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BUCK: I’ve been talking to Clay all week about “tree equity” and then the wonderful Senator Marsha Blackburn comes on and mentions also the tree equity. Let me explain to you. This is a real thing, and it is a line item.

CLAY: Billions of dollars in tree equity, not even a small number. Billions with a B.

BUCK: No, it’s like real money in considerable numbers being spent on this. Tree equity is kind of like tree socialism. It’s there’s not enough trees in some neighbors so they’re gonna take government money to make sure that everybody has the same number of trees, because they like trees, the climate, and it provides shade. This is a priority of the government, apparently, and I would just say, it’s actually not… You could plant trees. If people want trees in the neighborhood, it’s a thing that they could do.

CLAY: Seems like also something that maybe local government should be focused on, as opposed to the national government deciding to spend billions of dollars on trees. Just an idea.

BUCK: It doesn’t really seem like a federal priority. If you don’t have enough… The federal government’s not gonna help you when you have a giant pothole on your street that will rip your axle or tire off or whatever. But they are gonna make sure that you have equal trees in different neighborhoods. This is just another version of micromanagement.

By the way, if you’ve never read a book called Seeing Like a State, I would highly recommend it because it goes through government programs from the top down. One of them is in village planning in Tanzania. The one that it starts out with in the book is German forestry, Clay, and the smartest guys in Germany.

I think it’s the latest nineteenth century figure out, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to…” The experts, the Faucis of that time. “We’re going to only plant one kind of tree in rows, an exact degree apart. We’re not gonna allow for just forestry management,” and what they had is over time — because they thought they would have a much better league — it turns out that the local farmers and local forestry knew this was a terrible idea. Because if, one, pestilence goes through it —

CLAY: Wipes out everything.

BUCK: — it wipes out everything. If you have a fire you don’t have the underbrush there necessary to sort of be a stopgap against the fire, that actually the natural order of things with trees was better than what they were trying to do by planting trees in perfect rows, but the federal government never learns. They always think that they can make things better. It’s a little academic, but it’s a really interesting book.