There’s a lot to know about Steve Harris. Steve is the outgoing President of New York State Urban Forestry Council. He has acted as Syracuse City Forester for twenty years. He’s a great guy, and an impassioned advocate for urban trees.
Something less well known about Steve is that he served in the Peace Corps in the Gambia, West Africa (that’s what it’s called, he emphasizes, the Gambia) working with farmers to grow trees for food and work with them to start tree nurseries. When he started his post, in September 1991, rice production had been impaired by saltwater entering the rice marshes. Rainfall was not as plentiful as it had once been. Steve observed that the baobab tree under which people sat in just about every village had many uses beyond its shade. Its wood could be employed for traditional uses, of course, but also its bark could be stripped off to make rope, its seed pod could be used to create dye, the fruit is edible, and it had medicinal uses as well. He started talking with an innovative farmer about growing these and other native trees, and the farmer began breeding them and selling baobab seedlings in the village market. “I didn’t teach them anything other than what a straight line is,” Steve jokes in his typical self-deprecating manner, “and even that is dubious. I learned more from the people in the Gambia than I taught them.”
Steve’s experience in the Peace Corps changed the trajectory of his life. He had received his B.A. from Ohio State in Geography in 1990, after spending his formative years in Athens, Ohio. After a friend joined up, he decided he would as well. “I applied and it took a year, a month and a day from the time I finished an application until I got on the plane.” It turned out to be his introduction to forestry. When he returned to the United States after two years, he decided to pursue an education at Paul Smith’s College. By then he was thirty years old. “I treated it like a job,” he says, and he gained a two-year forestry degree. It proved useful in a practical way. “I was on a small forestry crew. We timber cruised 15,000 acres, learning how to inventory trees on a transect, as well as to how to understand forest inventory and software, and species composition. “It was fun,” he says. “The experience served me well.”
Afterward, Steve attended graduate school at SUNY College Environmental Science and Forestry. His master’s thesis focused on sustainable practices within the Forest Products Industry. At the time both SmartWood and Sustainable Forest Initiative Certifications were on the rise. Steve wasn’t yet thinking about urban forestry.
“I didn’t teach them anything other than what a straight line is,” Steve jokes in his typical self-deprecating manner, “and even that is dubious. I learned more from the people in the Gambia than I taught them.”
Steve’s first job after graduate school was with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Onondaga County, which had one of the first urban forestry programs in the country.
That would change after the devastating Labor Day storm in September 1998, when hurricane-force winds knocked down three thousand street trees in Syracuse. He remembers that his son had just been born. “We went without power for a week and saw gigantic, mature trees down everywhere.” It was strange, he says. “Residents were outside wandering around, seeing the carnage.” The city of basically shut down, and the National Guard came in. “It was quite an event.”
The storm had a silver lining in the arboricultural community, as it awakened people to the need for caring for the urban forest. Now the government increased monies available for research and activism. Steve’s first job after graduate school was with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Onondaga County. CCE offered him the opportunity to create a volunteer stewardship program that would engage municipalities in planting and caring for trees. Onondaga County had one of the first urban forestry programs in the country, formed in the wake of this brutal storm, which combined tree planting, ecosystem services and canopy assessment. The Syracuse Urban Forest Master Plan was one of the first to perform a tree canopy assessment and to quantify ecosystem services and evaluate the entire urban forest.
Steve worked for Cornell Cooperative Extension for five years, then at a tree nursery for three and a half years. He joined Syracuse as City Forester in July 2010. He had interviewed for many traditional forestry jobs and one urban forestry job, and ultimately decided to go with urban forestry “because the urban forestry jobs felt like they was more about people and more suited to my experience gained from Peace Corps.” Having grown up in a college town, Steve felt at home in Syracuse. By now he and his wife Kristine had one child and one on the way. (The boys did not follow in Steve’s footsteps. “They both joke they don’t like trees.”)
He likes his role with Syracuse Parks because he gets the chance to “interact with every department,” he says. “You’re in every neighborhood, and you meet all kinds of people. Also, it’s always changing. You develop good working relationships and figure out how to work together to integrate different elements, which isn’t always easy.” He says that there are advantages of heading up a Forestry Division in a relatively small municipality. He has direct contact with the mayor, the chief of operations, the commissioner. “We are a small city and cannot be siloed but we have more economy of scale and as a result bandwidth that a village or town would not.”
When Steve started, “it was me and two tree workers in a bucket truck. Now there is a four-person tree crew with an inspector. We have contractors for removals and emergencies and stump grinding and planting. Also, another certified arborist, a municipal specialist in a community forestry role, a landscape architect reviewing designs and enforcing permits and a full-time database manager.” All of these professionals report to Steve. “We have an amazing staff at all levels! Our tree crew is very experienced and operates safely. They can take down any kind of tree and are excellent during storms. We have grown because everyone is good at their job and takes ownership of it.”
The “next frontier,” he says, “will be modernizing the city’s tree ordinance.” Syracuse has just put out an RFP to find a firm to accomplish that. Another challenge will be dealing with the anticipated arrival of Micron Technology. The company is spending one hundred billion dollars to build the largest chip manufacturing plant in the world twenty miles from Syracuse. It will provide nine thousand positions at its headquarters. Another twenty thousand jobs are anticipated to stem from that investment. The development will increase economic activity and population in the city but will also create challenges.
“The pressure to build housing will be huge,” says Steve. “The reason Syracuse has gained canopy is in part because of our thousands of acres of derelict vacant lots.” An opportunity to plant trees might be replaced by the requirement of home building. “We don’t have good policies around trees related to that. How do we make sure trees are being planted on these plots? And what can we do to educate property owners to appreciate trees rather than associate them with negative weather events like the Labor Day storm, or a sewer that’s clogged?” The city has applied for IRA funding to address the repercussions of red lining, the historical legacy of banks not providing mortgages in certain neighborhoods, leading to what he terms “a cycle of disinvestment. It would be great to have natural areas that are beautiful, that provide a respite from the louder parts of the city. We want to plant 3,500 trees per year in Syracuse. We’ve only planted around 1,000 trees per year so far.
“We have an amazing staff at all levels! Our tree crew is very experienced and operates safely. They can take down any kind of tree and are excellent during storms. We have grown because everyone is good at their job and takes ownership of it.”
“We need to break down the functional barriers that prevent disadvantaged communities from applying for the Council’s planting grants.”
“It’s a dynamic job,” he says of his post as City Forester. “It’s always interesting. I went in never having done anything for more than five years. But right now I have no end date in mind. It’s still fun.”
Steve joined the Board of the New York State Urban Forestry Council roughly twenty years ago. The Council supported his enrollment in the Municipal Forestry Institute and enabled him to go to major tree industry conferences, including Partners in Community Forestry and the Society of Municipal Arborists. Of becoming President, he says simply, “It was my turn time to serve.”
He will still serve on the Council’s Executive Committee as Treasurer. “I felt like it was important to carry on with some of the programs we started when I was president— like our equity, justice and inclusion efforts. We need to break down the functional barriers that prevent disadvantaged communities from applying for the Council’s planting grants.” More emphasis on education is necessary, he says. “We need more funding for that. To get a groundswell of support in community forestry, we need more dynamic programming, going beyond pruning and planting alone.” Young adults aged 19 to 25, he says, “might stick around in the tree community for a while, but most are not choosing careers in trees. That connection to nature starts young. If you don’t begin exposing a person to the environment early on, it’s harder later.” He says that is why a large component of the City’s IRA grant application is for a robust K-8 after-school program. “We think it will be great to have the high school youth engage middle and elementary school kids in volunteer work. Children need to see people that look like them in a profession they plan to pursue. That is a foundation of the program.”
About his legacy for the Urban Forestry Council, he resumes his self-deprecating tone. “I give myself a solid C-plus,” he says. “I think that’s a fair grade.” He says he has asked himself what can make the Council most effective in advancing urban forestry in the state. “We have not been good enough in communicating with our membership. We need to think about engaging with people beyond asking them to pay their dues. We should be having forums that help us stay in touch.” He hopes that as Treasurer he will have an impact on funding educational opportunities, such as making it possible for members to attend the Municipal Forestry Institute. “I want us to send at least one person full freight to MFI, because everyone that has taken part in the past has gone on to play a leadership role in the Council. We need to promote our scholarships.”
“I’m proud of the Council,” Steve says. “I love interacting with all my colleagues across the state and being connected to other locales to try to get to another level of urban forestry. Sometimes I might be obsessed with just what I’m doing in my professional corner. But I feel that I have an antenna for funding opportunities that all communities can avail themselves of.” The roles of City Forester and President of the Council have intersected, as he sees it. “I like thinking about where a community is at with its program and where it could go next. I think my time at CCE working with small communities and at the city influence that. One of the things that I think would advance urban forestry in the state in communities of every size is a state-wide urban tree canopy assessment showing change over the last decade. Making that information available for all municipalities to see could be a catalyst for change, especially in those places experiencing dramatic canopy loss. It would be a call to action. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Land use change is what leads to loss. And, with the example of Micron in Syracuse, we’re going to see a lot of land use change.”
“I want to emphasize,” says Steve, “how damn lucky I am to have the people I do working for me in Syracuse. An organization is only as good as their people. And our Forestry Division has great people working in it.”