The Promise of Repurpose

In spring of 2020, 48 mature trees were cut down on Western’s campus to make room for the new Interdisciplinary Science Building. What did Western do with them?

By Sophia Reynolds // Photos by Max Widjaja

March 16, 2022

It’s the summer of 2020, and the sound of helicopter blades whips through a sun-speckled forest in Birch Bay. A team of ecologists and ground crew workers stand along a creek, strategically guiding a helicopter. Hanging from its underbelly by a thick cable is a tree trunk the length of a blue whale. The pilot lowers the multi-ton log, with its gnarled clump of roots still intact, carefully into the creek. Here, it will begin its new role as a source of shade and protection for salmon.

Oddly enough, the tree trunk didn’t come from the surrounding forest. Instead it traveled almost 40 kilometers from the heart of Western Washington University’s campus.

The Interdisciplinary Science Building’s (ISB) construction was finished in January 2022. In the process, 48 mature trees were removed from Western’s campus, which stirred up a community controversy. The university’s ambitious environmental restoration plan promised to repurpose the trees for everything from benches to local stream restoration and vowed to plant 56 new trees around the building.

Two years after the trees were removed, the question remains. Has Western fulfilled those promises?

The Controversy

On May 4, 2020, in a post on the local news blog Northwest Citizen, the blog’s founder John Servais accused Western of “hating trees.”

“This tree removal is unnecessary for the new building,” Servais wrote.

The post spread quickly, gathering opinionated comments from locals and prompting some to contact the university.

“While I’m no scientist, I suspect that the removal of 48 mature conifer trees constitutes a sizable loss to our community…” wrote commenter Jamie K. Donaldson beneath the post. “Are we to believe that smaller replacement trees at whatever ratio after the fact will make up for this tremendous loss? No, this is green-washing.”

“Green-washing” is a term environmental advocates coined to describe when institutions cover up their environmental harms with publicized “sustainable” actions that don’t have a significantly positive environmental impact.

The fir, cedar and hemlock trees went down in just four days and the fervor soon died out.

Now, there is hardly a sign of the towering evergreens that stood where the ISB is.

The Removal

Western tasked Restoration Inc., a Bellingham-based company, to remove the trees — some almost 10 stories tall and 45 centimeters wide, weighing several tons. Restoration Inc. sells downed trees to habitat restoration groups in Whatcom County.

Victor Insera, the president and owner of Restoration Inc., said his involvement in the project happened somewhat by chance.

“I was approached by one of the Western engineers,” Insera said. “I think we had a mutual contact, we had our daughters playing volleyball or something, and he told me about the project. I told him what I did, and he said, ‘We’re looking for a way to reuse these trees as best as possible.’”

Once the trees were out of the ground, Insera contacted salmon habitat restoration groups around Western Washington, including the Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association (NSEA).

“We really want the roots. The more roots, the better. So it works out really well if your construction project is like Western’s and you want everything gone.”

— Darrell Gray, NSEA Project Manager

Logs from Western’s ISB site were sent to projects on Terrell Creek and the Skagit River. Western wanted to be as responsible as they could and minimize the environmental impact of the new building, Insera said.

“I think Western was looking for a way to make lemonade out of lemons,” Insera said with a chuckle. “It was a pretty visible little patch of forest, and I think they wanted to at least be able to justify that clearing… to reuse those trees, instead of just cutting them down and sending them to the mill or having a contractor grind them up.”

Three representatives from the university’s Capital Planning and Development department — Lisa Brennan, the communications and marketing coordinator, Mark Nicasio, the project manager architect and Rick Benner, the senior director and university architect — answered questions about the removal and restoration plan in a collaborative email.

Western’s sustainability goals were a driving force behind the ISB project, according to the statement. It highlighted the university’s Sustainability Action Plan, green building certification goals and “one-for-one” style tree replacement policy.

“Sustainability goals are balanced against cost of implementation, and resources are allocated where they will have the greatest impact,” Benner wrote. “At a minimum, though, Western is committed to planting a tree on campus to replace any tree that is removed for building construction.”

The Restoration

One of Western’s goals is to achieve a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) gold rating for the ISB. Three other buildings on campus already have this national green building certification: Carver Gym, Miller Hall and Alma Clark Glass Hall.

The program rewards systems like optimizing water and energy usage, reusing materials during construction, reducing light pollution and diverting a majority of construction waste away from landfills. The ISB has not yet been rated.

The university is also trying to become completely carbon neutral by 2035.

Another part of the restoration plan involved planting 56 new trees around the building — the university has planted 51. They planted Douglas fir, Western red cedar, shore pine, vine maple, Garry oak, Western hemlock and Pacific madrone, which are all species native to Western Washington, as well as two non-native autumn blazing maple trees.

This selection was a good choice, said Karen Holl, an environmental studies professor with expertise in restoration ecology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Holl co-authored the article “Tree Planting is Not a Simple Solution,” published in Science, arguing that planting the trees themselves is only the first step in a successful long-term replacement program.

One of the saplings that was planted outside the ISB to replace the removed trees.

“First of all, you would want to pick the right native species,” Holl said. “You would also want to make sure that you have a plan for planting them in a place that hopefully is not going to be developed again soon, and that there’s enough space.”

Continued care and monitoring of trees post-planting is also essential, Holl said.

“Mostly it’s about monitoring and making sure that if the [new trees] don’t survive, then you have a plan for going out and replanting them,” Holl said.

The other part of the restoration plan was to recycle the removed trees.

Western gave parts of the trees to organizations like NSEA, and used the remaining sections to make benches and mulch for the university’s campus.

NSEA received about 200 tree parts from Western to be used for in-stream salmon habitat restoration. This smorgasbord of free wood went to a project on Terrell Creek in Birch Bay in the summer of 2020, NSEA’s project manager Darrell Gray said.

Heavy root wads, stumps and trunk sections from large trees — or what ecologists call “large woody debris” — are essential to salmon species’ life cycles and survival in streams, Gray said.

Besides creating pools and piles of sediment in the creek bed, which are ideal for salmon spawning habitat, large woody debris also provides places for juvenile and spawning salmon to hide from predators while swimming upstream.

“We really want the roots. The more roots, the better,” Gray said. “So it works out really well if your construction project is like Western’s and you want everything gone,” he laughed.

Moving the wood was a long and meticulous process requiring a helicopter and a crew of people. NSEA hired Columbia Helicopters in the summer of 2020 to fly the logs to their final resting spot. The logs made the three-kilometer journey to the creek from where they were being stored nearby.

This helicopter helped lift and place 200 large tree segments into Terrell Creek over the course of two days // Photos courtesy of Darrell Gray.

Two years after placing the logs along the creek, NSEA has gone back to the site and checked on the stream’s adaptation to its new woody infrastructure NSEA will continue to monitor the site every year for five years starting in 2022. Gray said they hope to see an increase in presence and depth of pools in the creek.

The Result

Wading along the muddy banks of Terrell Creek today, the tree trunks from Western’s campus already look like a natural part of the ecosystem.

A different massive log can be seen lying in the water around almost every bend of the creek. Beavers have gnawed on each one, leaving small scratches on their bark, and dead grass and leaves have become intermingled with the roots. Some of the logs already have deep pools underneath them, full of murky brown water: a perfect place for fish to hide.

Back at Western, the ISB will open its doors to students in spring of 2022. As they walk up the path toward the new building, they’ll see smooth cedar benches out front, made from the trees that used to grow in that very spot. Rushing to class, they’ll hurry past new saplings planted in beds of recycled mulch from the trees that stood before them.

Meanwhile, 30 kilometers away, the remnants of the trees from the knoll will be providing new hope for salmon in Terrell Creek.

Sophia Reynolds is a junior at Western majoring in environmental education and working to make environmental knowledge accessible to everyone.