To prevent California’s six million urban trees from destroying power lines, crashing through houses, or ending up lying across the street when they die, humans must intervene.

A handful of arborists and members of the Conservation Corps of Long Beach recently gathered at a run-down lot in the corner of a city park to do just that.

Early in the morning, corps members used a construction vehicle to remove one of the dozens of logs from beneath the shade structure and tossed it onto the giant orange log cutter.

“You know what’s going on – it’s always the same routine,” Tito Leulusoo, the corps’ chief of staff, shouted to the group. “This should be easy. Let’s do it.”

The saw whirred to life. Corps members slowly and cleanly cut bark from one side of the trunk. This piece of wood, once a thick eucalyptus tree in the city, will one day become a bench – perhaps in one of Long Beach’s city parks.

It’s the seedling of a vision the Corps came up with just a few years ago. The Corps has been planting trees since its founding in 1987, and now wants to take care of the trees after they die, turning them into usable lumber for houses, desks, benches, sculptures – you name it.

“The only limit is your imagination,” says John Mahoney, Urban Wood Manager at West Coast Arborists. “As far back as the past and future, wood is mankind’s favorite building material – it’s the warmth of wood.”

Dan Knapp, executive director of the Conservation Corps of Long Beach, hopes the program will grow much larger. Right now, work is sporadic with borrowed equipment, but Knapp wants a crew of Corps members to devote themselves to the project full-time, with their own mill and kiln to dry the wood and a store to sell it – all on the same property.

For every tree the company cuts down, it hopes to plant two new trees.

The amount of wood available in cities is not small. More trees are cut down in cities each year than are harvested from national forests, and researchers estimate that urban trees could replace about 10% of the United States’ annual wood consumption.

After receiving a $1 million grant from Cal Fire in 2022 to start the program, the Corps immediately turned to one of the state’s longtime leaders in urban logging: West Coast Arborists.

The organization quickly agreed to help the corps. The resource of urban wood is vast. “It would be foolish of us to think we can do it alone,” Mahoney said. “It takes every single person to move this whole movement forward. … You can save the world as long as you don’t want recognition.”

West Coast arborists report that their city lumber has ended up in the homes of A-list celebrities (they can’t name names), been supplied on acoustic guitar bodies, and appeared at the Los Angeles County Fair (as part of the show where a guy balances on a log rolling across a lagoon).

“You never know where the wood grew,” Mahoney said, “but for us it’s just cool that trees that grew in Long Beach are now in Architectural Digest … what the heck, that’s so cool.”

Mahoney comes from a family of tree lovers and has plenty of interesting facts about trees to share, from how fungi can turn wood all the colors of the rainbow to how to properly calculate a tree’s age. (Always add five years to the growth rings; the first few years are squashed in the middle of the tree, he said.)

During the milling session, Mahoney and a colleague gave pointers to the corps members as they worked with the giant milling machine.

For Knapp, the excitement about Urban Lumber isn’t just about the environmental benefits – it’s the chance to reach young people who aren’t sure how to move forward in life and provide them with employment opportunities and career development opportunities.

“I think we’re reaching young people at a key time in their lives,” Knapp said. “You can be a high school dropout. You can be an ex-convict. You can be all of those things and you still come to us.”

The Corps offers its members the opportunity to complete their GED, attend college or vocational school, and meet employers.

“I was the typical story of being on the wrong path,” Leulusoo said. “The Corps put me on the right path.”

High school didn’t go as planned for Leulusoo, who was born and raised in Long Beach. Some of his family members were in the corps, so he decided to join the corps.

Both Marco Navarrete and Madisen Tanore joined the Corps after starting college because they couldn’t ignore the urge to get hands-on and have a direct impact on their community.

“The corps let you experiment with anything you want,” said Navarrete, who grew up in LA. He’s studying psychology but hopes to work in project management when he grows up. “That’s something that will help me here … whether it’s in the corps or really anywhere in Long Beach.”

It was the first day at the yard for some of the five Corps members on site. They had come from working on road construction, irrigation and a number of other Corps projects to spend the day with a no-nonsense Leulusoo and an excited Mahoney, learning the art of sawing wood.

The Corps has even developed a 40-hour training program with West Coast Arborists designed to prepare Corps members for entry-level jobs in the field. Knapp hopes that if they don’t get a job with West Coast Arborists, they can use their skills in sustainable logging in Southern California’s forests, which are overrun by flammable vegetation.

Building an urban wood project from scratch is not easy, and when cities want to exploit the full 10% of their wood needs that can be met with urban wood, it becomes an even bigger challenge.

First, cities need to know where trees are dying. Lara Roman, an ecologist with the Forest Service, says there are two approaches cities can take: proactive and reactive.

“Reactive management means you can only respond to the latest emergency. That’s not generally considered an ideal system in urban forestry,” Roman said. “The ideal system would be if you already had an up-to-date inventory and knew where the most at-risk trees were.”

By inventorying all the trees in a region, the city can send crews to cut down endangered trees when a severe storm is imminent, or remove a particular species of tree that is susceptible to a pest spreading across the country toward Southern California.

But these inventories are difficult and expensive to create and maintain. “A tree inventory is very, very expensive. You have to pay someone to walk every single street and measure every single tree,” says Natalie Love, a researcher at California Polytechnic State University who helped compile the inventories into a database of 6 million urban trees in California. “It’s a lot of manual work.”

Even when organizations learn of a fallen tree, special care must be taken to preserve the tree for lumber processing. In addition, not all trees are in a suitable condition for lumber processing, especially if they have died from disease or pests.

In this case, it is usually shredded into mulch and composted, since California residents (including businesses and the government) are prohibited from sending dead trees to landfills.

However, this negates one of the most important advantages of urban trees: they absorb carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their wood.

“The carbon sequestration of urban trees is very short-lived,” Love said. “If a tree stands for 30 years, that means it’s sequestering carbon for 30 years. But if the city cuts it down and turns it into wood chips, and then those wood chips rot, that carbon just goes back into the atmosphere.”

However, when arborists use the shredded wood as mulch to support gardens, new trees or other plants, they can still keep carbon out of the air.

“Mulch is great,” Mahoney said, launching into another tree fact. “What is the highest end use of a tree?” he asked, referring to the use at the end of its life, which sequesters the most carbon. It turns out that mulch is second only to lumber, firewood third, and landfills last.

“Am I against mulch? No. Not every tree is suitable for lumber,” Mahoney said. With municipal lumber, “we’re basically sorting out the pearls.”

2024 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.