I’m very white. Not culturally; I’m not into whiskey, mayonnaise, ironic tattoos, grumbling about people who don’t speak English, and blindly defending all police behavior (except when they shoot white gun nuts). I’m white in that I have very little pigment in my skin. Enough to produce freckles; not enough to keep me from sunburning easily. So if I go outdoors, I either have to slather myself in sunblock, or stay in the shade. And since I find sunblock uncomfortable, shade it is.
So, despite how allergic I am to them, I’m very fond of trees. Big, shady trees. The more the better.
Other people like trees because of the whole carbon footprint idea: Trees inhale carbon dioxide, so the more trees, the less CO₂, and the better the air, and that whole climate-change thing. To me, that’s a nice bonus, but obviously my primary interest is shade. You could plant all sorts of plants which inhale CO₂ more efficiently, and stick ’em anywhere and everywhere. I just want shade trees, and I want ’em lining the streets and surrounding the parks.
’Cause I walk a lot. And when I started walking a lot, I lived Scotts Valley, which had no shade trees. The city was surrounded by coastal redwoods, but the city grew organically; it had no city planners. Consequently they got all the trees out of the way when they laid down their main roads. Most older cities are like that; they considered trees an inconvenience.
Lots of people still think that way. In Vacaville, where I live now, a lot of older neighborhoods could be tree-lined, but various homeowners just grew tired of the nuisance of maintaining their trees. You gotta water, and rake, and prune, and keep branches from thumping the tops of the occasional FedEx truck, and too much shade means the front lawn won’t grow right, and the winter windstorms break branches, and the neighborhood kids (who don’t know what trespassing means) might climb it and break more branches. So they cut down all their shade trees, leaving the front yard bare and sun-baked. To me, that’s just stupid. In summer, the shade trees cool down your yard and house. You don’t have to water the yard so much. You don’t have to run the air conditioner so much. Yeah, there are leaves and birds and branches and climbing kids; these are minor trade-offs. Shade is good. (And who says you gotta rake the leaves? Let ’em turn to mulch. What’s wrong with mulch?)
In the newer neighborhoods, the trees are still kinda tiny. Or not even there. The latest fad is to put a big giant house on as small a lot as the developers can get away with. (Like my brother’s neighborhood, or my grandmother’s neighborhood.) The claim is these short front lawns make it cozy and neighborly. The reality is they’re selling less land for more money. The tiny front lawns means trees are impractical: If they get too big, they’ll wreck the houses’ foundations. But as far as shade is concerned, often the houses shade the sidewalk, so there’s that.
Since Vacaville is in part planned, all the main streets, the main traffic arteries, have trees on them. Not necessarily good shade trees, and not consistently found on every street. From time to time the city cuts ’em down if they’re dead or not growing properly, and doesn’t always replace them. Still, for the most part, there’s some shade on some part of the street… though you might have to cross the street to get there. And at certain times of day, it won’t shade the street any.
It does mean I can mostly avoid sunlight, and thus far I’ve avoided sunburn. Haven’t had to break out the parasol yet.