Glossary
CLICK HERE for the Glossary of Urban Forestry Terms for Citizen Foresters from Casey Trees (pdf)



Albedo: The measure of the solar reflectivity of a surface.



Backfill: To return the soil to a planting area from which it was originally dug.
Bare-root seedling: A tree ready for transplanting that has had the soil removed from around its roots.
Biofuels: The product of biomass conversion; can be used directly to provide heat or electricity.
Biomass: In terms of energy production, biomass is wood and forest residues, crops and other plants, and animal manure.



Canopy: The cover of branches and foliage formed by tree crowns.
Canopy Cover: A measurement of how much of an area is covered by the leaves in the crown of its trees.
Carbon dioxide: (CO2) A colorless, odorless, non-combustible gas. Humans and all other living organisms give off carbon dioxide in respiration and decomposition. Trees and other plants absorb it and use it during photosynthesis. Also emitted as a by-product of burning fossil fuels.
Chlorofluorocarbons: (CFCs) Man-made compounds used as refrigerants and cleaning solvents, often long-lived in the atmosphere.
Coal: The most abundant fossil fuel, derived from prehistoric plant materials that were exposed to high temperatures and pressure.
Conifer: Cone-bearing, evergreen tree with needle-like, linear, or scale-like leaves. Found in temperate climate zones and is the most common tree in colder regions.
Conservation: The planning and management of resources so that we have continued access to these resources while maintaining their quality.
Crown: The branches and foliage of a tree.
Crown spread: The area covered by the branches and foliage of a tree.



Deciduous: Trees that shed their leaves regularly. they may be cold-deciduous and drop their leaves when the weather becomes cool (as in Autumn) or drought-deciduous, dropping their leaves when the water supply is low.
Deforestation: The removal of trees and often the plants associated with them.
Desertification: A process by which land becomes increasingly unproductive and barren.
Drain sump: A pipe that helps remove excess water from a planting hole.



Energy efficient: Using energy in the most productive, least wasteful ways.
Evaporative Cooling: The absorption of heat from the atmosphere during evapotranspiration.
Evapotranspiration: The loss of water through a plant's leaves, where it evaporates. One large tree can release up to 400 gallons of water into the atmosphere in one day!



Flow restrictor: A valve that reduces water flow from faucets.
Food chain: The plants and animals through which energy flows. Plants make up the base of the chain, by converting energy from the sun into food. Animals make up the next steps in the chain, by eating plants or other animals to get energy.
Fossil fuels: Includes coal, oil, and natural gas. Fossil fuels are derived from prehistoric plant and animal materials that were exposed to high temperatures and pressure.



Geothermal: Energy from the earth, derived as heat.
Global Warming: An overall rise in the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere; a projected result of the greenhouse effect.
Greenhouse Effect: The warming of the Earth's atmosphere caused by increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the air, which trap the sun's heat within the atmosphere.
Greenway: (Greenbelt) An area of green open space that surrounds and stretches into cities. It often contains trees and shrubs, and serves as a visual break between areas of urban buildup.



Heat Island: The phenomenon of higher temperatures in a city compared to the surrounding countryside, caused by the combination of paved surfaces, lack of shade, and heat retention of buildings.
Heartwood: (Sapwood, Xylem) The central part of the tree's stem (trunk), it provides support. No longer contains any live cells.
Hydrocarbons: Compounds made of carbon and hydrogen, used to describe many fossil fuels.
Hydropower: Energy derived from the flow of water.



Increment borer: A tool used to extract a core of wood from a tree. Using this technique, the age and condition of trees can be determined without destroying the tree. This tool should only be used by professionals because it can allow insects and disease to enter the tree, especially in urban areas.
Interdependence: Mutual dependence.



Landscaping: The art of placing trees, plants, and other features on a piece of land.
Leaf bud: A bud from which only leaves and stems develop.
Lobes: The division in leaves. For example, red maple leaves have five lobes.



Methane: (CH4) A fuel derived from the decomposition of plants; the main component of natural gas.
Microorganism: A living individual of microscopic size, such as a bacterium or protozoan.
Mulch: A protective covering, usually organic, placed around plants to keep in moisture and prevent the growth of weeds.



Natural gas: A mixture of gaseous hydrocarbons that occurs naturally in the earth.
Nitrogen oxides: (NOx) Compounds of nitrogen and oxygen; released during fossil fuel burning.
Non-renewable: A resource that is of a fixed quantity and can be used only once.



Ozone: (O3) A form of oxygen that is chemically unstable.



Phloem: (Inner bark) The layer of cells that transports nutrients from the crown to the roots.
Photosynthesis: The process by which plants convert sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into new plant tissue and oxygen.



Renewable: A resource that is of unlimited quantity and can be used indefinitely.
Riparian corridor: The area adjacent to a waterway such as a river, stream, or lake.
Root ball: The clump of soil containing the roots of a tree, often bound in burlap.
Roots: The underground part of the tree, they anchor the tree and absorb water and nutrients.
Rotary cultivator: A power-driven machine that uses rotating metal teeth to chop, separate and mix soil. A useful tool for large tree-plantings.



Sapling: A young tree that measures two to four inches in diameter.
Sapwood: (Xylem) The living wood of pale color next to the bark. it is formed from the cambium and conducts water and minerals from the roots to the leaves.
Seedling: A young tree shortly after it has sprouted from the seed.
Sequestration: The process of storing carbon within a plant. During photosynthesis, carbon dixoide from the atmosphere is broken down into oxygen, which is released back into the atmosphere, and carbon, which is stored (sequestered) in the tree's trunk, branches and roots.
Sidewalk pit: Small preserves of soil found in urban centers, usually within sidewalks. These pits are often the only place for trees in these areas, and constitute a sort of immovable "street planter."
Silviculture: The art and science of growing and harvesting forest products.
Solar energy: Energy from the sun.



Treelawn: The usually narrow area between the curb and the sidewalk.
Trunk: The main stem of a tree.



Urban forest: Created where people congregate and build communities. Since humans are the main inhabitants of the urban forest, they largely determine the tree species in this forest.
Urban heat island: The phenomenon of higher temperatures in a city compared to the surrounding countryside, caused by the combination of paved surfaces, lack of shade, and heat retention of the buildings and structures.
Utility company: A company that provides service to the public, usually electricity, gas, water, or telephone.



Well-aerated soil: soil that has been loosened enough so that at least fifty percent of its volume is air.
Well-developed soil: Soils sufficiently weathered to have readily identifiable layers, or "horizons." An organic layer is at the top; the mineral layer is close to the bottom.
Whip: A young tree. Often one that has developed a main stem but very few branches.
Wind power: Energy derived from the wind, usually from windmills.



Xylem: The layer of cells that transport water and nutrients to the leaves and branches from the roots.

"In the electric business trees are always friends and foes. Friends from the perspective that we live here also. This is our community and it’s one of the most beautiful things about the Mississippi Gulf Coast is our trees. We love our trees. Trees are also our foes from a utility standpoint in terms of getting limbs into lines, but we have a very aggressive program to go and just trim trees back. So that once the storm is over and people are able to get back to their lives, there are as many of those beautiful trees still left to help them in the rebuilding process as possible. "

"It was very difficult to ride around our service territory and see what had been an electric system built in seventy years that was devastated, demolished in, you know, one day. We ended up having 30,000 poles on the ground. We had 10,000 transformers to replace, millions of linear feet of wire had to be restrung. So it really was a Herculean task. "

~ Ron Barnes, Vice President Marketing and Public Relations, Coast Electric Power Association, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi



In years past, when a wildfire would go through an area like that it wasn't making the news. But now, when those homes are there in areas which have historically burned and suddenly houses are burning and schools are burning and thousands of people are being evacuated, suddenly it becomes very obvious, strong evidence of urban sprawl that's happening and how it's really impacting the wild land, you know, urban interface."

"Currently the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks is exploring different software opportunities where there's off-the-shelf tree inventory and management systems which will help us identify exactly what our tree inventory is here in the parks and exactly where they are positioned in a map layer. So that a technician in the field knows specifically what tree he's being asked to perform work on and we can start to track the record of the work being performed on those specific trees because they're being GPS and GIS layered in the inventory system. The other wonderful benefit of having a complete inventory of your trees as assets is the ability to take that information and to plug that into existing tools like i-Tree, which give us the opportunity to run some fancy programs which help quantify the benefits of our urban forests. So we're very much looking forward to having a good standing inventory so we can take advantage of assessment tools like i-Tree."

~ Laura Bauernfeind, Principal Forester, City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks



"Most folks don't necessarily see trees as a part of their responsibility as a resident or a citizen. And what our, a big part of our mission - although it sounds very environmental, restore and enhance the tree canopy - there's really a lot to it, a lot more to it especially on the social side. And working with residents, having them understand the importance of watering trees, working with the city agencies, getting people to see that they need to be an active participant to make the city a green place is really critical to what we do."

"Resources are always at a premium and collaboration is key to our survival. But it's also a little bit touchy because everybody's fighting for scarce resources." iPod | Windows

~ Mark Buscaino, Executive Director, Casey Trees, Washington, D.C.



"Taking a holistic approach to urban forest management is really important. And that means integrating the work of lots of different departments in the city or in the county, or in the region, which you may not really think have an impact on trees. When you hear public works, you may not realize that nearly half of the tree care managers in our country are working out of public works departments rather than Parks and Recreation Departments. When you think of Department of Transportation, you don’t necessarily think of the green infrastructure but green infrastructure is part of what those agencies impact. So there’s a lot of opportunities there. "

"I think the more that we see research that quantifies in dollar terms what trees are doing for our cities, you’ll see policy change."

~ Alice Ewen Walker, Executive Director, The Alliance for Community Trees



"In some parts of the city we lost 30% of the canopies. Some parts of the city we lost 70% of our canopy. Some parts of the city like the lower Ninth Ward, we lost 100% of the canopy, or New Orleans East, 100% of the canopy. To lose that magnitude is just unbelievable. So replacing could never be more critical than now."

"The hardest thing is when a good, healthy, strong tree that survived that storm, survived that wind, survived those floods, goes down because of a construction company. It’s very important that citizens are aware of how they can protect their trees so that they can have them for their future."

~ Jean Fahr, Executive Director, Parkway Partners, New Orleans, Louisiana



"With the advance of technologies, we now have transformed the earth into a single production unit. When you create a single market space you also transform the way business is done to serve that market space. So we are building faster connections to move people, goods and information. We are also redistributing economic activity around the world which is leading to this vast explosion of capital and wealth across the world. At the same time, that is leading to higher standards of living of former communist countries and third world countries. All that wealth can only by created by the conversion of resources. "

"Human consumption is endless. We’ve got to rethink how much can we take? How much can we consume? How much do we need? And then we’re going to have to find a way out because if we continue this way, we will take every fish in the sea, every animal on the planet, and every tree will be gone. And we’re gonna ask ourselves when the lightning bolt arrives, what have we done? "

"The way we're using resources and the way we're building our cities, the vast networks are highly inefficient networks. We have to begin to rethink human habitation of the planet based on high efficiency networks with low environmental impact. (abridged)"

~ Michael Gallis, Regional Development Strategist, Michael Gallis & Associates, Charlotte, North Carolina



"Chances are the water that you drink out of your tap today fell on a national forest a few days ago. So they percolate water, they clean air, they filter it. They do all kind of good things for human beings as well as other wild life and so helping people understand that is important. It is really what American Forests does, but there are benefits that we haven’t even started to measure. "

"We need to sit down with the people that are building and developing, people that make concrete, people that build houses, the people that put in railroads and make transportation. We need to be sitting at the table with them so that we’re sure that the environment is just a highly regarded as the other concerns that they have. "

~ Deborah Gangloff, Executive Director, American Forests



"Los Angeles has the largest urban forest in the nation. We have over 700,000 street trees, about 850,000 park trees, and over 10 million trees on private property. It was mainly chaparral, grassland, and really the urban forest that you see now in Los Angeles was essentially manmade."

"Fortunately, in LA the utility is a city agency. Our Department of Water and Power has been right there with us, working on a million trees and working on just the care of the urban forest because they have a vested interested in urban forests. They recognize that by planting trees strategically around a home, you can reduce the energy use in that home, so they encourage that. They encourage the use of trees to mitigate storm water runoff, particularly our Bureau of Sanitation because they know that the more water the tree captures, the less water they have to treat downstream that’s going into our rivers, our harbors, our beaches. So we’ve had a tremendous, tremendous benefit working with these departments. "

~ George Gonzalez, Chief Forester, Urban Forestry Division, City of Los Angeles



"This whole thing wouldn’t have happened without the school and the principal, teachers and the students here being enthusiastic. They wanted to do this reading circle. And it was such an anomaly having this little piece of green space in this sea of asphalt. When I brought the city officials by here they were like almost embarrassed. Then we created this wonderful idea of asphalt removal using storm water mitigation money to do this and it’s become very popular. We’ve moved 14 acres of asphalt off of city schools citywide. "

"A healthy community development process, I think, that’s going on as a part of improving water quality. But actually as we’re seeing with global warming and as we get more and more into drought areas or we have periods with very little rain and then a lot of rain, we need storm water harvesting in these urban places. "

~ Guy Hager, Director, Great Parks & Green Communities, Parks & People Foundation, Baltimore, Maryland



"All of us have to raise the tide of saying parks are important. Parks are part of the solution. Parks are not at the bottom of the barrel to be considered last. We have to be at the table where all of the important decisions are being made about cities. It's not that the mayor will sit down with the economic development director and the tourism director and the department of transportation and the housing director and make some really important multi-billion dollar decisions and then inform everybody else. It's saying that parks are very much part of this and need to be at the table to add their part of the solution to some of these problems." iPod | Windows

"So when you actually go to the people, they're voting for park land and they're voting for buying land, preserving land from development. And this has been a wakeup call for a lot of politicians because they're not always - they're mostly hearing from the lobbyists. They're not always hearing from the regular people. And when it gets put to a vote of the regular people they're getting these huge majorities. So some of them are saying, "You know this would be an okay thing for, we wouldn't actually have to run this through the ballot measure. We could vote on it right in our own city council or county council." And I think that is beginning to turn the corner." iPod | Windows

~ Peter Harnik, Director, Center for City Park Excellence, Trust for Public Land



"Well, the damage here at City Park– we had $43 million worth of damage, and 90% or more of the park flooded anywhere from a foot to eight feet of water. You know the public has sent lots and lots of money. Local folks have been incredibly supportive. Lots of local businesses have not only donated money but sent their employees out here and volunteered to help clean up the park. We hear these stories, you know, 'I proposed to my wife at New Orleans City Park.' 'You know I lost my house. Here’s $10.' You know it brings a tear to your eye and at the same time you – you feel good. You say, 'Well, we need to ramp back up because people want this park back.' " iPod | Windows

~ John Hopper, Chief Development Officer & Director of Public Affairs, New Orleans City Park



"So what kind of city would we have if it was all gray infrastructure? It would be a terrible place to live. And likewise obviously we have to live in homes and go to work in buildings and have ways of getting to work and so on, so of course we have to have gray infrastructure. The reality is we really have to have both and what I think we’re trying to do through American Forests is to really understand how these systems, the gray and the green infrastructure, can work together and really build off of one another." iPod | Windows

"So when communities are not meeting their air quality standards they’re trying to figure out how in the world can they do that and one of the best management practices would be increasing the urban tree canopy. "

~ Cheryl Kollin, Vice President, Urban Ecosystem Center, American Forests



"In 2001 the trees in Orleans Parish were removing 1.2 million pounds approximately, of air pollutants. In 2006, because the trees are no longer there, that has dropped to 625 thousand pounds of removal. What that means is there are 600,000 more pounds of air pollutants in that small parish just because the trees aren’t there."

~ Mike Lehman, Director, CITYgreen Software, American Forests



"Strategically planting those trees, cooling down streets, parking lots, schoolyards, all the sources that heat up the city gives you a double and triple whammy on preventing pollution. "

"There’s a real passion that gets unleashed as people know that they’re planting these trees for their health, that they’re protecting their families, that they’re protecting their communities. "

~ Andy Lipkis, Founder & Executive Director, TreePeople Los Angeles, California



"The city had flat-lined at least thirty days. There was no power, no electricity anywhere. We had to really closely monitor tree companies that were coming in hired by Entergy to make sure that they were trimming the trees within our specs and guidelines. That was a huge challenge because the bottom line is people wanted power. They wanted to start the recovery process. "

"After the storm, there were a lot of tree removals done illegally, mainly in neighborhoods that were just barren and vacant. A lot of citizens were gone so we did have the tree contractors and the debris removals that did get paid by the load doing some illegal tree removal. It was just very difficult to monitor; very difficult."

~ Ann Macdonald, Director, Department of Parks & Parkways, City of New Orleans



"Nature's not a place where we go to get away. Nature's a place where live and that we nurture to survive. "

"We need to build our cities within a new framework that integrates the gray with green in ways that we maintain the function of the ecosystem while still accomplishing what we need to do as we build our cities."

~ Ed Macie, Regional Urban Forester USDA Forest Service, Southern Region



"Oh, I don’t know if there’s any vocabulary in the world that could describe the damage of Katrina. It was close to annihilation."

"I’d say if you have a problem you have to get on it right away. The longer you wait, the worse it gets. So the sooner you get to the problem and start working on it, the quicker it will be resolved. You know the choice is that or cut and run. And where are you running? "

~ Chipper McDermott, Mayor, Pass Christian, Mississippi



"Efficient development is the best way to save natural systems. To understand ecology is to first realize that it isn’t just about your place, the place where your yard is, the place where you city is. Your ecology, the natural system is really large. It is all around you."

"So, how do we manage the unnatural world sort of becomes our challenge for today and we realize that this challenge is not one for the so-called conservation community or environmental alone. It is really part of the whole community, all the business community, the managers of towns and cities. All the people need to participate in that. "

~ Gary Moll, Senior Vice President, Urban Ecosystem Center, American Forests



"Well absolutely, trees are an important component of what we in the parks service describe as the cultural landscape. They tell the story of how places were laid out, what the design was. Originally this cemetery had several parallel rows of trees. And in fact the hurricane damage to trees in this cemetery goes back quite a ways. And much of it was done was done during hurricanes like Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Hurricane Camille in 1969. And for whatever reason many of those trees were not replaced at the time. So the park undertook back in 1999-2000 to research the history of the plantings here in the cemetery. We were able to find old drawings and landscape plans, even descriptions of what trees had been planted. And we began replanting those alleys of trees that had been here historically. "

~ David Muth, Director of Natural Resource Management, Jean Lafitte National Historical Park & Preserve, New Orleans, Louisiana



"We moved 2.9 million cubic yards of debris. It’s a football field stacked over a quarter of a mile high. The big convention center in New Orleans, that’s 3 million square feet. Take that entire property and stack it, I think it was forty-two feet high would be the debris we hauled off, hauled out of here. "

"I think the better developers and the developers that have been in the game for the long haul understand that green sells. And green sells their property and green sells their lots three times faster than if you just strip it off and you've got bare dirt. "

~ Eric Nolan, City Arborist, Biloxi, Mississippi



"By providing this information through eco-system services assessments that the community, the politicians, the local users can understand, they can make those informed decisions as to how many eco-system services should we have and how much forest should we have to get in return. In the past, no one really knew about it, they knew people liked trees, but now they’re saying okay, this is worth this many dollars, it means this many tons of air pollution, this many kilowatts in energy savings to the homeowners. So we get this economic return coming back from the forest. So we are making hopefully smarter decisions into the future of how we develop these forests to get the maximum, optimal return for the investment that we put into the forest. "

~ David J. Nowak, Ph.D., Project Leader, Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service



"Oh, they could have chopped off my head before I would have let them take down my trees. "

"I believe the biggest roadblock to reforesting the City of New Orleans is the construction that’s happening. It’s got to happen but I do believe that that’s the biggest issue; that Parkway Partners needs to let people know that there still could be some damage done to so many of these trees because of the big trucks, the demolition that’s still happening. "

~ Amelie Oriol, New Orleans Resident, Parkway Partners Tree Trooper



"Number one you need to understand the amount of tree canopy and natural assets you have in a given area - in your city, in your county, whatever the jurisdiction your trying to preserve in your state. So establish a baseline. And then the other lesson we’ve learned, it’s absolutely vital that we have a change in terms of our view, how we view natural assets. Right now we plan in all of our cities and towns for all these man-made surfaces, the street networks, where the buildings are going to go, where the utilities are going to go. And we don’t plan where are natural assets are going to go."

"We are seeing cities like Atlanta that are within 90 days of running out of drinking water. Raleigh, North Carolina is less than 90 days away from running out of drinking water. So our leaders are finally waking up to see that we have to change the way we are treating the natural assets. Our leaders must account for the natural assets, plan for them, and integrate the man-made structure and the natural assets together so that we grow in sustainable fashion. "

~ Rick Roti, Attorney, Chairman of the Charlotte Tree Commission



"When we came home outside in the yard looked to me like pick-up-sticks. We had probably a hundred or more trees in the woods in the back and we lost all of them. They’re still dying. That concerns us a lot, not just in our yard, but all over the coast. And all over our town, but all over the coast, they’re still dying. They’ve been way too stressed. "

~ Gayla Schmitt, Pass Christian Resident, Advisory Board Member for the Land Trust for the Mississippi Coastal Plan



"There is a significant amount of development going on in the District and fortunately, there is also a lot of attention to how to develop in a more environmentally friendly way. So green building standards have been developed. We are seeing a lot more green roofs and we’re seeing a lot of attention to and concern about the space - the area that is needed for healthy trees in a developed area. "

"City life is tough on trees and it’s tough in Washington as well as across the country. The concrete boxes are too small. Cars run into them. Weed wackers that are used around them inflict damage that is often fatal. There’s a lot of stress on trees in urban environment. "

~ Dan Smith, Senior Director of Communication, Casey Trees, Washington, D.C.



"Urban ecology is so important now. I think we’re at a critical time in our society, in fact, if not in the entire world because we have been relying on systems that developed when nature was in abundance around us and nature was in abundance around our cities. And because of population growth and because of the dysfunction of cities, that’s no longer true. Urban ecology is absolutely important as something that needs to be reintegrated and reconnected to our everyday systems and our everyday lives. "

"We have many products in our lives that are derived from natural systems. Our food, building supplies, lumber, those sorts of things and what I see in our society is that many people are disengaged from these products. They don’t really recognize where they come from and they don’t really support the sustainability of these products so our farmlands around many cities are being gobbled up by new development. "

~ Kathleen L. Wolf, Ph.D., Research Social Scientist, College of Forest Resources, University of Washington, Seattle

In September of 2008, Hurricanes Gustav and Ike came ashore in Louisiana wreaking havoc across our state.

Fallen Heroes Image Courtesy of the  Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at LSU,    National Cemetery, Baton Rouge

Our citizens need information about how city agencies and residents can work together to implement stronger storm safety protocols that include smart landscaping, storm-appropriate green infrastructure, and planting the right tree in the right place.

Many tree ordinances do not address hurricanes and trees. So many lessons learned by arborists, urban foresters, landscape architects, and horticulturists about selecting and planting hurricane- suited species do not get passed on to city leaders and the general public.

More directly, not getting these issues right is costing taxpayers a heavy dollar.

Information (in pdf format):

* Louisiana Active Arborist Directory

* Louisiana Native Tree Growing Guide

* Dealing with Storm Damaged Trees in the Landscape

For more information, please contact the following resources:

* Your Local Parish Tree Commission or Office of Landscape & Forestry

* Louisiana Urban Forest Council (http://www.louisianaurbanforestry.org/)

* Louisiana Municipal Association (http://www.lma.org/)

* Louisiana Department of Agriculture & Forestry (http://www.ldaf.state.la.us/)

* LSU AgCenter (http://www.lsuagcenter.com)

* USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, (http://www.urbanforestsouth.org)

* American Forests (http://www.americanforests.org/)

* Alliance for Community Trees (http://www.actrees.org)

This one hour documentary, narrated by actor Sam Waterston, tells the story of a fascinating and endangered habitat that eighty percent of our citizens call home: America's urban forests. Urban forests are critical components of every day life for the majority of Americans, yet they are often overlooked or taken for granted by most citizens.

The program was updated in 2008 as Return to the Forest Where We Live.

---

Original "The Forest Where We Live" Program Transcript

These venerable columns, this verdant roof,, these fair ranks of trees, massy and tall and dark, . . This mighty oak by whose immovable stem I stand and seem almost annihilated--not a prince. -- William Cullen Bryant (A Forest Hymn)

For over three hundred years, these woods have been a landmark of America.

Oaks and maples, elms and evergreens were all part of an ancient forest that stretched as far as the eye could see.

To untold millions who emigrated here, the wildness offered refuge and freedom.

It was unfettered ground -- a place to build, to play, to meditate.

Nature in America was important as any monument in Europe.

But today, these woods face an uncertain future.

ROBERT MILLER: We tend to think of deforestation going on in tropical countries. But around our cities weíre doing a lot of deforestation.

NANCY WOLF: It never occurred to anybody that the cities were a forest of a type and that that forest ought to be cared for and paid attention to.

GREG McPHERSON: Itís a dynamic forest, Trees, its composed of trees that are dying, growing, constantly being regenerated by people. And its a forest that is really essential to our well being, the quality of our life.

It affects air. Water. The very climate of our cities.

This is the forest where we live.

Around our cities today, trees must contend with urbanization on a scale unknown before.

It's affecting land from the downtown of American cities to the edge of suburbs. This is the nation's urban forest. Some 70 million acres. An area more vast than any of our national forests.

GREG McPHERSON, Research Forester, USDA Forest Service: About 2400 acres per day is being converted from rural to urban land use. So for every acre there are 20 to 30 trees that all of a sudden are part of the urban forest. Or we're protecting trees that were in forests and now are surrounded by buildings and shopping systems.

In recent years, America has witnesssed an explosion of population and economic activity. And it has come with a price. In too many cities, the space for trees doesn't exist. Growing conditions are poor. Urban soils are often little more than construction rubble. Areas for planting are becoming smaller and smaller.

GARY MOLL, American Forests: Cities still lose more trees than they plant. That's the biggest crisis that cities have with trees as they're simply losing them and they have no place to put them back.

America's relationship with nature has been a wavering one since settlers first came here. Debates over the environment have happened before, notably in the conservation movement that swept the country in the l9th century.

JURETTA JORDAN HECKSCHER, Library of Congress: I think its safe to say that nature was overwhelming to the Europeans who came here. It was threatening, and the importance of their survival as a society depended on taming it. And the importance of personal success depended very specifically on cutting the trees back so one could farm.

In the mid-19th century, rapid industrialization led to extensive deforestation and worsening urban conditions. Forest fires took their toll each year. What wasn't burned was harvested at an alarming rate.

HECKSCHER: The industrial revolution revolutionized the American relationship with nature, that's very clear. For the first time large numbers of Americans were living most of their lives separated from the natural world in the sense that earlier generations had known it.

Most of the forests on the East coast were gone, and those in the West were under siege.

There were some who warned of overdevelopment. One was George Perkins Marsh, a 19th century Vermont Congressman. "Even now we are breaking up the floor of our world," he said, "disrupting the invisible bonds that link all the myriad forms of life." And, he said, "The destruction of woods was man's first violation, for the woods served to protect the earth."

HECKSCHER: For the most part Americans I think still felt that the way toward progress which was the great 19th century word and the emblem of Americans' aspirations, progress still meant cutting back the forest, it still meant making room for what they thought of as civilization.

Soon, there was equal concern for the cities.

NANCY WOLF, Alliance for Community Trees and Environmental Action Coalition: Streets, sidewalks, houses. So many people, so many needs for housing -- they didn't leave open space as a matter of course, it wasn't part of the planning. Block after block after block, just eating up land.

Finally, some began to seek solutions. One of the first took place in 1858 with the creation of New York City's Central Park.

The man behind it was landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead.

HECKSCHER: He was the first person who really made a strong intellectual case for the importance of wild scenery, parklands and beautiful places within cities that could refresh the body and the mind and the spirit.

WOLF: So they just captured land in the nick of time, and you can imagine what Manhattan would be like if they had not done that. These cities would be unlivable without these huge parks.

By the 1870s, a movement to preserve American forests came of age. The U.S. Forest service was founded. The first Arbor Day was observed.

Between 1905 and 1907, Theodore Roosevelt established 180 million acres of land for wildlife refugees and national parks for the United States. Four years later he established forests in the East, acquiring lands for watershed protection.

Advocates of forest preservation arose. Guifford Pinchot, the first chief of the forest service. John Muir, a passionate defender of wilderness. Aldo Leopold, who called for a land ethic. They represented the culmination of sixty years of conservationism and environmental awareness that had evolved throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But if anything had been learned in one century, it appears to have been lost in the next. After World War II, the American landscape was again suffering radical change.

ROBERT MILLER, Professor of Forestry, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point: Following World War II, the automobile became much more widely available. And people bought them, and people had higher incomes after the war. And they wanted to move out of the cities and into the countryside. We weren't living in apartments or row houses, we wanted our own little piece of suburbia, a quarter acre or half acre or whatever.

And then disaster hit. Dutch Elm disease and later infestation by gypsy moths spread throughout the land. The urban forests were more fragile than anyone had understood.

MOLL: The Dutch Elm Disease was brought in from Europe and it spread like wildfire through these trees.

McPHERSON: Dutch Elm Disease was working its way east to west across the country.

There was no cure. They just had to tag infected trees and get them removed.

McPHERSON: It's one thing when you lose the tree outside your home, but its another thing when you lose the trees along a whole street.

MOLL: They no longer had shaded streets, they no longer had tree-covered roadways. They now had clear cut communities.

MILLER: And people took them for granted. When they died, they didn't take them for granted anymore.

McPHERSON: Dutch elm disease made people realize how much they missed trees. We don't realize how important a part of our lives trees are until they're gone.

Dutch Elm disease marked the beginning of the modern urban forestry movement.

MILLER: And so the environmental movement really started in the 60s, and expressed itself particularly in the 70s. A lot of legislation passed. People in cities became much more interested in nature. The interest in gardening, the interest in camping, backpacking, a whole host of outdoor activities dramatically increased. And along with that people were interested in making their communities better places to live.

But the Reagan administration challenged these developments. Funds for urban forestry were cut. Political support had to be raised. It came in 1990 under the Bush administration.

JAMES R. LYONS, Undersecretary, Natural Resources & Environment, USDA Forest Service: We put together legislation, I was on staff in the House Agriculture Committee then, and drafted the legislation that was called the Urban and Community Forestry Assistance Act.

It became known as the Farm Bill. Funds for urban forestry expanded twentyfold. A network of federal & state organizations was established, dedicated to community and urban forestry.

ROBERT SKIERA, Retired City of Milwaukee Forester: The importance of the Farm Bill was that it sets up urban forestry funding at the federal level, in a way that we can pipe it to every community.

JOHN DWYER, Northeast Coordinator, USDA Forest Service: It really created a real resurgence in urban forestry because people saw this was great attention at the federal level, and I think it caused many others to respond in kind. It really created a new era in urban forestry, like a higher plateau than it had been before. A very significant event.

Others saw the Farm Bill as a step in the right direction, but they remained concerned that the real threat to American forests was not being addressed.

MARCIA BANSLEY, Trees Atlanta: All around the country they're have been some plantings done, but the overall effect has not changed the entire way people do development. It hasn't gotten down to the public works crews, the information's not out there.

What has been hard, say scientists working in the field, has been persuading policy makers and city planners that the urban forest is important. In the past city forests were not considered worth study. They were not even thought to be natural.

LYONS: The forestry community overall has always focused on rural areas. They focused on national forests and natural resources that tended to be outside city limits.

McPHERSON: Would you rather be, you know, doing research in Lake Tahoe or in a Walgreens or Wal-Mart parking lot, for example? And that's where so much of the funding, much of the support, and much of the emphasis in gaining new knowledge about ecosystems, is directed -- towards non-urban environments.

Today, scientists are redifining the way we look at forests within cities.

ROWAN ROWNTREE, Urban Forest Ecology Research, USDA Forest Service: It's important to see the city not as just a set of artificial buildings and impervious surfaces, but as having an infrastructure or a circulatory system weaved through it of live material. It's a vibrant renewable resource that unfortunately we take for granted as we walk through the city. But it's critical to the life within the city. If we look at it as a rich tapestry of dynamic processes and interacting components. If we're going to just look at is as a set of street trees, or as single elements we're just not going to comprehend it.

Throughout America, cities have been expanding at a colossal rate.

HENRY DIAMOND, Author, Land Use in America: Land use controls, and quite rightly so, traditionally were local in nature. I mean the town meeting decided whether someone could add a new roof to their house in New Hampshire or whatever. Now that we're dealing with huge systems we're no longer dealing with individual issues, we're dealing with massive highways, massive shopping center developments, massive power developments, the local government becomes in many cases obsolete.

JAMES SCHWAB, American Planning Association: About 80% of Americans at this point are living in metropolitan areas. Over half of those, about 53%, are living in metropolitan areas that are already above one milion people. So we're a very urban nation. Today, the central cities are not where most Americans are locating. It's not where most of the development activity is taking place. Most of it is taking place in the suburbs.

DIAMOND: As jobs have moved to the perimeter, the so called edge city phenomenon, people will go even farther out. And we tend to get this flight from the city, but it becomess an absolute mob flight when the jobs go out the corridors, chewing up land, and in a very uneconomic way, because the corridors are not compact, and they cut down trees, they demand sewer and other services.

They move in ever widening rings of development that often leave the inner rings vacant and empty.

Or there are vast corridors of growth.

SCHWAB: There are some very rapid growth areas even without the population growth, such as Howard county between Washington DC and Baltimore. Suburbanization has moved people out of the inner city even in relatively stagnant overall metropolitan areas, and more into the suburbs and thus more land gets consumed in the process. That is the real crisis, trying to slow down that trend before that whole pattern of land use becomes so implanted that there's nothing we can do about it.

New voices have risen, warning of a silent crisis, a specter hovering over the land. The vast American countryside, the fountainhead of national myth, memory and identity, is vanishing.

DIAMOND: Americans have not been willing to accept even the most modest restraints on growth. It's been this frontier and old English law that I can do anything on my land from the sky to the center of the earth and politically it's been absolute murder to try to touch it.

HECKSCHER: We can't simply make it make a question of property. There are these larger issues of health and spirit and imagination that are directly affected by the landscapes we live in and that in turn create us. And that's at least as much true in a city as in the countryside.

Despite its reputation as a "City in a Forest," Atlanta ranks last among major American cities for the number of trees shading its streets. Built surfaces have rapidly replaced the city's natural landscape.

WILLIAM CHAMEIDES, School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Tech: We're losing tremendous amounts of forests. We have so many more cars in Atlanta than we used to, we have so many more people, so many things are happening at the same time we're losing our forests.

ED MACIE, Director, Urban & Community Forests, USDA Forest Service - Southern Region: Citizens became concerned that so much forest cover was lost for land development. And so I think the emphasis, at least here in the metropolitan region, the focus is really the loss of tree cover as part of the overall land development process rather than the care of public trees on public lands.

Development had been consuming 50,000 trees a year. But it took satellite photographs to reveal the full extent of deforestation.

MOLL: Atlanta's one of those cities that has grown rapidly. It has sprawled out over the last 20 years. And we're able to measure that change, first using Geographic Information Systems, so we can see the change in land cover. The Landsat satellites have been circling the Earth for over 20 years. So you can look at an image from 1972 and all the years in-between, and find out how the landscape has changed.

MACIE: Everything has to come with a balance. And I know for example here in Atlanta we are experiencing a cost.

Atlanta had lost some 65 % of its trees in twenty years. A heat island was expanding steadily from downtown Atlanta to the Hartsfield International Airport. The central city core was at times 6 to 12 degrees warmer than the surrounding suburbs.

CHAMEIDES: Trees have a major impact on the climate. Local climates, urban climates. When you cut down trees, you cut down green spaces, and you put up parking lots and roadways, you end up increasing the temperature by anywhere from five to ten degrees. And that hot temperature really has a lot of negative impacts, both climatically, it has a negative effect on people's health, and it also hurts the environment in terms of air quality because it affects the chemical reactions that occur.

HASHEM AKBARI, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, University of California: Typically when the cities are being developed the very first thing that people do, they chop down the trees and orchards and replace them with impermeable surfaces, that most of them are dark, either rooftops or pavements. And this temperature difference between the city and the suburban, rural area is defined as a heat island.

Atlanta's Olympic ring was in the red hot center of the temperature grid. Higher temperatures were contributing to increasing smog, ozone and air pollution.

The impact of deforestation is being felt far beyond a city's borders, affecting entire regions. The loss of trees reduces the amount of carbon dioxide that can be absorbed. Worldwide, scientists detect an alarming rise in CO2 levels and global warming.

AKBARI: One of the ways that man is having an effect on the environment is burning more and more fossil fuel. This fossil fuel which is burned will show up in the form of CO2 in the atmosphere. That CO2 acts like a blanket, a thermal blanket around the globe.

CHAMEIDES: Atlanta and the state of Georgia have spent something on the order of a billion dollars in the last ten years or so to clean up our air pollution problems, and we haven't made any progress. That is not a record that we're proud of.

BANSLEY: The obstacles, of course, are the development pressure. There's a huge amount of development pressure here. Everybody wants to live in Atlanta because its such a lovely place, and they don't realize that the place that they want to live in is going to be destroyed by all the new housing and the new buildings that are coming in.

Atlanta is not alone. In 1987 and 1991, American Forests surveyed the condition of streeet trees in 20 cities.

SKIERA: Many of the cities were planting far fewer trees than they were removing, but many of them were not even inventorying what they had, so they really didn't know how bad conditions were.

In many cities, maintenance funds are cut.

MARTIN FITCH, Park Superintendent, City of Sacramento: The problem is that there are fixed number of dollars available, and we have police and fire that are really considered very important in any community. And we've been faced with on-going budget cuts for the city as a whole, so in that environment, its been very difficult for us to get more money to do more tree work.

Some say reduced funding has forced many city foresters to become nothing more than undertakers for dead and dying trees.

The lack of maintenance has made the trees vulnerable to disease and infestation.

In New York, the Asian beetle is sweeping through communities wreaking devastation not unlike that of Dutch Elm Disease.

These plots in Brooklyn are all that remain of an entire street of trees.

PAT FERRIS, Brooklyn Resident: I just couldn't picture our backyard without that tree. My granddaughter was like, knew that I was going to be devastated when this happened because I just kept talking, they're gonna take our tree down, and I was really upset, and my granddaughter wrote me a note saying, "don't be sad, don't be sad." And my husband said I used to say, "When that tree goes, I go with it. "

Nationwide, citizens are grappling with the effects of a changing landscape.

MACIE: With changing land use patterns there will be conflict, a lot of different conflicts. There's going to be more people, not less, with greater demands on a diminishing base of resources.

With development has come conflict over competing needs.

McPHERSON: I think there are issues as to how much green space do we need. How effectively will it offset the impacts associated with economic development as this community grows. How can this green space be best configured and managed to provide net benefits.

In some cities, the utility lines have proved to be a battleground.

LYNN MORRIS, Baton Rouge Green: One of the most tragic things is the desecration of a live oak. A live oak can be trimmed to canopy up over lines, it doesn't have to have a hole cut in it, or a crotch cut, or any of the very severe pruning practices that you see today.

Natural cycles are disrupted. Trees are not replenished, raw materials end up as waste.

Or there is flooding and water pollution.

SCHWAB: We're seeing serious problems in allowing too much development too near floodways, allowing the development of too much impervious surface -- you know, concrete, pavement, buildings -- things that don't allow the water to percolate through the soil, consequently forcing more water into our waterways causing the rivers to flood more often and suddenly those hundred year floods are happening a lot more than once a century.

MORRIS: About 44,000 trees have gone down in one development alone, and when you realize that we've planted, its taken us 7 years to plant 10,000 trees and they took down that many trees in 3 months, you know, it's just a significant impact on the ecosystem in that area. And all the wildlife that's supported by the trees is forced into other areas. It interrupts innumerable patterns that are intimately related to each other in terms of our whole environmental existence. We can't live without air and water, nor can any other creature, and yet we are destroying the primary mechanism to clean our water and provide the oxygen for us to breathe.

In Atlanta, the conflicts involve the billboard industry.

BANSLEY: The billboard industry, sees trees as vegetation that gets in the way of delivering their message to their paying customers. And many of them have no qualms at all about cutting down trees so that they can have their billboards visible. Its all done very quietly and a lot of it happens at night so nobody knows how it happened, and there's no smoking gun lots of times, it's an ongoing difficulty for all of us.

MILLER: You know most of our existence as a species we lived out in the woods or in the savannas. And its only in the last couple of hundred years that we've decided to live in cities. And I don't think you can cut off from nature and say it doesn't have any consequences.

One city began to look for solutions. In Chicago, the mayor and political leaders called for a study of the city's street trees. It came to be called the Chicago Urban Forest Climate Project.

ROWNTREE: It came to fruition primarily because we'd done a study in Dayton, Ohio in the early 1980's where we looked at the role of vegetation and trees in modifying the climate and air pollution levels of Dayton, Ohio. Mayor Daly and his staff learned of that study and asked if my staff and I would conduct a three-year, one million dollar study of the city of Chicago's urban forest ecosystem. This was the first time we really focused on one city, particularly of that size, and that complexity, for a period of time with reasonably adequate resources.

DAVID NOWAK, Research Forester, USDA Forest Service: We looked at meteorology, air quality, carbon, energy, costs and benefits, and tried to wap it all together into the physical ecosystem, understanding of that.

They found that the benefits of trees were larger than anyone had imagined.

ROWNTREE: The role of vegetation in an urban system ranges from air cleansing, through energy conservation, through reducing peak runoff during storm events, into the very important visual and perceptual and social aspects of a community.

NOWAK: In areas that were high in tree cover you could get up to five and ten percent short term air quality improvements.

Air pollution was reduced. Temperatures dropped. The amount of smog declined. Trees absorbed water, reducing stormwater drainage.

McPHERSON: The benefits from those trees was nearly 2 1/2 times greater than the costs associated with the planting and management of those trees.

City officials have become dedicated to improving the inner city environment. They realised that not everybody can or should move to the suburbs. And the urban forest helps encourage people to stay in town.

In Sacremento, similar results were found.

McPHERSON: Six million trees provide about $64 million worth of benefits every year. And even though that's a substantial amount, that's really modest when you consider the impact that we're having on our environment. Trees can make a big difference to the quality of lives in urban areas. They modify the microclimate of our environments, they clean our air, they reduce flooding and rainfall runoff, they protect our soil from erosion. They just contribute to the quality of our environment, and the quality of our life in many, many ways.

RAY TRETHEWAY, Sacramento Tree Foundation: City planners and public works officials in Sacramento took to this rather quickly, this being urban forest, science, technical information that the urban forest does make a difference if there's investments, if there's planting, if there's care, if there's management. And that's principally because Sacramento's striving to become the best city possible. Last year the city took its first public opinion survey ever, and trees just came right off the top as the most important thing to the citizens of Sacramento.

At the Lawrence Berkeley labs, Hashim Akbari has found that tree planting and light color surfacing can contribute in a major way to cool cities.

AKBARI: By all means, shade trees appear to be one of the lowest-cost energy efficiency measures that exists. Typical payback that we expect for trees is to be something less than one to two years.

Others have begun to measure how trees might affect social conditions in a community and social health. A study was undertaken at the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago.

CAROL ADAMS, Chicago Housing Authority: Robert Taylor Homes is the largest public housing development in the world. 28 high rise buildings, from 21st Street to 55th Street. Concentated poverty, and high hopes.

WILLIAM C. SULLIVAN, Human Research Laboratory, University of Illinois: Some of the buildings have quite a number of trees, or a fair number of trees, right next to the buildings. And then you walk down a little bit further and you'll notice that not only are there no trees but there's hardly any grass or any green space at all. It's really a concrete jungle.

ESTHER DAVIS, Resident, Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago, Illinois: When I first came to Robert Taylor, there was more trees and grass and benches. You know, more grownups downstairs, a lot of, you know, parents and children. Now that they have took the grass away and added concrete, took the playgrounds away, there's less adults down and there's young kids but they have nothing to play on. You feel depressed and look at the concrete, nothing, no flowers, no grass, sometimes its a warm day and it feels, you know just depressing.

FRANCES KUO, Human Research Laboratory, University of Illinois: Before we started our research I would have said, its nice, you know, trees are nice, but the problems we're facing in our cities and our budgets are such that I'm not sure its worth it, and I think that through this research I have become convinced that, no, trees are really an important part of a supportive, humane environment. Without vegetation people, are very different beings.

SULLIVAN: People that live in intense poverty have to count on their neighbors for a lot of the social support that they need in their lives. We're finding trees produce settings in which neighbors get to know each other better and violence is reduced. Therefore, trees are associated with the reduction of one our most significant important public policy concerns of the day.

DAVIS: The trees give you and grass gives you, you know, the breeze it just vibrates through you, you feel calmer.

ADAMS: Trees have to do with beauty, and aesthetics, and appreciation of life, and a capacity to see growth. And we hope that the trees are a metaphor for the kind of growth we're going to see for the families and the individuals who live here.

SKIERA: The environment sets up a sense of place. I think it has a tremendous psychological impact on people in the environment. So I think we've just touched the top of the iceberg as far as what trees do to us psychologically. And what they do to us environmentally. And what they do to us physically. How they can modify climates, and sequester carbon dioxide, clean the air, slow the waters. We hear this story so much but we need to keep it up because political management needs to hear that story so that they understand that trees pay and they don't cost.

Robert Skiera was part of a model tree program in Milwaukee, where trees came to be at the center of city planning, not an add-on at the end.

SKIERA: One of the most important things in planting a tree is not the time of planting, it is the plan that allows the space both underground and overhead, and then the compatible tree that is set up by the forestry people that will fit into that site. So the site has to be prepared and the tree has to be engineered into the site so they both fit and complement themselves, the right tree in the right place is going to cost you 2.2% of the entire construction project for that road.

But planting is only the beginning. Milwaukee places a great deal of emphasis on maintaining the trees it plants.

SKIERA: We can plant the tree but we can't walk away from it. When we plant that tree we expect that tree to be there sixty years, and that means that you have to set up a dedicated funding source so that that tree will be pruned and maintained in a proper manner so that it will perform, maximum performance with minimum liability. Funding source for maintenance, funding source for maintenance, because that is the key.

Today, scientific knowledge is in hand and model programs have been created, but ironically, cutbacks have become the order of the day.

Austin's city forester turned to the local community for support.

JOHN GIEDRITIS, City Forester, Austin, Texas: Austin is a fairly new city in terms of its population. About half of the people who live here have lived here less than ten years. And we don't have a traditional tax and spend sort of mentality in Texas. Taxes are low, there's no business tax, there's no income tax at the city and state level. So we don't have a lot of money to provide the direct services like they do in other areas of the country. But along with that sort of philosophy of not having much money, there's also a philosophy that people have that when they want to get something done, they go out and do it. They help each other, sort of a frontier mentality.

They have developed model tree replanting programs at a fraction of the cost faced by other communities.

GIEDRITIS: And that idea of government acting as a facilitator as opposed to a direct provider has been a very, very powerful concept in Austin, and one that we've mined pretty heavily. And the way that we do that is we know which areas of town have low canopy cover or need trees, and we know what trees do very well. And we have a local dry cleaner who will pay us to buy the trees that we need to plant along the streets. And then we go to the individual homeowners and say "Would you like a tree in your front yard?" And we actually mark a spot in their front yard where they can plant a tree and we leave a little door hanger. And they tear the card off the door hanger and send it back to us and say yes, I'd like to plant a tree there and this is the kind of tree I want. We order the trees, the local dry cleaner pays for the trees, we drop the trees off at the peoples' houses, and they plant and water them. So the big expenses in tree planting, which are to buy the trees and plant them and water them, are overcome. So within the past three years we've planted about 10,000 trees, at an average taxpayer cost of about six dollars each, and a total cost per tree of about twenty five dollars each.

But elsewhere, others feel the government must be more involved.

ROWNTREE: The funding for urban forestry research is inadequate because of the complexity of the system that we're studying, because of the fact that we're on the steep part of the learning curve and because not everyone fully understands the science of urban forest ecosytem analysis and how it can be applied very quickly and in a leveraged way to produce large public benefits.

McPHERSON: We're just beginning to understand how urban ecosystems function. We're really just at the cusp of even learning how to study them.

MILLER: Urban forestry became an issue at universities in the late 60s and early 1970s. So that would beabout when these courses were first taught. At the University of Wisconsin at Steven's Point, we started our program in 1973 with the teaching of a course in urban forestry, and within a few years developed an undergraduate program in urban forestry. In recent years it's been much more recognized. Early on, I think rural foresters tended to think of urban forestry as something they didn't have to deal with.

Another such program was established at Southern University in Baton Rouge.

BOBBY PHILLS, Dean & Research Director, College of Agriculture, Southern University: We have not only the first BS degree in urban forestry, but we have been recently approved to offer a masters and a Ph.D. in urban forestry and this will truly be the cream of the crop for urban forestry in the nation academically.

The students from these programs have already begun to be involved at the community level.

Elsewhere, leaders of youth programs have discovered the vital role of wilderness and working in the out of doors. In Chicago, the "River Rats" were formed.

ANDREW HARTT, Chicago Youth Center Fellowship House: We all went over to an area about a half a mile from here on the Chicago River, and the young people called it the Amazon. The kids started adopting the name River Rats because they were down there cleaning up; they brought over nine or ten tons of garbage up out of that site.

These studies and community programs have received some support, but only only a small percentage of cities receive help. Others have felt the government should do more.

Some in the U.S. Forest Service agreed.

DWYER: We began to realize the significance of the urban forest in so many different dimensions, and started looking more towards an ecosystem or a more holistic view. So it's been a matter of broadening of our approach. People are still moving from the city to the suburbs to find different types of environments but we're seeing a great deal more emphasis on improving the inner city environment.

MACIE: We have experienced a certain degree of political support over the last ten years and its produced significant results nationwide but I think there could be more, you know, a doubling of that effort would probably have a quantum increase in the amount of impact.

LYONS: And there was a group of us who were concerned that street trees and urban parks and open space wasn't getting adequate attention, that those resources were declining, that they were being impacted by disease and human use and pollution and that they required some attention because 80% of all Americans live in cities and metropolitan areas.

This support has come none too soon for many ordinary citizens. In Los Angeles dense smog was killing even the trees in the mountains. Andy Lipkis began planting trees and launched a formal organization called "TreePeople".

ANDY LIPKIS, TreePeople: The reason why TreePeople is one word is because it implies that joining hands, that together and working together with each other and with trees is really where it all begins.

In Baton Rouge, great tracts of green space were being cut down.

MORRIS: A group of citizens, about 12 people, got together, they were very concerned about the changes that were occurring in the urban forest and the lack of planning from the city government. So they decided that if there was going to be something done to alleviate that they would have to do it themselves.

Atlanta had become a treeless maze of concrete.

BANSLEY: By the time Trees Atlanta came into existence in 1985 we had almost no trees downtown. So now we're trying hard to restore some of that.

In Sacramento, severe budget cuts in 1981 led the mayor and citizens like Ray Tretheway to establish the Sacramento Tree Foundation.

TRETHEWAY: Tree planting was not on the agenda for county planning. City and county planners and public works officials and department heads have only recently been acquainted with the technical, scientific benefits of our urban forests.

In New York City, the Environmental Action Coalition was formed.

WOLF: Open space and trees were not part of the concept of New York. And so you have extraordinary parks like Prospect and Central, you have huge woodland parks in the northern Bronx, and then you have neighborhood after neighborhood with almost no open space.

By the late 1980s, non-profit groups were being formed in cities and states throughout the country. In 1993, they formed the Alliance for Community Trees.

WOLF: The Alliance for Community Trees is a network, it's a nationwide network of not-for-profit groups that work with urban forestry. Right now we have 43 members. We are not in all states. We're in 28. We are hoping eventually to have about 60 or 70 members, and to reach all states with at least one group.

The oldest non-profit and most influential is American Forests, based in Washington, D.C.

MOLL: American Forests has been in the role of organizing the national urban forest conferences since 1982 and at each conference we try to gather the information that's available in the urban forestry community and in the conservation community and pick out the most important issues for developing the urban forestrry movement.

These organizations are part of an expanding movement, and yet they are still struggling just to get recognition of the importance of urban forests. A wall continues to exist between environmentalists and policymakers at the city, state and federal levels.

MOLL: The science of urban forestry is developing rapidly. Yet we still see cutbacks in programs in communities to take care of their trees. And there is a gap of course between science and public policy, and that to a great extent is what American Forests is concerned about. How do we communicate the scientific information to people who are making decisions in communities?

WOLF: I've worked with a lot of city administrations over the past twenty years. And I would say that until recently they have had no, like NO, understanding of why green space is important.

When many non-profits began it wasn't easy. There was no system. Every single hole had to be hand dug. It was a lot of work.

BANSLEY: In our very intensely developed downtown area, it's hard to put trees along the sidewalks. Our first trees, I think we planted like only 10 trees, and it was a big effort, but we got it done.

To Andy Lipkis in Los Angeles, the experience of planting trees was life changing. Working with people and seeing a dead land come back to life was a powerful inspiration.

Baton Rouge Green is working with a local university and the public school system.

The Sacramento Tree Foundation works with city officials.

SKIERA: I think that the non profits are in a unique position to be able to help the urban forestry condition by disseminating information, taking the scientific information we have on all the benefits of trees and putting it before the policymakers.

The results can be impressive. The Martin Luther King Boulevard in Los Angeles was transformed in one day.

Trees Atlanta expanded.

BANSLEY: We were planting about, I'd say, about 40 trees a year. And then the Olympics hit. And the funding quadrupled. We did what, 4.5 million dollars worth of trees in the downtown area. We were planting about a thousand trees a year for the Olymics, and that was really a lot of moving and a lot of action. And we're still carrying on that momentum right now.

New York citizens began working with school children.

WOLF: When we took them out to kind of do tree work and identify trees and kind of get close to trees, I realized you know, we tapped into something more powerful than anything we ever dreamed.

The Chicago River Rats have transformed the lives of former gang members and their families.

HARTT: I see young people involved in this project who say things such as "you know, before I started working on this project, I'd walk by trees, and I'd walk by flowers and not really pay that much attention, but all of a sudden things like trees became more important to me. And families become involved, and it's just a snowball effect. And I certainly see that happening here, and it's an exciting thing to see happen when young people are involved in gardens then all of a sudden it goes up generationally and then their parents come out and say "What's going on out here?" and they see what's happening.

ANTWONNE PERSON, Chicago River Rats: I think it has shown a togetherness of the community around here, because they see what we're doing and some people they like to volunteer their hours around here and help out and once you get to talking to them they really seem interested in nature. And that's a way we've been able to help the community, and they're very concerned about this project.

JOSE LOPEZ, Chicago River Rats: It's just like a place where you can come and see a lot of green. It makes you feel good to know you helped, you know, your neighborhood out. We're making this a better place.

GIEDRITIS: We are forest creatures. And we can't live without the forest. I mean, we don't plant the tree for today, you plant it for the future. So it's a sort of thing that people do that can give them hope in their community.

The work of non-profits and community groups has been important, but the management of the urban forest, say many scientists, is more than a volunteer job. It will require a team effort of government, business and citizens.

McPHERSON: When we think of the urban forest we think of trees and being solid and permanent and long-lived, but in fact the urban forest is really a very fragile resource. We can look at what happened to our communities with Dutch elm disease and how all of a sudden the forest was decimated. We can look at the impact of hurricanes and the removal of large numbers of trees, and realize that this resource can disappear in a very short period of time.

MILLER: I think people need nature. It's not going to be worth the effort to live in a city if I can't have something green around me, if I can't go out and hear birds, if I can't have some piece of nature available to me its not going to be a very interesting life.

McPHERSON: All of humankind has its roots tied directly to the land and that's an inescapable truth. And I think the further we get removed from it, the more disconnected we are, the less functional we are, we become more dysfunctional. And that's really the final analysis, when you're thinking of an ecosystem, you're really a community. All of this stuff, this nature, is an extension of our community. We're really not that different not far removed from the land. We just have to remind ourselves of that.

SKIERA: Urban forestry is in a key position to do great things for the future. We have the science. We have the people now that have the degrees in urban forestry. There's still a long way to go. All we have to do is want to do it.

America, said Olmstead, was the one country where democracy made trees and parklands available to everyone. Here, nature was not merely the soil, it was the fountain of energy that flowed through and gave diversity to American life -- and as we are now discovering, protected the very biological processes on which we depend.

Today the fate of the forest falls increasingly to cities where the great vast majority of Americans live.


End of Film

Benefits of Urban Trees:

"What," you might ask, "is the big deal? Sure, trees are great. They look pretty, they give us a place to have a picnic, but they just sit there. They don't actually DO anything."

At times in our nation's history, many people have believed this to be true. However, in recent years, studies of our urban forests have shown that city trees provide benefits worth many times the cost of their planting and upkeep, even as they just "sit there"

• Just three well-placed trees around a home can lower air conditioning bills by up to 50 percent, and windbreak trees can reduce winter heating bills by up to 30 percent. See the tree planting guide for more information on how and where to plant energy saving trees around your home.


• Tree root systems hold soil in place, preventing erosion. Trees also absorb stormwater that might otherwise result in flash flooding. A city's urban forest can reduce peak storm runoff by 10 to 20 percent, according to the USDA Forest Service.


Trees are natural buffers to harsh weather conditions. Well forested lands are consistently at least 2 to 4 degrees cooler during the summer and 1 to 2 degrees warmer during the winter than deforested land. This temperature reduction can significantly lower smog production, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Trees can reduce wind speeds by up to 85 percent, compared to treeless areas. City trees also help to counter the urban heat island effect.

• Trees reduce noise pollution by acting as a buffer and absorbing urban noise. A U.S. Department of Energy study reports that a 100 foot wide and 45 foot tall patch of trees can reduce noise levels by 50 percent.


• Trees increase economic stability by attracting and keeping businesses and shoppers in a community. Mature trees also raise property values by up to 20 percent, according to the American Forestry Association.


• Trees provide homes for animals that would otherwise be unable to survive in an urban habitat.


• Trees help create relaxation and well being. They relieve psychological stresses, and a Texas A&M study indicates that patients in rooms with a view of green and woodland areas have shorter postoperative hospital stays.


• A study of public housing residents in Chicago has shown that trees can play an important role in reducing urban violence.


• Trees add beauty and reflection to our everyday lives. Picture your home and city without trees. Would you still want to live there?

Adapted from Why Trees?, Baton Rouge Green and All About Trees, American Forests.

CASE STUDIES:

Charlotte, North Carolina’s Urban Ecosystem Analysis (pdf)
Washington, D.C. – Assessing Urban Forests Effects and Values (pdf)
New Orleans, LA – The Impact of Hurricanes: 2005 Hurricane Katrina (pdf)
San Diego, California – The Impact of Forest Fire: 2003 Cedar Fires (site)

Archived Case Studies:
Atlanta: Deforestation Heats Things Up (pdf)
Chicago: The Value of Trees in Public Housing (pdf)
Milwaukee: Economic Benefits of the Urban Forest (pdf)

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Urban Forestry Timeline

1634 - Boston Common is created as a place for Bostonians to graze their livestock.

1840s - Vermont Congressman George Perkins Marsh warns of the destructive impact of human activity on the land, and advocates a conservationist approach to forest management.

1849 - The U.S. Department of the Interior is established.

1854 - Henry David Thoreau's "Walden, or Life in the Woods" is published.

1858 - New York City's Central Park is designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.

1864 - George Perkins Marsh publishes "Man and Nature."
Congress passes a bill granting Yosemite Valley to the State of California as a public park.

1865 - Frederick Law Olmsted develops Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

1866 - German biologist Ernst Haeckel coins the word "ecology."

1872 - Congress establishes Yellowstone National Park.
Nebraska observes "Tree-Planting Day" on April 10. By 1907, Arbor Day is celebrated nationwide.

1875 - Congress bans the unauthorized cutting or injury of trees on government property.

1878 - Frederick Law Olmsted begins work on Boston's "Emerald Necklace," a series of public parks around the city. The Boston Public Garden is the first public botanical garden in the country.

1879 - Congress establishes the U.S. Geological Survey as a bureau of the Department of the Interior.

1885 - The state of New York establishes the Adirondack Forest Preserve and the Niagra Falls Reservation.

1890 - Congress establishes three national parks in California (Sequoia, Yosemite and General Grant National Parks) in less than a week.

1891 - Congress passes the Forest Reserve Act, creating the legislative foundation for what will become the National Forest system.

1893 - President Benjamin Harrison sets aside 13 million acres of forest reserves.

1892 - The Sierra Club is founded on June 4, with John Muir as the organization's first president.

1896 - The Massachusetts Audubon Society is founded. By the end of the following year there are Audubon Societies in ten states and the District of Columbia.

1905 - Control of the national forest system is transferred to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.
The National Association of Audubon Societies for the Protection of Wild Birds and Animals is founded in New York, officially uniting the numerous state groups which have sprung up since 1896, and establishing a strong national voice for conservation. The organization's name was changed to the National Audubon Society in 1940.

1905-1907 - President Theodore Rossevelt sets aside more than 180 million acres of land for wildlife refuges and national parks.

1907 - Organized opposition to U.S. conservation policy arises. At the Denver Public Lands Convention, Western ranching and mining interests call for cession of public lands to the states and restriction of national forests.

1916 - The National Park Service is founded as a division of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Stephen T. Mather is its first director.

1917 - Dutch Elm Disease is first detected in Holland.

1919 - The National Parks Association (renamed the National Parks and Conservation Association in 1970) is founded.

1930 - Dutch Elm Disease is first spotted in Cleveland.

late 1940s - After World War II, Americans flock to the suburbs, accelerating deforestation around cities.

1950s and 60s - Dutch elm disease devastates America's urban forests. Thousands of tree-lined streets are completely clear-cut, and the population of American Elm trees is virtually wiped out.

1970 - The first Earth Day is celebrated on April 22.

1980s - The Reagan administration cuts funds for urban forestry and other ecology programs.

1990 - Congress passes the Urban and Community Forestry Assistance Act, which expands funds for urban forestry twentyfold, and establishes a network of federal and state organizations dedicated to urban and community forestry.

1993 - The Alliance for Community Trees is formed, uniting the dozens of local urban forestry groups that have sprung up across the country.

1996 - The Asian long-horned beetle is detected in Brooklyn in August, and in Amityville one month later. More than 500 trees are removed in six months in an effort to one of the biggest threats to America's urban forests since Dutch Elm Disease.

Based in part on The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920, National Digital Library, Library of Congress.

What YOU Can Do

Urban forestry isn't just the realm of scientists and city planners. There are many things you can do to make your city a greener place. Planting trees around your home will not only beautify your neighborhood, it can also help you save money on your utility bills! You can also get involved with one of the dozens of local tree-planting groups around the country.

Planting Trees Around Your Home

Local Urban Forestry Groups (Listed in our Resource Section)

Protect an Acre ($)

What's Your Carbon Debt? - Calculate my Carbon Debt!
Carbon Footprint Calculator

Many scientists believe that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are causing the earth's temperature to slowly rise, in a phenomenon called global warming. In the last century, CO2 levels in the atmosphere have risen 28%, and the atmosphere has warmed by almost one degree Fahrenheit. That may not sound like much, but during the last ice age, the Earth was only 5 to 7 degrees cooler!

Carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere when fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas), or their byproducts (like gasoline) are burned. This CO2 acts like the glass windows in a greenhouse, letting light and heat in, then trapping the heat inside.

One way to help counteract carbon dioxide emissions is to plant trees. Trees absorb CO2 from the air, and use it during the process of photosynthesis. During photosynthesis, CO2 is chemically broken down into oxygen, which is released into the atmosphere, and carbon, which is stored, or sequestered, in the tree's trunk, branches and roots. According to estimates by American Forests, one tree will sequester over 600 pounds of carbon over a 40-year period.

Based on the article "Carbon Debt: Restoring the Balance," by Dan Smith, American Forests, Autumn 1996.
Adapted with permission of the author.

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In The Classroom

A note to parents and educators:

Trees in our cities provide tremendous benefits, from increased property values and decreased violence, to significant energy savings and cooler climates. Now more than ever, "Think globally, act locally." isn't just a catchy phrase, it is a commandment for modern living. Educating students about the health of their environment is a formidable, yet vital task. The primary goal of environmental education is to illustrate to students that our environment plays an important role in the health of the people. Beginning this education with urban forestry allows the student to see how things affect him or her, in their "own back yard." It is very important that students see how they can affect the state of the environment through their own actions.

Education is the key. There is a wealth of information for parents and educators to share with students throughout this web site. Here are some classroom lessons designed to help students to plant and care for trees at their schools and elsewhere throughout the community. Most importantly, we hope that they will help your students to view trees as an important part of their own lives.

Return to the Forest Where We Live Viewer Guide & Appendix (pdf)

Lesson Plans
Lesson 1: Tree Sense (Elementary)
Lesson 2: Tour the Trees (Junior High/Secondary)
Lesson 3: A Tree is a Tree (Junior High)

Cool Stuff for Kids!
Try a Word Search!
How Big Is That Tree?

Our Big Tree includes
How to Measure a Big Tree,
FAQs,
Nominate a Tree, and

Resources for Kids:
Treetures - An educational and entertaining interactive site that uses cartoon characters to focus on trees for kids prek-6th grade with lesson plans for teachers and conservation activities for families.
A Tree for Every Child - The "A Tree for Every Child" project is a hands-on, flexible environmental education program that allows students to see how practical action can create a better world.

Overview: Trees line our avenues, shade our schoolyards, provide links to our heritage, contribute to economics and serve as a basis of urban ecosystems. They provide us with oxygen, help filter the air, reduce temperatures, buffer the effects of wind, and contribute to our sense of well being. And while not meeting the generalized definition of forests, city trees occupy approximately seventy million acres of our nation’s landscape, a space they share with eighty percent of all Americans.

LESSON PLANS: Download the complete Teacher Guide here.

This series is designed to help students:

• become more aware of the forest ecosystems of which they are a part
• develop skills necessary to establish and maintain healthy urban landscapes
• become acquainted with urban forestry-related careers, and
• become stewards of their home environments.

Program 1: Urban Forestry, What Is It?
Discover the field of urban forestry, which has risen in importance since the 1970s. Learn the difference between rural and urban forests and hear from some of the key people working in the field: municipal foresters, scientists, government leaders, university professors teaching forestry issues and average citizens working in volunteer and nonprofit organizations.
Activity: Close Encounters With a Tree

Program 2: The History of Urban Forestry
Discover that a 19th century conservation movement arose over concerns about deforestation and led to the creation of city parks, wildlife refuges and the U. S. Park Service. The post-World War II period set the stage for a new environmental movement concerned with rapid urbanization, highway expansion, and the devastating impact of Dutch Elm disease. See the establishment of a body of knowledge, policies and practices aimed at protecting and fostering urban forests.
Activity: Classroom Discussions

Program 3: Deforestation In America
Learn the dangers of not attending to urban forests. Uncoordinated development throughout the nation and the resulting deforestation have led to overheated cities, worsening air pollution, and flooding. Concerned citizens call attention to urban forests and the establishment of an ethic of land use to benefit the entire community.
Activity: What Effects do Trees Have on the Environment?
Optional Laboratory: Comparing Soil Temperatures in Sun and Shade

Program 4: The Science of Urban Forestry
See how urban forests affect climate, energy savings, air pollution, the potential for cost benefits, and psychological health. Scientists and foresters describe better ways to plan cities. Sociologists explain the psychological importance of trees in reducing stress and promoting harmony within inner city environments.
Activity: Drying Leaves
Activity: A Simple Clinometer
Activity: How Big is a Tree?
Optional Laboratory: Measuring Tree Heights
Activity: What's Happening Below the Surface?
Activity: How Old is a Tree

Program 5: And Who Shall Lead the Way?
Explore the debate over how to care for urban forests and who should assume the lead: government or nonprofit and private organizations? Cutbacks in government budgets have increasingly left the task to non-profits and private organizations. Viewers meet leaders of nonprofit organizations in Baton Rouge, Atlanta, New York, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.
Activity: How Fast Does this Tree Grow?
Activity: Planting a Tree and Helping It Grow
Activity: Establishing a School Arboretum or Tree Walk
Activity: Investigating a Built Community

Program 6: A Natural World
View how young people and communities unite through model programs to beautify urban areas, such as the Chicago “River Rats.” Meet citizens throughout the country—foresters, researchers, professors, and private citizens— who affirm the vital importance trees play in preserving quality of life and a sense of community.
Activity: Meet Your Forest

Healthy urban forests moderate temperature, reduce air pollution, reduce flooding, and allow people living in urban areas – representing 80% of the nation – to live calmer, less stressful lives.

Our environment is part of who we are.

Correlated to Standards & Guidelines

Note: Throughout the activities in this guide, students will be instructed to work in collaborative groups. Development of strong, cooperative teams is essential for successful completion not only of the unit activities, but also of the cumulative project. Rotation of job assignments and review of job descriptions may take extra time but will prove beneficial to team development.

This project was supported by
the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting
and the U.S. Forest Service's Urban and Community Forestry National Challenge Cost Share Grant,
as recommended by the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council, (NUCFAC).



Funding for "The Forest Where We Live" was provided, in part,
by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service
in cooperation with the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council.




Resources

National Urban Forestry Organizations and Agencies:

The Alliance for Community Trees
4603 Calvert Road
College Park, MD 20740
(301) 277-0040

American Forests
P.O. Box 2000
Washington, DC 20013
(202) 737-1944

The Arbor Day Foundation
100 Arbor Avenue
Nebraska City, NE 68410
888-448-7337

International Society of Arboriculture
1400 West Anthony Drive
Champaign, IL 61821
P.O. Box 3129
Champaign, IL 61826-3129
888.ISA.TREE (888) 472-8733)
(217) 355-9411

National Association of State Foresters
444 N. Capital St. N.W., Suite 540
Washington, DC 20001
(202)624-5415

National Tree Trust Foundation
1120 G Street, N.W., Suite 770
Washington, DC 20005
(202)846-TREE

Society of American Foresters
5400 Grosvenor Lane
Bethesda, MD 20814
(301)897-8720

Society of Municipal Arborists
P.O. Box 641
Watkinsville, GA 30677
706-769-7412

USDA Forest Service
1400 Independence Avenue S.W.
Washington, DC 20250-0003
(800) 832-1355

State Foresters:

National Association of State Foresters
444 N. Capital St. N.W., Suite 540
Washington, DC 20001
(202)624-5415

The National Association of State Foresters Member Roster

Local Tree-Planting Groups:

Alabama
Streetscapes, Inc.
70 Croydon Road
Mobile, AL 36608
(205)342-6133

Arizona
Flagstaff Green and Beautiful
211 W. Aspen
Flagstaff, AZ 86001
(602)774-5281

Forestry for Phoenix
P.O. Box 3617
Phoenix, AZ 85018
(602)534-5323

Trees for Mother Earth
P.O. Box 1491
Chinle, AZ 86503
(520)674-3258

Trees for Tucson
P.O. Box 27210
Tucson, AZ 85726
(520)791-3109

California
TreePeople
12601 Mulholland Drive
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
(818)753-4600

California ReLeaf
3001 Redhill Avenue, Bldg. 4, Ste 224
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
(714)557-2575

Tree Musketeers
136 Main Street
El Segundo, CA 90245
(800)473-0263

North East Trees
4701 Olson Street
Los Angeles, CA 90041
(213)255-4863

California Oak Foundation
1212 Broadway, Suite 810
Oakland, CA 94612
(510)763-0282

Sacramento Tree Foundation
201 Lathrop Way, Suite F
Sacramento, CA 95815
(916)924-8733
E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

People for Trees
P.O. Box 505
San Diego, CA 92112
(619)234-8733

Friends of the Urban Forest
512 Second St., 4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94107
(415)543-5000

Our City Forest
151 W Mission St.
San Jose, CA 95110
(408)998-7337

Pacific Coast Tree Foundation
P.O. Box 999
Walnut Grove, CA 95690
(916)920-4086

Colorado
Denver Digs Trees
715 S. Franklin Street
Denver, CO 80209
(303)722-6262

Fort Collins ReLeaf
633 S. College
Fort Collins, CO 80524
(303)224-2634

Connecticut
Hartford Trees
188 Oak St.
Hartford, CT 06106
(203)527-8737

District of Columbia
Casey Trees
3030 12th Street NE
Washington, D.C. 20017
(202)833-4010

Florida
Greenscape of Jacksonville, Inc.
3100 University Blvd. S., Suite 112
Jacksonville, FL 32216
(904)724-5518

Trees for Dade
Florida International University
Miami, FL 33199
(305)348-3083

TreeFlorida
P.O. Box 31114
Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33420
(407)622-6966

ReLeaf Sarasota County, Inc.
2620 Grafton Street
Sarasota, FL 34231
(941)922-3693

Mayor's Beautification Program, Inc.
P.O. Box 2104
Tampa, FL 33601-2104
(813)221-7214

Georgia
TreesAtlanta
96 Poplar St., N.W.
Atlanta, GA 30303
(404)522-4097

Savannah Tree Foundation, Inc.
3025 Bull Street
Savannah, GA 31405
(912)233-8733

Hawaii
The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii
1116 Smith St., Suite 201
Honolulu, HI 96817
(808)537-4508

Illinois
Openlands Project
220 South State St. #1880
Chicago, IL 60604
(312)427-4256

Indiana
TREES
3500 Hulan St.
Terre Haute, IN 47803
(812)232-4331

Iowa
Trees Forever
1233 7th Avenue
Marian, IA 52302
(319)373-0650

Kansas
Trees for Kansas
1003 Orville Ave.
Kansas City, KS 66102
(913)573-2942

Louisiana
Baton Rouge Green
448 N 11th St
Baton Rouge, LA 70802
(225)381-0037

Citizens for a Clean and Beautiful West Bank
P.O. Box 1382
Harvey, LA 70059
(504)394-3652

Parkway Partners
1137 Baronne Street
New Orleans, LA 70113
(504)620-2228

Shreveport Green
610 Marshall Street, Suite 210
Shreveport, LA 71101
(318)222-6455

Maine
Maine ReLeaf
P.O. Box 433
Old Towne, ME 94468
1-800-648-4202

Maryland
Bethesda Ever Green
33 W. Irving St.
Chevy Chase, MD 20815
(301)468-4940

Parks & People Foundation
800 Wyman Park Drive
Baltimore, MD 21211
(410)448-5663

Trees for the Future
11306 Estonia Dr., Box 1786
Silver Springs, MD 20902
(301)929-0238

Michigan
Global ReLeaf of Michigan
1100 N. Main Street, Suite 105
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
(800)642-7353

Greening of Detroit
415 Burns Drive
Detroit, MI 48214
(313)821-8733

Minnesota
Twin Cities Tree Trust
6300 Walker Street
St. Lewis Park, MN 55416-2373
(612)920-9326

Mississippi
Keep Jackson Beautiful
931 Highway 80 West, Box 67
Jackson, MS 39204
(601)352-1808

Missouri
Project Parkway
3016 S. Murphy Road
Springfield, MO 65809
(417)887-7739

Forest ReLeaf of Missouri
4207 Lindell Blvd., Suite 120
St. Louis, MO 63108
(314)533-LEAF

Nebraska
Parks of Pride Foundation, Inc.
101 E. Main St.
Battle Creek, NE 68715
(402)675-8185

Trees for North Platte
Rt. 4, Box 46A
North Platte, IN 69101

Make Ogallala Beautiful, Inc.
319 E. "A," Box 702
Ogallala, NE 69153
(308)284-2456

Nevada
Growing Solutions
P.O. Box 11242
Las Vegas, NV 89111-1242
(702)486-5123

New Jersey
New Jersey ReLeaf
P.O. Box 583
Bordentown, NJ 08505
(609)298-2999

New Mexico
Tree New Mexico
P.O. Box 81827
Albuquerque, NM 87198
(505)265-4554

New York
Bronx Green-Up
200 St. and Southern Blvd., The Snuff Mill
Bronx, NY 10458
(718)817-8995

Environmental Action Coalition
625 Broadway
New York, NY 10012
(212)677-1603

Trees New York
51 Chambers Street, Suite 14124
New York, NY 10007
(212)227-1887

North Carolina
ReLeaf Charlotte
P.O. Box 6155
Charlotte, NC 28207
(704)334-2015

Releaf, Inc.
P.O. Box 4072
Greenville, NC 27836-2072

Ohio
Global ReLeaf of Columbus
1519 Aberdeen Ave.
Columbus, OH 43211
(614)263-8749

Oklahoma
Greater Oklahoma City Tree Bank
621 N. Robinson, Suite 58
Oklahoma City, OK 73102
(405)236-2280

Up With Trees
Tulsa Garden Center
9920 E. 44th Place
Tulsa, OK 74146
(918)610-TREE (8733)

Oregon
Friends of Trees
2831 NE Martin Luther King Blvd.
Portland, OR 97212
(503)282-8846

Pennsylvania
Philadelphia Green
325 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA 19106
(215)625-8280

Rhode Island
Street Tree
P.O. Box 456
North Kingstown, RI 02852
(809)785-9450

South Carolina
Lowcountry ReLeaf
Charleston, SC 29402
(803)723-9470

Tennessee
Trees for Memphis, Inc.
2199 South Germantown
Germantown, TN 38138-3803
(901)751-1200

ReLeaf Tennessee
300 Orlando Ave.
Nashville, TN 37209-3200
(615)353-1133

Texas
TreeFolks
P.O. Box 704
Austin, TX 78767
(512)443-LEAF E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Dallas Trees and Parks Foundation
2121 San Jacinto, Suite 810
Dallas, TX 75201-6724
(214)953-1184

SPARK school park program
P.O. Box 1592
Houston, TX 77251
(713)247-2909

Trees for Houston
P.O. Box 13096
Houston, TX 77219-3096
(713)840-8733

San Antonio Trees
8331 Fredericksburg Road, Suite 311
San Antonio, TX 78229
(512)615-0828

Utah
Tree Utah
364 East Broadway
Salt Lake City, UT 84111
(801)364-2122
E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Virginia
Arlington ReLeaf
1706 N. Adams
Arlington, VA 22201
(202)357-2811

Fairfax ReLeaf
12055 Government Center Parkway, Room 703
Fairfax, VA 22035
(703)273-3030

Tree Action
P.O. Box 1306
Herndon, VA 22070
(703)324-1409

ReLeaf Roanoke Valley
c/o Chamber of Commerce
310 First St.
Roanoke, VA 24011

Washington
PlantAmnesty
908 NW 87th Street
Seattle, WA 98117
(206)783-9813

Treemendous
216 1st Avenue South #455
Seattle, WA 98104
(206)624-7075

Wisconsin
Trees for Burlington
441 Hawthorn St.
Burlington, WI 53105
(414)763-9454

Greening Milwaukee
1150 East Brady Street
Milwaukee, WI 53202
(414)276-6272

Web Links:

Calculators
Forests & Climate Change
Carbon Footprint Calculator
Tree Benefit Calculator
Air Quality Calculators

Resource Links
American Forests Links
TreeLink
National Association of State Foresters: Forestry Links
USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station
USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station
Urban Forestry South
National Urban and Community Forestry Council
TreeBank
Michael Gallis & Associates
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School Learning Landscape Initiative
Historic Tree Nursery
Casey Trees documentary The American Elm: Magnificent, Imperiled, Renewed
LSU AgCenter

Technology Links
i-Tree
UFORE – Urban Forest Effects Model
CITYgreen
Tree Map – Casey Trees

Toolkits/Professional Resources:
Urban Forestry South Manual
Talking Trees: An Urban Forestry Toolkit for Local Governments
Local Government Urban Forestry Toolkit
UC&F Programs
UFORE Collection
Urban Forests & Carbon Credits Collection
The US Conference of Mayors: Mayors Climate Protection Center
Carbon Offsetting: Interactive Guide


National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council (NUCFAC) Annual Reports
* NUCFAC Annual Report 2006
* NUCFAC Annual Report, 1995-1996

Bibliography:
Bibliography: Return to the Forest Where We Live

McPherson, E.G. 2006. Urban Trees: A Dynamic Resource and Valuable Community Asset. USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station. 19 Oct. 2006 http://fsweb.wo.fs.fed.us/pao/fs_today/2006/may19/research.html

Gillman, E. F., M. L. Duryea, E. Kampf, T.J. Partin, A. Delgado, C.J. Lehtola. Assessing Damage and Restoring Trees After A Hurricane. 2006. U of Florida, IFAS Extension. 1 November 2006
http://www.urbanforestrysouth.org/Resources/Library/assessing-damage-and restoring-trees-afterahurricane.htm

Robbins, Michelle. American Forests Awards Grants to Reforest the Gulf Coast, The Home Depot Foundation Provides Major Support. 1 Sept. 2006. 30 Oct. 2006

http://www.americanforests.org/news/print/php?id=159

de Vries, R. Advanced Technology for the Urban Forester. American Forests. Washington, D. C. 1994. 2 Nov. 2006

http://www.urbanforestrysouth.org//Resources/Library/Citation.2004-11-03.P2612

Campoli, J., E. Humstone, A. MacLean. Above and Beyond: Visualizing Change in Small Towns and Rural Areas. Chicago: American Planning Association Planners Press. 2002. 2 Nov. 2006. http://www.urbanforestrysouth.org/Resources?Library/Citation.2005-02-24.4324/view

Stewart, S. I., V. C. Radeloff, R. B. Hammer. Characteristics and Location of the Wildland-Urban Interface in the United States. Proceedings of the 2003 2nd International Wildland Fire Ecology and Fire Management Congress. 2004. 2 Nov. 2006. http://www.urbnaforestrysouth.org/Resources/Library/Citation.2004-12-16.5828/view

Browne, David R. EM Scientific Insights – Issue 2. The Katoomba Group’s Ecosystem Marketplace News. 31 Oct. 2006. 2 Nov. 2006. http://ecosystemmarketplace.com/pages/article.news.php?component_id=4586&component_v

Growing with Green: Business Districts and the Urban Forest – Fact Sheet 2. 3 Nov. 2006 http://www.cfr.washington.edu/research.envmind/consumer.html

Wolf, K. L. 2005. Business District Streetscapes, Trees and Consumer Response. Journal of Forestry, 103, 8, 396-400. 30 Oct. 2006. 2 Nov. 2006 http://www.cfr.washington.edu/reserch.envimind/consumer.html


Trees in Business Districts: Comparing Values of consumers and Business –


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Sullivan, W.C. & F.E. Kuo. 1996. Do trees strengthen urban communities, reduce domestic violence? USDA Forest Service Southern Region, Technology Bulletin No. 4, Forestry Report R8-FR 55, Athens.

Return to the Forest Where We Live Credits

Producer/Director
Liz Barnes

Writer
C.E. Richard

Editor
Rex Q. Fortenberry

Narrator
Nia Vardalos

Senior Producer/Project Director
Tika Laudun

Composer/Musician
Mike Esneault

Photographers
Keith Crews
Rex Q. Fortenberry

Additional Editing
Todd Justice
Tika Laudun

Associate Producer
Kevin Gautreaux

Post Production Engineers
Todd Justice
D-Ray Washington

Graphic Artists
Mark Carroll
Jeanne Lamy

Web Team
John Tooraen
Jeanne Lamy

Production Assistants
Amanda Clayton
Marian Lefebvre

Promotions
Bob Neese
Bryant Langlois
Margaret Schlaudecker

Educational Consultant
Claudia Fowler

Project Evaluators
Homer Dyess
Ayan Rubin
Gladys White

Production Engineering Supervisor
Chris Miranda

Production Manager
Ken Miller

Executive Producer
Clay Fourrier

Deputy Director
Steve Graziano

President and CEO
Beth Courtney

Special Thanks to our Program Advisors

Alice Ewen Walker
Cheryl Kollin
Gary Moll
Ed Macie
Greg McPherson
David J. Nowak
Kathleen L. Wolf


Special Thanks

Alliance for Community Trees
American Forests
Casey Trees
City Park, New Orleans
Coast Electric Power Association, Bay St. Louis
Coldwater Canyon Park, Los Angeles
Suzanne M. del Villar
Department of the Interior
District of Columbia Office of
Motion Picture & TV Development
ESRI
Franklin Park Elementary School, Baltimore
Griffith Park, Los Angeles
Jean Lafitte National Historic Park & Preserve,
New Orleans
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Charter School, New Orleans

Mecklenburg County Government:
GIS Mapping and Project Services Division,
Greenway Planning and Development Division,
Parks and Recreation Department
and Water Quality Program

National Parks Service
National Urban & Community Forestry Council
Parks & People Foundation
Parkway Partners
Virginia Plauche
Rock Creek Park, Washington, D.C.
Sierra Club
South Wastewater Treatment Plant, Baton Rouge
TreePeople
United States Capitol Police
USDA Forest Service
The Washington, D.C.
Convention and Tourism Corporation

The volunteers from Casey Trees,
Central Piedmont Community College,
Parkway Partners, the Sierra Club:
Central Piedmont Group, TreePeople and
the University of North Carolina – Charlotte

Creative Artists Agency
Jim Nicolay
Andrea Kerr
Jenna Gambaro

GIZMO Enterprises, Inc.
Gary Moscato
Alex Ghersini
Irena Pietenza

Soundtrack Boston
Charlotte Moore

Archival Film and Prints
The Carolina Thread Trail…
weaving communities together

Charlotte Visitor’s Association
City Park, New Orleans
Ronald J. Daley
Steve Garlock
KPBS Public Television
Indigo Productions
Jill W. Lang

University of North Carolina,
Charlotte Urban Institute

US Geological Survey

WETA
Public Broadcasting of Greater Washington

WWL-TV Archives


Additional Thanks

JoAnn Albrecht
Austin Allen
Ron Barnes
Laura Bauernfeind
Vicki Bott
Lois Brink
David Buetow
Mark Buscaino
JuanCarlos Chan
Gwen Cook
Sheila Crider
Shakia Darden
Cecily Durrett
Peter Eredics

Andy J. Goretti
Peter Harnik
The Harris and Nelson Families
John Hopper
David Kroening
Jared Liu
Terry Losardo
Joe Mangum
Stephen Martin
David Muth
Terry Patton
Stephen Readmond
Peggy Rosefeldt
Evalina Schmukler