The value of trees and labor

Michael Wilson is an organizer at Twin Cities DSA, and resides in the Hiawatha neighborhood.

MPRB Arborists maintain 600,000 trees that cover 29.8% of Minneapolis with an urban canopy. Recent rain, hail, and wind gusts, as well as the LiUNA 363 labor union strike, has highlighted the precarity of our tree canopy, as well as how much work it takes to keep it safe and healthy. Our professionals in arboriculture address widowmakers looming over trails and fallen tree trunks obstructing boulevards and parkways. Urban tree canopies cool our neighborhoods during excessive heat events, aesthetically improve our quality of life, and are even correlated to lower crime rates. But our tree canopy has also become a source of revenue with a very explicit monetary value.
MPRB’s Carbon Pricing Program was piloted in 2022 and allows companies to buy offset credits based on the carbon sequestering power of trees. This program is intended to continue the aggressive rate of tree planting MPRB conducted during the Emerald Ash Borer years. That planting initiative was funded by the 2014-2021 Tree Preservation and Restoration Levy. Despite the long precedent of such tax levies, the current political will now has an appetite for a market-based approach.
MPRB has sold 3,872 carbon offset credits to seven purchasers, earning $103,892 in sales revenue, and this revenue is about to expand rapidly. David Wilson of Green Cities Accord boasts, “One of our prior purchasers… liked the quality of these offsets, so we provided them with a proposal where they could buy a bulk of between 3,000 and 6,000 credits." Emerging from the pilot phase, MPRB annual offset credit revenue will increase as both the price per credit rises and the number of available credits goes up. They project about 25,000 credits will be sold in the coming years. Millions of dollars will grow within an Urban Forest Fund that is earmarked for trees and tree maintenance. Money from this fund has not yet been used for this purpose, however, and it is unclear when or how it ever will be. Oppositional commissioners question how one defines “additional” tree planting, and they scrutinize the practices of companies doing the purchasing. While these are valid concerns, another problem is how we conceptualize the additional value that the workers are creating.
In a press release from Green Cities Accord (formerly “Green Minneapolis”) announcing the launch of the program, “The MPRB incurs no additional costs for its role in the program; it's only obligation is to plant and care for the trees included in these projects for 25 years – work that is already performed by its forestry department.” The longevity and quality of arboricultural work is taken as a given. Apart from the moral hazard of letting companies buy credits instead of lowering their emissions, this deal is based on keeping workers on the outside looking in.
Green Cities Accord brokers public-private partnerships for tree canopy “infrastructure,” and gets a 10% cut of all credit sales. City Forest Credits is the third-party certifier of these credits and is incentivized with $1,500 application fees for purchasers and $4 a pop for each credit. Centerpoint Energy, Nordson, and Xcel Energy get to greenwash their image while they actively commit climate harm. Winslow Capital, an investment advisor, gets to provide climate indulgences to its investment partners. MPRB gets to squirrel away a hefty sum in its new savings account. Yet, by some economic alchemy amidst all this cash flow, the only ones creating anything of value, the Arborists, are being told that there simply isn’t enough to go around.
Casey Roser, an arborist at MPRB, recalls, “I used to be a social worker in Minneapolis. I actually thought that going into arboriculture and working in the trades would be more of a living wage. I’ve been really disheartened to still be working paycheck to paycheck. I have a two-year-old son, and I don’t get to see him every other weekend because I have to work at my second job to pay the bills just to scrape by. And this is one of the most dangerous jobs you can have.”
If these trees succumb to the elements before their proposed attrition rate, they aren’t eligible for financialization. Sound stewardship of assets would suggest that MPRB, Green Cities Accord, Centerpoint Energy, Xcel Energy, and Winslow Capital would all have an interest in strengthening a safe and stable workforce of arborists to continue producing the urban canopy that is so valuable to them. That would be low-hanging fruit. But alas, MPRB wage studies tell us that they think arborists' pay is exactly where it needs to be, and there is no indication of that changing, regardless of how large the Urban Forest Fund becomes. Sophisticated analyses about half million dollars in “co-benefits and quantified ecosystem services'' and over $800,000 of estimated revenue for just this year’s Carbon Pricing Program conveniently disappear when it comes to compensating arborists like Casey with a wage that keeps up with inflation. The speculative value of future fruits has been picked while the trees fall around us.
Parkkeeper Davion Evans addressed Park Commissioners, “The middle class is under attack. There is no more middle class. It’s slipping little by little by little, and you can help us hold on to what we got.”
Environmentalists might say that carbon offsets fail because they don't address carbon emissions. Labor advocates might say it fails as long as offset money bypasses the workers. But it was never meant to meaningfully address the climate crisis. It was never meant to benefit the arborists who work, live, and love in our community. That is missing the forest through the trees.
This program works exactly as the market requires. This model of economics, where organizations accumulate wealth for its own sake in endowments and investment funds through speculative gambling, is ultimately the problem here. Our civic tradition of collectively funding arboricultural work is now framed as punitive. The market creatively extracting speculative value from natural resources while sidelining workers is now framed as pragmatic. Growing a fund to generate compounding interest has taken precedence over the interest of workers. The quality of speculative carbon offsets has become more valuable than maintaining the trees they are based upon. As long as we exalt our economic system to wag the tail of our good intentions, the working class will lose, the investment class and their government/NGO enablers will win all the profits, and the temperature will continue to rise.