm Park 
• Hopkins Demonstration Forest 
• Parrhasian Heritage Park 
• Howell Territorial Park and Sauvie Island Organics 

The metro region — with its progressive politics, protected urban growth boundary and rural reserve, commitment to local food, and interest in all things green — provides a great opportunity to test the reinvention of the age-old concept of living close to nature. Imagine our own orange belt (like green) — or food belt, if you will — around the edge of the region providing small adjoining plots of land that families or small cooperative groups can cycle, bus or drive to. Imagine families, community groups or youth leaving their homes for the weekend to learn about soil, the sun, and the seasonal nature of planting and tending food, occasionally foraging in nearby forests or meadows for medicinal plants, roots, berries and the like. Small cabins provide places to gather at the end of a long day, to tell stories about the previous years’ crop success and failures. 

If all of this sounds far-fetched, just remember the successful European examples, in which people see themselves as not just urban, but also as farmers and nature lovers. This blended and trifold identity will help conversations occur more easily between the environmental, farming, and urban communities who too often see each other as coming from far ends of the spectrum. These three identities combined is how humanity used to see itself, and how we could perceive ourselves again in the future.  

What is next? Is the European model one we can easily adopt in and around the metro region? Is there a coalition out there that can come together to discuss this emerging topic and plan for our future food parks? Is there a place we can start a regional dialogue about how to grow our own food? At the moment we probably have more questions than answers. But like so many other movements, this is always a good place to start.

My earliest memory of feeling connected to nature was going to outdoor school in sixth grade. It was a week-long SEI Academy program at a campground on Mill Creek, a tributary of the Willamette River.

I had a blast. I was the kid who “accidentally” fell in the water when learning about aquatic life, just because I wanted to get a little closer to the newts. It was also my first time camping, which seemed really strange and scary at the time. Dark! Can't see what's coming! No door to lock! But I’m a seasoned pro now.

I returned to outdoor camp in seventh grade, but my exposure to nature was pretty limited after that. As I high school junior in Gresham, I heard about the TALON program, and I knew it would give me many opportunities to be that kid again. I wanted to be more in tune with nature. So I applied, and was accepted.

A program of the Audubon Society of Portland, TALON educates and employs young adults ages 16 to 22 to Teach, Advocate, Lead, Observe and Nurture. It provides skills for participants to move into and excel in conservation-related professions. Based out of Audubon’s Eastside branch at Leach Botanical Garden, the program aims to reach diverse cultural and ethnic communities, especially those in East Multnomah County.

Before TALON, bugs made me uncomfortable, birds were a nuisance, and plants were just plants. TALON helped me realize that all living things are beneficial to humans in so many ways. Without spiders, there would be an uncontrollable, uncomfortable and unreasonable (in my view) amount of mosquitos. So now? Big fan of spiders.

Trees protect our drinking water by preventing erosion, and plants with edible and medicinal properties can be found throughout our forests. I started seeing and really getting these connections. TALON opened my eyes to the natural world.

TALON is a pretty new program, and I was lucky to be part of its first two summers (2013 and 2014). The fun starts with a 10-week training in local natural history, environmental science, and local and regional conservation issues. We visited the Tillamook Forestry Center for hands-on conservation lessons. We pulled English ivy at the Audubon Center to learn about sanctuaries. We organized an all-ages nature fair at Leach Botanical Garden. Did we bond? Heck yeah!

After the training, program members are assigned apprenticeships. I was a camp counselor both years, working with kids ages kindergarten through 11th grade. I helped with day camps at Audubon and Leach Botanical Gardens, and overnight camps in places like Newport and the San Juan Islands.

One camp that stands out in my memory is a two-week trip for high schoolers to the San Juans. One day, thousands of dead jellyfish washed ashore. We starting pulling them out of the water with a big stick, amazed at how pretty they were. I had never seen a jellyfish before. Another time, a fox strolled right by our campfire at twilight.

Two summers as a TALON member developed my love for and knowledge of nature, plus the job skills and professional connections needed to apply for and get an office assistant position with The Intertwine Alliance this fall. I joined the team in October. It’s my first office job. With long-term goals to become a surgeon and one day open a nonprofit health clinic, the skills I’m gaining now will help me down that road.

I look forward to meeting partners and friends of The Intertwine — starting at the youth-themed Intertwine Alliance Summit this Friday, Nov. 14, at the Oregon Zoo. I’ll be there, sharing my TALON experiences. Hope to see you! (Note from editor: It’s not too late to register for the event!)

With credit and a humble apology, I take the title of Norman Maclean’s book A River Runs Through It and strive to make it more personal and inclusive by replacing “It” with “Us.”

For we, the people who now call Oregon home, should have a personal relationship with the many river arteries that run through our state: the Deschutes, John Day, Klamath, Malheur, Columbia, Trask, Pudding, Wilson -- the list goes on.

But no river has been altered, used, abused, and loved like the Willamette.

Call it the happenstance of human migration, the mistakes of our mothers and fathers, progress, or opportunity; this river, which many of us see each day, has defined where we live.

What the Willamette has seen; from the earliest human settlements thousands of years ago, to the massive and repeated Missoula Floods, where the depth of water rose up to what is now the highest floors of our Portland bank towers, to the commerce and recreation of the recent past -- this river was and does shape our lives.

As the Willamette Valley changed, so did the river. Where once grasslands, oak savannas, meanders and floodplains made for a natural balance of nature, our river has now has been “tamed” into a channel.

Over the “modern” years, it has been used as a garbage dump, toilet, a place where “out of sight, out of mind” was the operating procedure, manifested by either letting waste materials leach into the soils adjacent to the waterway, or by simply pouring it directly into the water.

Such was the accepted practice for almost 100 years.

We have used the Willamette for commerce, manufacturing, ship-building, industry and recreation. Yet for centuries, this river was a major source of life giving food and materials to the Native Americans. You can see where the uses conflicted with one another.

Which brings us to where we are now. How do we rectify past abuses that stemmed from industrial progress? How do we go forward?

There is hope. Tribal Nations, environmental and recreational organizations, large and small companies, government agencies and neighbors -- all share a common goal: to bring the lower Willamette back to a healthy state.

We know that we will never be able to rewind history and arrive at where the river was before we came here. But, working together, we can create a new legacy where past ills are identified, worked on, and corrected.

For over 18 years, I had the honor of serving Oregon as the executive director of Governor Tom McCall’s non-profit organization, SOLVE.

One of my favorite quotes of all time came from this remarkable lover of his adopted state. Tom McCall proclaimed, “Heroes are not giant statues, framed against a red sky. They are people who say, “this is my community and it is my responsibility to make it better.”

And so, I extend a heartfelt invitation to become a hero for your Oregon.

In 2013, I was approached by the Port of Portland to be involved in an ambitious, public undertaking. It was not only to help tell the story of the Willamette, but also to engage us, the people, in an effort to become aware and take part in this process of restoration by creating a series of podcasts. Together, we interviewed over 40 representatives associated with the river in some way. The series -- called "One River, Many Voices" -- is now available free on iTunes.

For me, this has been and continues to be a personal, educational journey. Now, it's my hope that you will take an opportunity to listen to the series and get involved as the remediation process progresses. We owe it to our families, our neighbors and ourselves to become part of the Willamette's next chapter.

David Bond wants to sell you something. He’ll say anything, really. As long as it gets you and your kids outdoors.

In his new documentary Project Wild Thing, the British filmmaker – alarmed that his young daughter was choosing to spend 97 percent of her waking time indoors – sets out to reverse shrinking demand for outdoor play by employing the same marketing tactics that sell Nintendos.

Now Bond is bringing his pitch to America, with a week-long set of Portland events that starts today.

We Skyped with Bond the day before his flight, in an interview that ranged from Norwegian villages to lightning rods and Hollywood blockbuster The Hunger Games.

***

So why does the United States need Project Wild Thing?

The United States fares quite badly in terms of reported childhood wellbeing on the Unicef survey.

Nationwide, it's a big issue for you, as it is for us in Britain, that children are less and less connected to their natural environment.

An enormous amount of the thinking that led to Project Wild Thing – from the Nature Network to Richard Louv – has come out of the States. In some ways, you're ahead of us. In other ways, you're really a catastrophic representation of what can go wrong.

What’s gone wrong?

We've identified 11 major barriers between children and the outdoors, things that are high in the U.S. and U.K.. Things like traffic and road safety, perceptions toward stranger danger (fear of strangers in the media).

A risk averse, litigious culture makes it hard for organizations to let children roam freely without panicking about the risks.

Project Wild Thing isn't just a film anymore. What's happened since your October 2013 release?

Well, in the film, as a kind of joke, I appoint myself the Marketing Director of Nature, and then we start this campaign to try to sell nature to children. In the process, we actually do a campaign – we get lots of free ad space and creatives helping us.

As a result of doing that, we got a lot of real people coming and saying “we want to join the movement.” We started signing people up, and the Wild Network was born. Now it has thousands of members, and quite a wide reach. It's been amazing to see, just in the last months since we launched.

What does the Wild Network do?

The insight from the film is that while there's a supply of green space out there, and organizations that offer natural experiences to children and parents, in economic terms, people aren't demanding it.

The reason for this shrinking demand is that the alternatives are demanded more voraciously: screen time, computer games, time indoors playing with toys. The Wild Network exists so that all of the organizations that want to sell outdoor play to children can use it to make a big noise about the benefits of their product.

When will you know that this big marketing noise is successful?

If you're marketing Nintendos, you know precisely how many you sold. But there's very little measurement of outdoor time for children. So it's a challenge to figure out if we're having an effect. At the moment, we're judging success by whether debate has been stimulated in the U.K.. We're looking at creating a measurement for time spent outdoors as well.

There's a gap there that we need to figure out. Do we use proxy sales, like rubber boots? Some power companies have suggested that we correlate power consumption with time spent outdoors. We also want to ask questions like what's the most outdoorsy city and the most outdoorsy day? We need answers like these to sell nature in an ongoing, cost-effective, celebratory way.

What nations, in your opinion, should we look to? Who already does what you call "Wild Time" well?

There's that great saying, if you design a town for a child and an eighty-year-old, then you end up with a really great town. Certainly in Northern Europe and Holland, they're much better at the supremacy of the child and the older person over the automobile.

I've just written a blog about the Norwegian philosophy of love of the outdoors. Land is considered to be everyone's to roam on, to move freely through fields.

Scandinavians also have the belief that children need to be plugged into the natural world from a very young age. Newborns are often taken outdoors their first day. There's a different intention there. Formal education starts later, but they end up scoring well compared to nations like ours, which school our children much younger.

How do you counter the fears of risk-averse cultures like ours?

I have to be careful how I answer so as not to be rude, but it's nonsense. If you look logically at the risk of contracting these diseases, they're vanishingly small. It's equivalent to worrying about being struck by lightning. We don't attach lightning conductors to our children's heads when we take them outside. We don't act on the risk. But for some reason in the U.K., and the U.S. I think, we act on the fear of disease or stranger danger in very illogical ways.

In the U.K., some are reacting quite strongly to the Wild Network, saying that our product is dangerous. But it's in fact really good for you, and the alternatives are dangerous. A life lived indoors, in front of the screen, is far more sinister in terms of the long-term risks of diabetes, heart disease, obesity.

But as Nature’s Marketing Director, that’s not the sales pitch you use in the film. What’s your angle?

We try to be playful, to get people to see our product as fun and free.

A lot of charities, NGOs, organizations who have traditionally been responsible for selling the joys of an outdoor life, have often done so through quite negative messaging: get your children outside or the climate will suffer, or they won't understand polar bears. In the Wild Network, we're trying really hard to have fun, not make people feel badly.

What demographic is proving the hardest sell so far? Parents?

Actually, it's teenagers. There's scientific evidence that says if you don't get children normalized to an outdoor life by the time they're seven or eight, then it just gets increasingly hard to persuade them to enjoy it. If you're a teenager in the depths of hormonal change, deep into social media and that's the way you're expressing yourself, having someone like me come along and say “Hey, let's put on some Wellington boots,” that's not even going to begin to break through. You'll see some of those kids in the film, who are almost unreachable.

Is there any way you've found to break into this particularly tricky market?

The Hunger Games is a really interesting representation of a wild life that teenagers really understand. The message is that there's something highly resilient about an outdoor person – that they're more determined, more likely to survive and be tough.

Teens in the U.K. respond well to a statistic that 80 percent of successful entrepreneurs were tree climbers when they were kids. So if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, a good place to hone the skills of a self-starter is in the outdoors.

So the sell there isn't climate change or understanding polar bears?

Appealing to a teenager's self-interest can be highly effective. That's been a big insight for us. You and I might respond well to an ethical consideration that we want our children to be nice to each other and know the names of plants and animals, but there are waves of people who are more motivated by financial gain or status. And these are people we have to communicate with as well. Finding those pathways has been really fun.

What's the plan for your week here in The Intertwine?

I'm really excited that a Wild Network might be launched in Portland. We're gathering nature's marketing department here for a big brainstorming. This would be the first Wild Network in the States, and we hope it might be the start of more marketing of nature by groups across the U.S..

Your daughter plays a big role in the film. How have your efforts to up wild time for kids worked out at home?

Well, they know they can make me really happy just by saying they want to go outdoors more. Whether they genuinely do or not, I really don't care. My daughter, who I measured at about three percent of her waking time outdoors, is now at about twelve percent. She's actively choosing to go outdoors far more than she ever did before. So that's amazing.