Arbor Day celebration at new pavilion

Published May 2, 2013
By Airman John Linzmeier
22nd Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs

MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, Kan. -- McConnell Air Force Base held its annual Arbor Day celebration here April 26, at the new Reading Garden Pavilion located next to the library entrance.

A sugar maple and a chinkapin oak were planted at the pavilion as part of the celebration. Both trees are deciduous, meaning they will lose their leaves seasonally.

The trees will take approximately 20 years to reach their full height, said Tina Seemayer, McConnell AFB Environmental Department environmental engineer.

"We are very early in the stages of planting," said Darla Cooper, McConnell AFB Library director. "There is a plan to put native plants, flowers and more trees out there."

Col. Mark Evans, 22nd Mission Support Group commander, opened the ceremony with a paraphrased quote by Henry David Thoreau: "I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived."

Arbor Day originated when J. Sterling Morton, former Secretary of Agriculture, proposed to the Nebraska Board of Agriculture that a special day be set aside for the planting of trees in 1872.

Kansas is a grassland state in which trees are not prolific.

"If you want to have trees in Kansas, you have to work hard to get them," said Seemayer.

Because of extreme weather conditions, Kansas has no naturally thriving evergreen trees, which have leaves year round, and is the only state in the nation with no indigenous pines.

"A lot of the time, we don't think of the earth as a system like we do an aircraft system," said Seemayer. "People don't realize that at McConnell, not only do we have to have the physical infrastructure, but we need the environmental infrastructure healthy too. Trees contribute significantly to the environment."

Trees can reduce erosion of precious topsoil from wind and water, help absorb carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, filter runoff and pollutants, decrease heating and cooling costs, and provide many other natural necessities.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the net cooling effect of a young, healthy tree is equivalent to ten room-size air conditioners operating 20 hours a day.

Modern environmental engineers will often place trees around buildings to help stabilize the indoor temperature. By placing deciduous trees south of a structure, leaves will shade the building in the summer and allow for sunlight to reach the building when absent in the winter. Evergreen trees can help break the Northwest winds when placed to the north and west sides of a building.

"There is a saying," said Seemayer, "that the best time to plant a tree is yesterday and the next best time is today."