In 2023, Oregon was awarded more than $58 million in federal grants from the Inflation Reduction Act to plant and maintain trees. The availability of much of those funds remains uncertain.
Earlier this month, the Oregon Department of Forestry, city agencies and nonprofits told Inside Climate News that at least $40 million dollars in grant reimbursements to boost urban tree canopies in Oregon remain unpaid.
Last week, several U.S. farmers and nonprofits sued the Trump administration for withholding grants funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Vivek Shandas is a professor of geography at Portland State University and a member of the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council. He joins us with more on the future of the state’s tree canopies and what they mean for Oregonians.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 2023, the state of Oregon, a handful of cities and some nonprofits were awarded more than $58 million in federal grants. The money was supposed to be used to plant and maintain trees as part of a broader effort at climate resiliency. It came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the Inflation Reduction Act, but you won’t be able to find that out if you go right now to the Department of Agriculture website that once had information about these grants. The page is no longer available. The money might not be either.
Earlier this month, Oregon recipients told Inside Climate News that at least $40 million of the $58 million in grant reimbursements remain unpaid. Vivek Shandas is a professor of geography at Portland State University. He has focused a lot on urban tree canopies and he joins us to talk about what the loss of this money might mean. Welcome back to the show.
Vivek Shandas: Thanks, Dave. It’s good to be here.
Miller: What kinds of projects in Oregon was this IRA money supposed to be used for?
Shandas: Yeah, so there’s a set of projects that are really intended to bring people together around doing urban community forestry work that’s slated for everything from getting trees into the ground, to building out the nursery stock, to supporting tribes and tribal affiliates that are trying to improve their health and well-being through the planting of trees. And for being able to really do a lot of economic development in areas, because we know that these trees have an enormous effect on the health and well-being of communities, economic development, as well as just the overall quality of life for people who live in urban and peri-urban areas.
Miller: That news source, Inside Climate News, found that at least $40 million of the $58 million has not been spent yet, close to 70%. Do you have a sense for how much of the work has actually been done?
Shandas: It’s hard to really estimate in terms of the overall scale. What we know is that about two-and-a-half years ago there was this big announcement about $1.5 billion. And just to give you a little bit of context, urban forestry and urban community forestry is a relatively thin budget overall for any city, any state. What we end up seeing is $1.5 billion showing up – it’s a game changer. And at the conferences I’ve been to, it was just a celebration like I’ve never seen before, having spent 25 years in this work. What came to bear was setting up a lot of systems. So there were people hired, there were systems and granting officers that were put in place. There were entire pipelines to move money out the door. All of that had to happen before any RFP was put out for a community group, a state, a municipality to be able to apply for it. All of that had to be set up.
That required an enormous amount of hiring of people, on the idea that these monies were gonna show up. So there’s an enormous infrastructure that’s in place right now all around the country, including here in Oregon, that was set up to be able to move this money out. Yet, a little, if any, has actually made its way out of D.C. yet.
Miller: The sense I got from that article is that local nonprofits or city leaders in Portland and around the state were afraid to speak on the record about what’s happening because they didn’t want to face blowback by the federal government. I’m curious what you’re hearing? What kinds of conversations have you had with people, if you can give us a sense for them?
Shandas: Yeah, it comes down to basically three things. One is an enormous amount of uncertainty. Right now, it is just unclear, just like as you were saying earlier, the web pages are down. There’s a lot of material that’s no longer available. In fact, there’s a tool that was used as the primary tool to identify target areas where this work needs to happen. It’s called the CEJST tool, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. And that tool was online, it was federally backed … that tool has disappeared.
Miller: It has words that we now know are essentially verboten by this government. They don’t want people to use the words climate change or environmental justice. It’s an administration that once talked about freedom of speech that does not like certain phrases.
Shandas: Right, right. I can’t speak to the motivations for where that’s coming from. From my point of view, when you have air that’s really toxic to breathe, when you have heat waves that are coming through that are incredibly disastrous, not only on infrastructure but human health and well-being, when we don’t have a verdant and thriving tree canopy, we are all going to be bearing the brunt of what we’re seeing coming down the pike.
Miller: These are allocations of money that were passed by Congress, signed into law by the former president. Where do legal challenges for the freeze of these payments stand right now?
Shandas: Yeah, a lot of this, as I’m hearing from D.C., is in the courts right now. Most of the offices in D.C. are holding back what it is that they can actually say and what it is they’re allowed to say. So the second part of that is just that there’s a real reticence to actually put information out.
Much of what I’m seeing, like with the pulling down of some of these tools, is a form of digital book burning that one could actually ascribe to and say that we are now losing enormous amounts of information that we’ve all had relatively easy access to – in the freedom of speech, freedom of information, etc. – so that we can all make good decisions. When that information is gone … like with the courts and what’s exactly happening there because folks are very reticent to actually speak very openly about it. It’s all in the courts, so therefore there’s a kind of a gag order put on all the federal employees to be able to speak to it. Even when I speak to my program officers at D.C., they’re saying sorry we can’t talk about that right now.
Miller: At this point, are you just assuming that a lot of this money is not going to come to Oregon, not going to flow to the rest of the country?
Shandas: At this point, one of the biggest concerns I have is that the entire urban community forestry division of the U.S. Forest Service, which is under the United States Department of Agriculture, is gonna go away. If that happens, it’s going to be an enormous loss to the health and well-being of a nation that has been relying on things like managing pests and disease. Emerald ash borer is now here in Oregon and we have seen what devastation this little insect causes all through the Midwest, all through Colorado, many other parts of the West. So we have urban community foresters actively looking for this particular pest. We have others who are out on the field, boots on the ground, supporting communities and being able to do neighborhood-scale work that could help build more resilience at the local level. All of that will go away and that’s the part that’s really challenging to think about.
Miller: You’ve said recently that places like Portland might have reached “peak canopy.” What does that phrase mean?
Shandas: So it means that we’ve seen recently that the city of Portland’s actually declined in the amount of canopy it has. This is not unusual. We’re seeing this across the country. We’re about to publish a paper in the next month that will show that across 33 cities, we’ve seen canopy come down …
Miller: What does that technically mean, canopy coming down?
Shandas: Canopy coming down means that we’re not no longer growing in terms of the amount of canopy.
Miller: If you’re in a hot air balloon above a city and you’re looking down, say, in June, at leaves you can see on trees, there’s less of it now than there was five years ago?
Shandas: That’s exactly right.
Miller: As opposed to more?
Shandas: That’s exactly right.
Miller: Why is that a problem?
Shandas: It’s partly a problem because two things: One, where we’re seeing that loss is actually in neighborhoods that are the hottest neighborhoods. So in that summer day, in the hot air balloon as you’re looking down, those leaves are not in the neighborhoods that need them the most. They’re in fact further, continuing to bake in that heat and those communities are going to face the brunt of that. So they’re really important for human health and well-being at the basic level. It’s also important because the city [and] many cities have set important goals for moving towards a much higher canopy, upwards of 40% or 45% canopy. And if we have hit what would be considered a peak canopy, we’re not actually growing that canopy. We’re in fact shrinking it and that’s a real big problem.
Miller: Can you say more about how this is going to further divide the haves and the have-nots? I mean, this gets to things that you and I have talked about on the show, but it’s been a while now. So, what kind of a divide is there now and how much bigger do you think it’s gonna get?
Shandas: Well, the divide is largely driven by aspects of what happened going back even 100 years. In the early 1900s, the federal government put a pulse of money out hiring Olmsted Brothers, all these consulting firms and other groups to go out and just pepper the entire country with green space, canopy and parks. And we were about to see a big pulse of that happen again with this Inflation Reduction Act money. And that could have actually righted what happened over 100 years ago, where most of that tree canopy ended up in wealthier neighborhoods across the country. They had more political power, they were able to lobby for it, they were able to get the parks, etc. We were about to do something like that just now and kind of even it out a little bit more, if you will.
Nevertheless, what ended up happening is, right now, without this, the have-nots, if you will, in terms of canopy are not going to get a lot more trees, at least federally-funded trees. We can talk about some of the local initiatives that I think might help shore up some of that as well.
Miller: So let’s turn to that because when we had the governor on a couple of days ago and I asked if the potential cuts to Medicaid can be made up by lawmakers in Salem. Her immediate answer was “no.” We’re talking about so much money that there’s no hope for that. Big cuts to Medicaid would mean big cuts, period, because it’s too big a hole to fill. Is urban forestry different?
Shandas: Urban forestry is not very different, though compared to Medicaid, most of the money for Medicaid comes from federal agencies. For urban forestry, very little money comes from the feds. They do a lot of coordinating work, they do a lot of technical support. The amount of money that was in the Urban Community Forestry Division was largely through research, state engagements and some local work.
Miller: That was before the Inflation Reduction Act, though, right?
Shandas: That’s right.
Miller: That was an enormous pulse, as you say, of tree money.
Shandas: That’s right. There is a history of states, municipalities and nonprofits doing urban forestry work for the last 100 years on their own. So this pulse of money was a moment of recognizing the importance of doing urban forestry work. However, when, now, we don’t have that, it’s kind of back to what we had before.
A part of the silver lining that I see of this is that it really mobilized communities. It brought people together in ways that I have not seen before. And the conversations that people are having now are, how do we pivot to other sources of resources? How do we try to think about what it means to reshape housing and design around trees, for example? How do we start thinking about building resilience at the neighborhood level, with folks planting trees in their yards, etc? So there’s now a palpable pivot that’s happened in terms of, what is it that we can actually do on our own? Because that’s really where it’s gonna end up.
Miller: In 2023, you were appointed to the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council ...
Shandas: A mouthful.
Miller: It is. When I go to the federal website for the council, under current members, it says “pending.” Under the next council meeting, it says “pending.” Under past activities, stuff that has already happened, it says “pending.” Does this council still exist?
Shandas: Council, in paper, we still have our charter, we still exist. This is part of a broader act that was passed on October 6, 1972, when a lot of federal activity was happening in terms of the Environmental Protection Agency, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, etc. That Federal Advisory Council Act was a way for us as citizens, residents of different parts of the country, to advise the federal agencies about what we’re seeing on the ground, what we’re doing. And right now, what I’m hearing from D.C. is that many of these FACAs, as they’re called – Federal Advisory Councils – are on the chopping block.
If the Urban Community Forestry Advisory Council gets eliminated, then that’s essentially sending a message that we no longer want information from what’s happening in and around the country related to this field. And there’s other factors on pesticides, on conservation, on a variety of different topics that they’re set up around.
Miller: The work you do, among other things, it’s focused on climate change and institutional racism, the long-term disparate impacts of things like redlining or disinvestment on neighborhoods that have had a higher percentage of People of Color, historically or now. The new administration, as we were talking about earlier, they don’t want federal employees to say phrases like “climate change” or “institutional racism,” let alone try to address them. Can you do the work that you’re trying to do, that you’ve been doing, without honestly talking about what’s at stake and why you’re doing it?
Shandas: Yeah, my approach to this is really around meeting people from where they are. We want to understand what they’re experiencing in their neighborhood, in their residence, or unhoused populations as well. What does that mean in terms of shifts in the environmental conditions that are happening around them? I want to go to the places that are the hottest in the community. I want to go to the place that is the most polluted in the community, the place that have the least tree canopy, places that people have the least coping capacity to be able to manage some of these extreme events that are coming through, that are only increasing in intensity and frequency.
For me to be able to do that work, I need to be able to talk to people. I don’t need to be able to use semantics and shift with language in a certain way. So I’m more interested in addressing the problem at hand than I am necessarily trying to splice and dice the terms that I use with communities. So that’s the way I’m approaching it and I feel like that’s the thing that is the most real for communities that I speak with.
Miller: Vivek Shandas, thanks very much.
Shandas: Thanks, Dave. Great to be here.
Miller: Vivek Shandas is a professor of geography at Portland State University.
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