Street Talk: Jim Chi-yung
Professor Jim Chi-yung, better known as the “Tree Professor,” has been working hard, along with a group of keen prodigies, on a “Tree Print 2.0” app that aims to encourage more public involvement in tree preservation. He tells Emily Wu how he stays positive despite the government’s poor tree planting policies.
HK Magazine: How did you become interested in trees?
JCY: When I was small, my family couldn’t afford to buy me any toys. All the kids loved to spend time in the hills. It was so much fun to be in the wilderness—that was when I started to build up a close attachment to trees.
HK: What’s so special about them?
JCY: Trees are reliable biological indicators of our quality of living. Trees can grow and reach the sky and live a thousand years, which is impossible for human beings. You can see that some trees in Hong Kong have “spirit” tablets (inscribed wood slabs) placed in front of them by people who take to “worshipping” trees. [For example], the people who want their children to grow as strong and tall as the trees.
HK: The public can now help with tree preservation through the “Tree Print 2.0” app that you designed. How does it work?
JCY: Anyone who comes across any potentially harmful trees can freely post photos and share their assessment on the Tree Print Website via their iPhones. They only have to answer six simple questions, by examining whether the tree branches are broken or whether there is fungus growing on them. It’s not a professional tree assessment; it’s simply to arouse the public’s interest in trees.
HK: How do you think the local government has dealt with tree protection?
JCY: Planting strong trees is like having preventive health care. In other countries, it’s like securing a healthy population. However, in Hong Kong, we’re importing inferior seedlings, planting the wrong tree in the wrong place, and the soil quality is bad. The government does not know how to take care of the trees; that’s why we can see so many diseased trees that were planted half a century ago along the roadside and everywhere else in Hong Kong.
HK: Have you been given a lot of assistance along the way to study the trees in Hong Kong?
JCY: I know of 22,000 roadside trees,12,000 urban park trees and 48,000 trees in public housing estates—I don’t understand how the officials can say there are 700,000 trees in the urban areas. I think that it is just an excuse for them to say that there are too many trees around and they don’t have enough resources to manage all of them. I have encountered many hurdles. The government refuses to give me their tree database for studying purposes and I have to pay around $200,000 to get a set of digital maps, which is provided free [by the government] in other countries such as the US and Japan.
HK: Is there anything special about the urban trees in Hong Kong?
JCY: Stone wall trees in Hong Kong are treasures in the eyes of many, especially the foreigners, but definitely not the local government. The twenty-something trees that are growing on the masonry stone wall on Forbes Street in Kennedy Town all grew naturally. No one planted them there. Some birds ate the seeds of the banyan trees, flew to the area and took a rest there. Their excrement fell on the wall, then one or two of the thousands of seeds that were once as small as sesames grew to become gigantic trees. Don’t you think it’s amazing?