 My name is Winston Welch, and this is the newest edition of Out and About on the ThinkTech Livestreaming Network series, where we explore a variety of people, organizations, and the topics of interest in our city, state, country, and world. As a disclaimer, any of my comments are not related to any organization that I may be affiliated with. That said, I am delighted today to have a very special guest come back to the show, is Mr. Miles Ritchie, Programs Director of the Outdoor Circle, a wonderful organization that's been around for over 107 years. So thank you so much for being with us today, Miles, as we talk about planting for the future, exceptional trees and beyond. Okay, thanks for having me. Yeah, so you have been with the Outdoor Circle for a few years now. Can you tell us about what is the Outdoor Circle? What's its history? What's its mission? What are its goals? Right, so for those who haven't heard of us, we are a statewide environmental nonprofit that began in 1912. So we've been around for quite a long time, but the kind of claim to fame began with the banning of billboards, and the whole interesting story, if you want to check that out on our website, a really fascinating story of how that came about. But then it also focused on maintaining view planes and also tree conservation around in urban areas, but also elsewhere, just keeping the trees that we have and trying to plant many more new ones. So you have branches all over the states, all over the state of Hawaii, right? It is only a Hawaii-based organization. Correct, yep. And branches. And branches. Okay, and so you are the Programs Director there. So what has been your trajectory with this organization? When did you start and how has your career developed there? Right. So I've been with the Outdoor Circle for going on six years now, and over that time we've done a lot of really great, innovative things. So the organization was known in the past, as I mentioned, for tree-related efforts. So there's been figures that we found in some of our documents that the organization has planted statewide roughly one million trees, which is pretty incredible over our entire, you know, over our century existence. But what we've also been known for in the past was just, you know, getting into schools and doing environmental education for students, benefits trees, and we're definitely kind of ramping that up again as we discuss the potential impacts of climate change, how trees and other factors can be used as mitigation impacts. And yeah, so the programs we're working on are definitely some pretty cool and innovative stuff for the last few years and going ahead as well. Now did you start as a Programs Director there, or how did you get into the organization? How did you hear about it and what were your initial thoughts? Right. No, so I learned about the organization from a family friend. He's been involved with it for years, so when finished up at UH decided, hey, you know, maybe see what this field's like, got an internship, started the process and have been here ever since. So it's been a pretty fun experience. And did you envision yourself working for an environmental organization when you were a high school student or something? Is that something that you thought of? No, I don't think that far back it was more so, you know, once you hit the university, take a few courses, kind of determine what you are passionate about and anything involving that, mine became trees. It was kind of near the end that things began to look like, oh yeah, you know, maybe do the environmental conservation sector, do some really good work and kind of help the state here. And that's, and there it is. And so you have become the Programs Director. So you've got more than one program that you've carried out and that you're currently carrying out. So what kind of programs do you have or have you carried out recently and that you've got planning coming up in the future? Right. So in the past, we've done everything from just, you know, the tree planting events to partnering with Google for their program, which is, you know, fascinating going around. And if anybody's ever done or used Street View, essentially it's going a big backpack out to locations that we receive permission to go to and highlighting some of the important cultural, environmental and historical aspects of those areas. So that was very cool. And there's some cool scientific research that's being done with that, doing comparisons over time. So we have the baseline imagery and you can use that when you go back and look at maybe invasive species encroachment over time or other things of that nature. So that one was definitely interesting, but we've been doing a lot of collaborations with other nonprofits, entities for the past few years since I've been here. And that's resulted in, you know, assisting with smart tree specific and other nonprofits, citizen forther program or working with UH and they're one of the professors in the geography department, Dr. Camila Mora, who has been getting a lot of publicity lately for the carbon neutrality challenge that we were one of the first nonprofits to really get on board and support his efforts and get thousands of trees in the ground. So it's been a shift from or revitalization, I guess, of, you know, plantings and environmental education to not just only students, but the general public, which is just as important, but also forming those really good relationships with others so you can collectively use your resources to get important things done that you might not otherwise be able to do so. Don't tell us what you mentioned, citizen forester. What is a citizen forester? Right. So essentially, a citizen forester is a member of the public who is passionate about trees, maybe has a lot or no prior knowledge about urban forest tree identification, how to measure them, anything like that. So the program itself just allows interested people who may care about trees the opportunity to come to some trainings, become certified. And that usually, you know, is over the course of two weeks, maybe four to six classroom sessions and then outdoor sessions as well. They become certified and then they go around town all around Oahu and they start gathering height, diameter, health, crown spread and the GPS coordinates of the city's public trees. So in street trees, trees and parks, things like that. And then the data is used to create an inventory so we know not just how many trees are on Oahu and then hopefully the rest of the state, but also how healthy they are and the different ecosystem services they provide to us. So, carbon sequestration, stormwater, runoff avoidance, pollutants, removals, energy savings, even property value increases. So it's a really useful data set that the citizen foresters are using and they're able to take these skills and use them elsewhere later in life as well. And is that because the city right now doesn't have a good inventory of its trees or it doesn't really know the condition of them or why is this even necessary? The county has a lot of area to cover with all these trees. So it's always great to have a updated inventory. So that can be extremely costly and a lot of people don't realize that to hire a company to go out and do that is a lot of money. So you have the ability to reach out to members of the public, not only get the inventory with pretty reliable data. We do go out and verify and ground truth the data itself to make sure that we're getting good quality information, but we're also educating the public at the same time, which is arguably more important so that they can take what they've learned. They can pass it on to friends and family and kind of branch out these really important concepts that we need in this kind of era of climate change and necessary mitigation. And people can find out about a program like that or your other programs at outdoorcircle.org, right? That's correct. Yes. And see a whole bunch of different ones. You mentioned another one I thought it's interesting that maybe people haven't heard about carbon neutrality. Can you tell us what does carbon neutrality mean? I get to two words, but what are they together? Right. So as I mentioned, that's the program created by Dr. Camilla Mora at the University of Hawaii. It's essentially planting trees to offset your carbon emissions for the year. So if you go onto the website that Dr. Mora has created, you input your daily lifestyle, it'll give you your carbon footprint emissions for the year, which is not new. Lots of websites do that. However, his website will show you exactly how many trees you need to plant of a certain species and become carbon neutral. And then the program allows you to say, well, okay, that's great. I need to plant 20 monkey pods this year to become carbon neutral. What can I do then? And then the third part is you just go out and then we give you the opportunity to plant trees. So it's this whole process of education, learning how to make a difference, and then actually doing it to become carbon neutral. And yeah, sequester all that carbon. So it's very cool. So you can go on and actually, instead of having some sort of vague idea of how much carbon you emit or buying a carbon credit when you take a plane to the mainland, you can actually roughly estimate how much carbon you are producing each year and then what, how many, I guess, endemic types of trees or even non-endemic types of trees you need to plant every year to remain carbon neutral. Correct. So we're focusing on native trees. Just there's a whole slew of benefits in addition to carbon sequestration that planting natives and re-forcing the natives has, bringing a lot of biodiversity back that is dependent on those specific trees. And a whole bunch of other aspects. But yes, we're focusing on native plants and the programs has grown exponentially in the past several years from, you know, 50 trees, then 100, then 1000. And then Dr. Moore was just out in December, putting 10,000 trees on the ground. I know he's looking at 100,000 coming up. So it's an ambitious and extremely worthwhile project that the public is getting behind. And I know you've been intimately involved with all of those details. So we've got a couple of slides here showing some other tree planting related efforts here. If we can go to that one and what are we looking at here? Right. So this is the Hilo Outdoor Circle tree giveaway event that occurred back in June. It was, as I mentioned, a collaborative event between the Arbor Day Foundation, FedEx, the Outdoor Circle. And we had a whole bunch of local nurseries propagate plants, natives and fruit trees that we were able to give away thanks to this wonderful donation, this grant from the Arbor Day Foundation and FedEx. So the Hilo and more so East Hawaii community came out and were able to just lined up and they received some free trees that they were going to go plant on their own property, because that's one of the aspects that a lot of people don't think about. Yes, you can plant in parks or you could plant in parks or more street trees. But one of the largest areas that isn't utilized are people's own private properties. So if they're interested, but maybe they would not plant because they don't know what plant to choose or they just don't want to go spend the money on it, this hopefully gives them the opportunity to choose a plant based on expert opinions because we have Master Gardeners, we have Arborists at these events. So, you know, I live in volcano and here's the plant hallets that will work for you. You're getting a tree that's for the right place and you're also getting it for free. So then we're hoping that we can get more urban tree canopy cover through these events, these tree giveaway events. Okay. And then it's a terrific thing that was on the big island after they had some disasters over there, the volcano, the floods and one other thing. It was a pretty rough summer. So we've got to get back to the community. Just a quick plug real fast. We are doing another one of these events in Hilo this year. We're going to be conducting one in October. The date is most likely going to be the second or third week. So details will be coming out on our website, OutdoorCircle.org or our Facebook page or an emailing list. But also our Manoa branch is having a tree giveaway, their annual thousand tree giveaway, which is going to be Manoa on the 24th of April. All this information, as I said, can be found on our website, social media pages and things like that if people are interested. Facebook, OutdoorCircle, just Google that, OutdoorCircle.org. And then for the Manoa tree giveaway, that's a super popular one. What time, you've helped with that before. How, how many trees do they give away and what time do you need to be there to get a tree? So the minimum is a thousand trees. Generally, there are more. It's a great collective event where members of the OutdoorCircle and Malama Manoa actually propagate these plants on their own for upwards of two years and then they bring them all together. So there's at least a thousand trees generally, but they're, I've seen in years past upwards of 1500. So there's a whole range from fruit trees to natives to to monkey pods, everything like that. So it's a great event. I highly recommend getting there early. I know it usually, I'm not sure on the times itself, it might be an eight o'clock or nine o'clock start, but people start lining up around six or seven in the morning. So they get to first come, first serve basis. Okay. And we've got a couple more pictures and then we'll go to a break. But right here, what are we looking at this photo? Sure. So this is a Nether collaborative project with the Arbor Day Foundation. This was with Enterprise Car Rental and us at the OutdoorCircle. This saw Windward Community College receive a bunch of free trees. We worked with them. They they're working on a new master plan to include a lot more trees. In their campus, especially right there, where that image was shown on the Great Lawn, we went in and put 30 large native trees, and it was just a great community event. It was there. Those volunteers you were seeing were either Windward Community College students or staff or enterprise employees. So it was a really good dynamic different group of people. We taught them how to plant trees, right? The importance of the natives were selecting the cultural and historical background of them all. So it was a really good event. And if anybody goes to the Great Lawn now, they'll see these 30 new large trees, which is great. That's awesome. And I know that they had for people who hadn't been to Windward in a while, they had an incredible canopy of trees, which really were decimated by the Galwasp hitting the Banyan trees there. So this is part to kind of replace some of those. So it looks like you got a lot of terrific programs, a lot of collaboration. I know that's a lot of work getting your own group together, but getting working with other groups is a huge amount of effort. But obviously you're super successful at it and got these things coming up. So again, if people want to follow along, they can go to outdoorcircle.org. And we're going to take a little break. We've been talking with Miles Richey, the programs director at the Outdoor Circle, where he is doing fabulous things along with all of his colleagues and volunteers and related organizations. So we will be back for more of the story in a minute. My name is Mark Schloef. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Being a lawyer has many aspects. And I try to cover them every time I do a program of law across the sea. Not everything has to do with law or being a lawyer per se. Some of it has to do with the people you meet, the things you see, the places you visit. And that's what I try to combine in Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Thank you for watching Aloha. Aloha and welcome back. My name is Winston Welch and you are tuned into Out and About Show every other week on Think Tech Hawaii where we explore a variety of topics, people, events and organizations that do good in our community. We've got a fabulous organization and terrific young man representing the Outdoor Circle, Mr. Miles Richey, the programs director. And we have been talking about programs that he does as well as what the organization does. And Miles, welcome back to the show. Can you tell me one of the things Outdoor Circle is known for is trees and the Exceptional Tree Program. People may not know what an Exceptional Tree Oh, you get the words, but what does it mean? What's the Exceptional Tree Program? What do you have to do with it? What's going on with that program and how have you furthered it? Right. So essentially the Outdoor Circle is the organization and the whole helped pass some legislation back in 1975. It was Act 105 that established protections for trees of importance around the state. So they just determined them exceptional trees and they are worthy based on the criteria of age, rarity, location, size, aesthetic quality or endemic status. So if a tree meets one or more of those, it has the potential to be put on this exceptional registry, which does have some benefits. So like I said, it provides legal protections for unnecessary removal unless the committee. So how it kind of works is it's a statewide law, but each county has an arborist advisory committee that receives nominations. They meet frequently and then they will go and look at potential candidates. And then if they determine they meet the criteria, they will put them on the county's registry. At that point, unless the arborist advisory committee delists a tree for some unusual reason, which is very infrequently. Unless the tree poses a public safety risk or dies, it's going to be on that list. So it's a great opportunity to, I guess, protect some of the most valuable tree specimens that we have for future generations from developments and other aspects where these trees are a valued part of our society that we should protect. And that's what it allows. What were those, tell me again, run through the categories of protection again that we have in Hawaii? Sure. So you want the criteria? Yeah, like you said, age? Right, yeah. So we're looking at essentially age, rarity, location, size, aesthetics, endemic status. So those are the ones that will meet the list. As I said, one can make it on. If a tree meets one of those, it's fine. But if it has more of those characteristics, then it has a greater chance of being put on the list. There's also a tax credit that comes with each one of these trees. So if you're a private property owner, there's an incentive to it's a $3,000 tax credit every three years. And that's towards maintenance for your tree. So you prove that you had an arborist or whoever come in, trim your tree or take care of your tree. Then you submit this during your during tax season and then you actually get the tax credit. So it's a nice incentive for people on private property or homeowners to go and take care of these trees that may otherwise incur some costs that they would want to remove them if they want an exceptional list. OK, and if people want to nominate a tree or get on this list and get the tax credit, it's on the tax forms. I see it there. Do you have an exceptional tree? How did they do that? So they would just go to our website. It's as I mentioned before, outdoorshorkle.org. Can't mention it enough. Yeah, there's an exceptional tree location on the website. And it's got all the details for each county. It's got each nomination form, which is great. Or if you want, you can always check out each county's individual arborist advisory committee. But ours has everything in one spot. So it's just very convenient if you want to check it out. And how have you furthered this program or what work have you done with it to advance the exceptional trees of Hawaii? Right. So since I started, like I said, about six years ago, the program was kind of in it was not well known. And to this day, it's still not as well known as it should be. So we've been doing a lot of activism work, presentations, going and working with different age people from, you know, community groups, schools or to tell them about these trees. And we've also decided to make it easier because we as ourselves are looking to the registry and, you know, where are these trees? What are their benefits? How? Why were they selected? So that's what we've been working on right now is this exceptional tree map. So we went to a slide of that, I think. Yeah. Yeah, that'd be great. It's if we start with six, that'd be awesome. Essentially, what happened is we didn't know where these trees were. They were on the registry, but from each county, some of them would say, you know, off Mile marker 11 on, you know, one of Maui's major highways as Kyave, which is pretty big. Others would be, you know, the Eba Makai side of this property in Minoa, so it makes it a lot easier. So it was very, there's a lack of standardization. So we wanted to make it easy for people to know where these trees are, if they're public or private, and then their various metrics. So you can see here, there's eight, there's diameter, there's health. It's a lot of the basic trees you see. But then we also use that to calculate the ecosystem services for each tree. And they're pretty substantial because a lot of these are large. Well, they don't have to be large to be an exception tree. That is generally one of the most common traits we've seen. So we've made this a really easy resource for a lot of people to just go on a check, find out where they are. There's a library on there that tells you fun facts about each tree species on the list and just a lot of really good resources and a photo of every tree on there, too, as well, that you've linked to their street view. Yes. And the street view you've taken individually of over a thousand trees. There's OK, there's one of that's what are we looking at here? So you have the the K-Pok tree over at Yangan, kind of Eritanya, K-Muku, right in Onowahu. And this one's an ear pod in Minoa. This is actually the one I was just referring to in the example. But you can see these are really iconic and important looking trees. You have the Indian Banyan over in Lahina on Maui. So they're all over the state and they do rain from public to private. We do strongly we can't make it clear enough that if you'll see it on there, it says private property. Please don't go on the private property to check these trees out unless you have permission. But the public ones definitely go and check out the really cool experience and we're about to roll out a new update that shows the approximate age of the trees and the reasoning, the criteria for selection for Oahu. We've started going through a lot of old nomination forms because those are the two most common questions we get is how old is the tree and why was it selected? And then so people could just go on to your your website and look at this, the exceptional tree map and really make just a day of it and go around and look at some of these amazing trees. These these beings that we're increasingly finding out are pretty sentient beings, although not in the way that we have thought of it in the past and just enjoy their beauty and splendor as well as maybe learn about some history, how old they are and what kind they are, which is very cool. So you have actually furthered this work by getting a master's degree that is related to this. So what was your thesis on and how is that going to help aid in this exceptional trees listing as it becomes more, I guess, universalized? Right. So essentially the research began from working on Hawaii's exceptional tree program, looking at how the counties were administered and chose the nominees. So as I mentioned before, it's a statewide law administered out of each county. But there was a lot. I noticed a lack of standardization amongst how these committees were choosing. And obviously, you know, it is a fairly subjective process. You do have expert opinion, but it can vary if you have the same group on each island. So I started looking to see maybe there's a way to make it more standardized. Less objective. And maybe the UN or somebody had a program for these recognized trees that we can pull some information and maybe improve our own program. And it didn't exist. And I started doing some research and saw that these programs are popping up quite regularly across the world, but there's no standard template of how to even determine what criteria should be used for these trees. So each program is just reinventing the wheel each time. And a lot of common mistakes are being seen over and over again. So the research I started focusing on for my thesis was, OK, well, what is a heritage tree or exceptional tree? And that in itself has a lot of interesting aspects to it because there's over 60 terms around the world used to denote these trees of importance. So just narrowing it down to exceptional heritage. Today we'll use exceptional as it relates to Hawaii's program. But just even selecting a name to refer to these trees is pretty subjective. So I assembled a group of international experts for heritage trees, exceptional trees and over the course of a year and several rounds of really intensive research, they were presented initially with a literature review showing here's a review of 46 case studies around the world. Here's how they nominate their trees using these criteria from this and through this rigorous process. Which criteria, and there were 50, do you think should be the most important and useful criteria that are applicable at any geographic scale? So anywhere in the world from a small little town to the national level. And that's what we work at. That's so that's awesome research. I know that was a huge undertaking and I look forward to seeing your published paper, which hopefully will be coming sometime soon. And all the other things that you that continue going to do with the outer circle and the great work that you do as program instructor. Sadly, our half hour is up. Amazing. It just goes by like that. So I hope you will come back again and be our guest and go into some more depth on some of these things and learn about other programs. But unfortunately, we've got to wrap it up for now. So I will say thank you so much to Mr. Miles Ritchie, the programs director of the outer circle, organization doing terrific work, Mr. Ritchie doing terrific work. And we hope to see you here every other week at Out and About on Think Tech Hawaii. Hello, everyone.