OPINION: Trees, power lines and unitended consequences

Unintended consequences. Funny how they work.

Case in point: In the 1960s, when developers built the Phelps Addition in the area between Browning and Kimball, the city required the planting of at least two trees in each yard. Lovely idea. It was the era of peace and love. Tree City, and all that.

Sixty years later, those sycamores and maples and oaks and even some elms are still standing - giant, mature, stately. Lovely.

Except for, say, in the wee hours of Monday night/Tuesday morning, when a big storm blew through. Down went big limbs, even some entire old trees. Boom went the transformers. Out went the lights.

Made for a dark and humid morning, quiet all around but for the low rumble of a few generators and the beeping of the Evergy repair trucks getting started on the recovery work.

Side note: I'm sure the power company runs the numbers, but isn't there some way to incentivize them to bury all the lines? Maybe make approval of that data center over in St. Marys contingent on putting all the wires in Manhattan three feet under?

That was a joke. I'm kidding. Easy, Trigger.

Old-growth trees really are great. Beautiful, calming, helpful in providing shade. I'm not arguing against them. All I'm saying is that the policy of requiring them a lifetime ago meant that this morning, as I'm writing this, there's no power at our house. We couldn't have imagined, six decades ago, the degree to which we'd be reliant on electricity to run, say, our phones and four big-screen TVs and the WiFi that allows us to control the thermostat, and for that matter to charge up the car.

Back then, they had other priorities. Which tells you that right now, we're making decisions as a community - our government, ourselves - that make good sense, based on the information at hand. But we're inevitably going to cause some downstream consequences that we can't even imagine right now, when our toddlers are approaching retirement age. No way around it.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't make them. It's just that we should be humble enough to know that we don't really know everything.

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This story was originally published June 9, 2026 at 12:06 PM.