By Jill Jonnes
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By the 1970s, most Americans lived in cities and suburbs, and the tree lovers among them watched sadly as graceful old elms, big oaks, and verdant small woodlands disappeared, victims of Dutch elm disease, development, and shrinking municipal budgets. This urban deforestation was one more blow to declining cities. City streets stripped of trees lost much of their character and beauty. “Elm trees were part of my life,” one Chicago woman ruefully told a forester in the 1980s. She cherished the deep shade and cathedral-like canopy of these majestic giants. “As each one died in my neighborhood . . . the place began to look old, worn, and crowded.” Soon thereafter, she moved to another neighborhood that still had trees.
Chicago mayor Richard Daley Jr., a self-proclaimed tree-hugger born on Arbor Day, was equally heart sore. Upon taking office in 1989, he vowed to plant a half-million trees as part of his effort to revive his decaying Rust Belt city. “What’s really important? . . . A tree, a child, flowers,” the mayor said in a Chicago Wilderness Magazine interview. “Taking care of nature is part of life. If you don’t take care of your tree and don’t take care of your child, they won’t thrive.” Knowing that his city’s air was among the most polluted in the nation, he asked, “Don’t trees clean the air?”
Lumberjacks had long known how to calculate the board feet value of a single lodgepole pine or a vast forest, farmers the price of fruit-tree crops. And yet, in the late 20th century, city trees collectively created an urban forest about which we knew almost nothing. The truth was that no one could provide an answer to Daley’s question that was grounded in science.
In fact, no one had concrete answers to a host of fundamental questions. What was the character of an American urban forest? How many poplars, ashes, or lindens were there? How old were they and what size? How healthy? How did trees interact with the ecosystem? Did they really affect air quality? Anyone whose family home was shaded by large oaks or maples knew the delicious cool of those trees on a hot summer day, but how much did they reduce the need for air conditioning? READ FULL ARTICLE >>
