166 Zhang et al.: Tree Ordinances as Public Policy and Participation Tools 2004). The risk of wildfire depends on nearby land use, vegetation near homes, and building design and materials. The presence of and spatial configuration of various tree species can also be a concern. Urban trees have positive and negative impacts on neigh- borhoods and the surrounding community. Positive impacts include what both tree owners and other citizens can enjoy, negative impacts indicate what citizens may suffer from. Trees are also a type of public good that causes a free rider problem where people obtain the benefits without bearing the costs. There are many potential conflicts involving trees and people within the community. These externalities and conflicts usually result in a call for laws and regulations—such as tree ordinances— as legal provisions adopted by local or community governments. Since trees in urban settings are part of the landscape and are used for public and private benefit, tree ordinances are of- ten specified in the context of green laws and landscape ordi- nances. In many states and communities, a tree ordinance is of- ten a component of a landscape ordinance that has been enacted to: 1) establish urban tree management programs, 2) establish new landscape plantings following construction, and 3) pre- serve existing natural amenities, including historic trees, forest lands, wetlands, and unique habitats. In the western and south- ern United States, these laws are usually called ordinances with the exception of Florida, where they are referred to as landscape codes. In other parts of the country they are found in sections of zoning ordinances and municipal codes (Abbey 1999), which are a systematically arranged, comprehensive collection of laws. With other green laws and landscape ordinances, tree ordi- nances are used as public policies to shape the urban and suburban landscape. Tree ordinances are also a planning tool. Abbey (1998) argued that “laws are now supporting design, and designers are assisting with the establishment of law. Many of such green laws are being written by design professionals.” Tree ordinances have been developed to supplement zoning, tree planting, and conser- vation, especially for new development sites. Tree ordinances are also used to provide a framework for new home builders and pub- lic citizens and to delegate responsibility to a public official, such as a director of parks and recreation or a director of public work, for planting and maintaining street trees (Barker 1975). Tree ordi- nances have been approved or considered as effective policy tools to promote urban trees in the United States (e.g., Davis 1993; Cooper 1996; Schroeder et al. 2003; Galvin and Bleil 2004). Tree ordinances are usually initiated in response to com- munity motivations as well as political will. Public attitude and preference are important when developing or amending tree ordi- nances. Usually, as a community grows and expands, population density increases and conflicts rise. Tree ordinances were initially written for protection of public trees, but have gradually moved toward greater regulation. In recent years, serious attention has been given to the importance of municipal liability (Tereshk- ovich 1990). Many tree ordinances have emerged due to a spe- cific, local issue where there is a conflict between trees, people, or some other interests. For example, off-street parking and ve- hicle use area (PVA) landscape requirements were a very com- mon “first-generation-limited-use” type of landscape ordinance in many U.S. cities (Abbey 1998). Similarly, Frischenbruder and Pellegrino (2006) uses eight recent case studies to generalize the proposal of using greenways to reclaim nature in Brazilian cities. The following sections will first demonstrate the development of tree ordinances in the United States, then provide further infor- ©2009 International Society of Arboriculture mation using tree ordinances in the state of Alabama as a case study. The conclusion generalizes how to use tree ordinances as a public policy and participation tool to promote urban forestry. TREE ORDINANCES IN MANY UNITED STATES CITIES Legislation has been widely used to protect trees and to develop urban forests for a very long time in Europe (Schmied and Pill- mann 2003). In the United States, the earliest tree ordinance was drafted around 1700 by William Penn in order to set standards for tree planting in some of the early settlements around Philadelphia (Zube 1971). This law is also considered as the earliest of all re- corded landscape ordinances (Abbey 1999). The Territory of Mich- igan enacted a law that specified which trees that could be planted on boulevards and squares in the City of Detroit in 1807. In Mis- sissippi, the commission charged with selecting the state’s capital city recommended that every other block be filled with native vegetation or be planted with groves of trees in 1821 (Zube 1971). During the late 18th Century, trees were established in vil- lage greens and streets throughout the eastern United States to emulate those found in European cities. By the 1890s, manage- ment of public shade trees had clearly become an important part and duty of municipal governance. To address the ambiguous problem between private property and the public right-of-way, “Nail” laws (using nails to distinguish which shade trees were public) were adopted in the New England area to enable towns to take definite steps to distinguish which shade trees were pub- lic: Massachusetts in 1890, Connecticut in 1893, Rhode Island and New Hampshire in 1901, Vermont in 1904, and Maine in 1919 (Ricard 2005). Washington D.C. passed a tree ordinance in 1892 to prevent girdling, bricking, wounding, destroying or harming trees in any manner on public or private property or to use them to tie horses. In Maine, the Supreme Court ruled in 1907 that private property such as tress was subject to rea- sonable regulatory limitations (Durkesen and Richman 1993). Even though tree ordinances appeared a century ago, only in recent decades have tree ordinances and related green laws be- come widely adopted in American cities. In 1976, The National Arbor Day Foundation unveiled its Tree City USA recognition program that requires a tree ordinance as one of its four require- ments of designated communities. In 2006, there were 3,213 Tree City USA communities, suggesting that an additional number of municipalities have tree ordinances now. Tree ordinances have primarily been used to protect public trees. As of 1984, only one hundred communities nationwide with tree protection laws on private land could be identified (Coughlin et al. 1984). A Michi- gan State University survey of over 1000 communities reported that 13% had tree preservation ordinances and restrictions on cutting trees on private property (Kielbaso 1989). In a Missouri survey, 22% of respondents said they had a “comprehensive tree ordinance” on public property, but only 13% of respondents stat- ed their communities had a “comprehensive tree ordinance” that defined tree preservation requirements during development (Trei- man and Gartner 2004). Since different surveys employed differ- ent standards and for various purposes, interpretation of results has varied application. However, it is clear that the United States is currently experiencing a revolution in green laws and tree ordi- nances that began in the mid-1980s and has continued to increase. The field of urban forestry as well as tree ordinances is develop- ing hand in hand with urbanization. After World War II, America’s
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