My name is Casey Clapp

Casey Clapp taking a selfie in the back of his truck

I am an Urban Dendrologist. Based out of Portland, Ore, I have spent the last 15 years exploring the relationships trees have with the world around them. Beginning first with the study of landscape design, I focused on the effects trees and plants have on the people and spaces around them. This influence I would learn is reciprocal, matched in scale and importance only by the effects people and spaces have on trees. A well-placed tree adds dimension, it offers grandeur and a sense of stability. Trees can encourage you to stay a while, or motionlessly usher you by.

Soon I began to shift my focus towards more natural systems, to study how entire forests function and how we manipulate them. It quickly became clear that there is no one unified accepted understanding of what a forest is, or rather what a forest should be and what role we should be playing alongside it. This path took me across North America and into forests whose constituents I had never met before. I learned just how wide-reaching our impacts on forests have been, and just how special the wild spaces left truly are.

Following my graduation from the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, I spent two years in Western Massachusetts at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst focusing my attention on the intersection where traditional ideas of managing a forest for some set of goals meets the modern concepts of intentional urban design. The way we design, build, and manage a space, whether a backyard or city neighborhood, has an immense impact on the people who live, visit, and work there, and few things can alter the nature and quality of that impact more than trees. This is where I concentrated my efforts: applying how trees grow, live, and die to maximize the positive impacts they have in an urban setting, be that a backyard or an entire city. As always seems to be the case, however, those positive impacts which I understood as facts were not universally understood as such. Often they were unknown entirely, or simply cast as unimportant.

As I began to see just how disparate views on and understandings of urban trees could be, and how those views manifested themselves in our society, I began to see that there had developed a certain disconnect between people and the trees around them. Often trees are merely seen as ornaments on the urban landscape, simple decorations with little practical importance to a practical society. Just as often, and with outcomes that are equally as detrimental, trees are seen as a dangerous nuisance, liable and likely to break or fall at any moment with dire consequence. This fear and indifference I found to be the result of a massive lack of connection to or relationship with trees. If you’ve never known a tree or interacted with them, even in the seemingly small way of knowing its name or watching it grow and change over a few seasons, you cannot be blamed for caring little about them or for being ignorant of their effects on you.

It is into this reality that I set out with an aim to bridge this gap and started the podcast Completely Arbortrary. Working with producer and longtime friend Alex Crowson, I set out with the ambitious goal of showing people just how interconnected, complex, and fascinating our relationship with trees truly is. My goal is to show with stories, facts, and a good bit of fun, that trees are far more dynamic and important than many realize. Simply put, my aim is nothing short of repairing the broken connection between people and trees through interaction and education. At a fundamental level, I believe that when people notice trees they care for trees, and when people care for trees, the benefits we reap from their co-existence with us increase dramatically. What’s more, as those benefits to us increase, it raises the quality of life for everything else in the interconnected web of organisms of which we are a part.

My Philosophy

Learn about trees. Teach about trees. Respect your trees. Love your trees.

I believe that trees are important to us, to our well-being, whether or not we collectively realize or acknowledge it. Foundationally, if we do not teach people about trees, fewer and fewer will learn about them or their world, and if one does not know the trees around them, they will often fail to see them and fail to see how important they are. If one fails to see the trees around them, they are far less likely to act on their behalf. I believe that learning about trees, even if it’s simply their name, will make one more likely to care for them. By knowing someone’s name you begin to build a relationship with them and care about them. I believe this is the same with trees, and that this is most important in our urban areas where the benefits and services that green infrastructure provides are most needed yet where the connection with the natural world is most lacking.

Trees are complex, long-lived, adaptive organisms. Understanding how they grow, live, and die is paramount in understanding how to maximize the positive impacts and minimize the negative impacts we have on each other. A science-based understanding of how trees and forests function, and how they impact other life around them should inform how they’re managed and how we incorporate them into our human-centric environments. Short-term economics should not play the current outsized role it occupies in management decisions; a short-term perspective on a long-form process is a foolish approach.

I also believe that exposure to trees does not have to take place only through scientific discourse. As a tool for for investigating and understanding how trees and forests function, it is invaluable; it helps answer questions that increase our knowledge about trees and our ecosystems. But, a scientific approach to defining our relationship with trees and forests can often simplify the interaction too much. As a means of spreading cultural knowledge and respect, or as a final say in what is right or correct, all too often modern scientific methods are incapable of simultaneously applying the necessary breadth and precision necessary to provide the best judgement or direction. Whether plants or animals, cities or communities, whole ecosystems or single meals, I believe they are all greater than the sum of their parts. In order to learn about trees, to respect them and love them, often one needs only to go outside, watch them, and learn their names.

Bona Fides

Professional Stuff

Education Stuff

Master of Science Degree in Environmental Conservation (2014), focused in Forest Resources and Arboriculture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; thesis focused on benefits and uses of conifers in the urban landscape

Bachelor of Science Degree (2012)

  • Bachelor of Science in Forest Management, Oregon State University, 2009-12; individualized focus in Urban Forestry and Arboriculture; graduated with Cum Laude honors

  • Studied Forest Management on exchange at North Carolina State University, fall 2010

  • Studied Forest Resource Management on exchange at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, spring 2011

  • Studied Landscape Architecture and Theatre at the University of Oregon, 2007-09

Publications