The Trees We Chose
The first thing to know is this wasn’t inevitable. The emerald ash borer didn’t choose Lincoln Park. We did. Not deliberately—not with malice—but through the usual compound habits of cities: fix what’s broken, cheap and fast, move on.
When Dutch elm disease came through mid-century, it took out the elms that lined our streets, shaded our sidewalks, cooled our roofs. Whole neighborhoods lost their canopy in a decade. People panicked. Cities scrambled. And ash looked like a solution: resilient, fast-growing, salt-tolerant, adaptable to compacted soils and boulevard trenches. A blue-collar tree for blue-collar neighborhoods.
So we planted them. Thousands of them. Block after block. In some areas, ash made up 1 in 5 street trees. In Lincoln Park, they went into the creek valley, the yards, the boulevards—places already dealing with erosion, runoff, and industrial fill. Ash took root where other trees might’ve failed.
And they did what we asked: they grew. They shaded the neighborhood, cooled the pavement, slowed the water. They blended into the background so well you stopped noticing them.
But ash is a genus. Not a forest. And like the elms before them, their strength was also their uniformity. A monoculture, again. One pest away from collapse.
We planted the ash. The beetle just came to collect.
What the Beetle Took
By the time the beetle shows up, the trees are already lost.
You won’t know it yet. The canopy still looks full. Maybe a little thinning. A couple woodpeckers hammering the trunks. Some odd sprouts low on the bark. You think, “maybe it’s just a dry summer.”
It’s not.
Inside, the larvae are at work—grinding out their S-shaped galleries through the cambium, slicing the tree’s lifelines. After a few years of silence, the damage becomes visible. Then rapid. Crown dieback. Bark splitting. Whole limbs dead. In six years, maybe less, the tree is brittle and hollowed out.
But the beetle doesn’t just kill trees. It kills systems.
Each ash along Miller Creek wasn’t just a tree—it was part of the infrastructure. Its roots held the banks together. Its leaves cooled the stream for trout. It slowed rainwater heading downhill during spring melt and summer storms. The ash was a node in a dense mesh of function—hydrological, thermal, ecological.
When it dies, those systems don’t just stop. They collapse unevenly. Water runs faster. Banks slump. Sunlight scorches the undergrowth. Invasive plants rush in to fill the void. Without that root net, soil washes downstream into culverts and storm drains not designed for this new flow.
On the boulevards, it’s no better. The ash shaded apartments that don’t have A/C. It buffered heat for the elderly, the asthmatic, the low-income. When the trees go, the sidewalk bakes. The air thickens. Cooling bills go up—or people go without.
The beetle took a tree. But the absence leaves a hole bigger than the stump.
And the removal? It’s not clean. It’s a public works project, a budget line, a scheduling problem. In 2021, Duluth took out over 450 ash. That’s hundreds of gaps in canopy, in identity, in routine. Where your kid waited for the bus under a tree last year, this year there’s sky. And heat.
We don’t just lose biomass. We lose cover. Memory. Cohesion.
The beetle doesn’t care. But we should.
Who Bears the Loss
Tree by tree, the collapse moves through the neighborhood. But it doesn’t land evenly.
Start with the public trees. City trees. Boulevard ash, tagged with green ribbons. Those come down on a schedule. City crews remove them, grants pay for some replacements. It’s not fast, but it’s happening.
Then look across the fence.
In the backyard, the side lot, next to the rental—there’s an ash no one’s touched. No ribbon. No removal. Just standing deadwood. The city won’t touch it unless it threatens the street. It’s up to the property owner.
And that’s where the split happens.
Because in Lincoln Park, a lot of people don’t own the land they live on. Renters can’t remove trees. Landlords might delay it. And even when someone wants to act, the cost can stop them cold. Two to five thousand dollars to take down a mature ash. Insurance doesn’t cover it unless it falls. So some folks wait. Hope it doesn’t drop on the garage, or the neighbor’s fence. Hope no one gets hurt.
Meanwhile, in East Hillside or Congdon, ash come down faster. Trees get treated or removed early. Replaced with maples, lindens, ginkgo. The cycle is interrupted. Because there’s margin. Time. Money. Fewer emergencies.
What happens here isn’t just about biology—it’s about power. Who has it. Who doesn’t.
That dead tree in the yard becomes more than a hazard. It becomes a signal. That no one’s coming to fix it. That you’re on your own. That this block isn’t worth the same as the next one.
It wears on people.
And it shows up in the data. Neighborhoods with mass canopy loss see drops in property value. In health outcomes. People walk less. Heart disease goes up. So does anxiety. You don’t need a psychologist to explain why—a block stripped of trees looks abandoned. Even if it isn’t. And when the next storm floods the basement or the next heatwave hits and there's no shade, it’s not an inconvenience. It’s cumulative damage.
We let the beetle do what climate and capitalism already started: make vulnerability visible. The cracks were there. EAB just widened them.
The World That Opens
When the ash come down, so does the ceiling. Streets that were once canopied feel peeled open. Backyards glare. Creekbeds lie exposed. It’s disorienting at first—familiar places stripped bare. But once the shock settles, something else becomes apparent:
There's light.
A lot of it.
What that means depends on what we do next.
In some corners of Lincoln Park, that new light is already being used. The solar garden by the park’s northeast entrance—community-built, supplying power to low-income residents—that wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago. Trees shaded it out. Now, the open sky is infrastructure.
Same with the urban farm a few blocks over. Rows of vegetables and pollinator beds growing on a site that used to be choked with debris and shade. Some of that land had ash on it. Now it has food, and people, and use.
There’s a pattern here: collapse creates voids, and voids are chances. Not guarantees. Not blessings. But chances. If the wood chips aren’t just dumped, they can become mulch for new plantings. If the trunks aren’t just hauled away, they can become benches, carvings, material for workshops. If the soil is tested and cleaned, those gaps in the canopy can become gardens, orchards, wetlands.
But nothing about that is automatic.
Plenty of ash removals leave behind nothing but stumps and weeds. Bare lots that grow hot and useless. Invasive shrubs take over. The ground erodes. The memory of the tree fades and the space becomes one more "problem spot" on a city map.
So the real question isn’t what comes down. It’s what rises in its place.
Do we plant better trees? Slower ones, tougher ones, diverse ones?
Do we make use of the sunlight while it lasts—because in a few decades, if we do it right, the canopy might return?
Do we let community gardens fill the gaps? Seed wildflowers for pollinators? Carve the felled ash into something worth keeping?
Or do we wait, and watch, and let entropy win?
The world that opens when the ash fall isn’t neutral. It leans toward disorder unless someone leans back.
Collapse as Fork
This isn’t the first time a neighborhood forest has collapsed. It won’t be the last.
We lost the elms in the '70s. We filled the gap with ash. Now they’re going too. This is the third wave in a hundred years. Each time, a different pest, a different mistake—but the pattern holds. Monoculture. Convenience. Unseen dependencies. Then failure.
What matters is what we do in the space between failure and forgetting.
Because collapse doesn’t just remove. It rearranges. It puts things side by side that weren’t visible before. The exposed roots of systems. The mismatch between public intent and private capacity. The raw seams of inequality.
In Lincoln Park, this is the moment where those seams either get mended—or widen.
We could treat this like another municipal maintenance issue. Log the removals, file the grants, plant some saplings, move on. But we’ve done that before. And look where it got us.
Or we could treat this as a hinge point.
That means not just replacing trees, but rethinking what kind of forest a neighborhood needs. Not uniform. Not fragile. Not reactive.
A forest that’s adapted to heat, to wet, to the weight of history and the pressure of what’s coming.
That means not just replanting, but reorganizing: where the trees go, who cares for them, how they’re funded, what they support beyond shade. Food, habitat, cultural space. Cooling corridors. Rain capture. Public gathering. All of it.
It also means reckoning with what was lost. Not in a romantic way. But honestly. We planted ash to fix a previous mistake. And it bought us time—decades of shade and stability. But the cost of a fix deferred is always paid in full.
Now the check’s come due.
So the question is simple, and real:
Do we rebuild another version of what we had—faster, cheaper, just enough to say we tried?
Or do we build something meant to last through what’s coming?
Because make no mistake, more is coming. Drought, flood, heat, pests that haven’t arrived yet. No one’s going to stop it for us. But we can build a forest—not a symbol, not an aesthetic—but a system that holds when the next collapse rolls through.
If we do it right, years from now people walking under that canopy won’t remember the beetle. They’ll just feel the shade. And maybe someone will tell them: those trees are what grew after everything fell down.
