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[Pepper Provenzano]

Green Infrastructure: The Elemental Solution

Let's talk about sustainable solutions for smart growth. We need potent antidotes to unchecked sprawl and urban decay. We need tangible energy conservation more than ever. How can we mitigate pollution - of soil, water, air and society - associated with population growth, unprecedented development, industry and vehicular traffic? Is there really any way to address habitat fragmentation?
Planners and politicians everywhere are experimenting with strategies for urban infrastructure, but few that everyone can agree on, fewer still that actually bring people together, and none so simple and painless as the movement known as Urban Forestry.
Urban forestry is a fast-growing movement (no pun intended) that combines strategic planting with environmental stewardship education to create green infrastructure for sustainable communities.
Urban Forestry Defined
Urban and Community Forestry is the formal title, most often abbreviated to simply Urban Forestry. More important, this movement resonates, and the sound that urban planners are hearing is harmony. It's easy to embrace and fast to grow. It could help redeem the much-tarnished image of the USDA Forest Service and put environmentalists and political conservatives on the same page.
Sure and steady, this movement is expanding its myriad canopy of benefits while bringing together a remarkable cross-section of supporters from every segment of society.
• Urban forestry organizations, located in every major metropolitan area and hundreds of growing communities nationwide, are the "Red Cross" of environmental groups, non-controversial, apolitical and utterly benevolent by nature and design.
• Urban Forestry councils, required by Congress to receive Urban Forestry funding under the 1990 omnibus Farm Bill, now exist in nearly every state.
• Some three dozen U.S. colleges now offer degrees in Urban Forestry.
Creating Green Infrastructure
One thing is clear: No strategy for smart growth is complete without a serious Urban Forestry element. There are too many logical reasons why. Consider the following:
1) The No. 1 threat to plant and animal life is loss of habitat, says E.O. Wilson, ecologist, author and professor of biology at Harvard. Since Wilson made this statement more than ten years ago, no one has refuted it. This potent acorn is a wake-up call to cities, a raison d'être for urban planners and smart-growth advocates.
Why? Because the same principle applies to the habitat of people. I submit that no discussion of the effects of growth, urban sprawl, and the associated hidden costs of pollution, is complete without discussion of threats to human habitat and, in particular, habitat fragmentation. This term, too, applies to people.
This isn't rocket science. The No. 1 threat to plant and animal life is loss of habitat, and that applies more than ever to the habitat of people and that habitat is urban areas. Let's take that one step further. Cities are becoming "critical habitat." Any time and anywhere a million people reside in close proximity, this becomes dumb logic.
Growth and Fragmentation
When most people hear the term "habitat fragmentation," it is in close proximity to another familiar phrase, "diminishing species," which begs the question, What next?
2) Population growth is rapidly and radically changing global demographics and affecting us all. By all predictions there will be nearly 6 billion people on this planet in the year 2000 and, conservatively, 9 million by 2025.
US Census Bureau figures for 1990 show 75 percent of the U.S. population living in urban areas. The United Nations World Health Organization predicts that 60 percent of the world population will live in urban areas by 2025.
The hamlets become villages, and the villages become towns, and one day we wake up and find that our little hometown has become a city. In the process, the "natural environment" is profoundly altered by impervious surfaces, i.e. blacktop, concrete and buildings that dominate the landscape.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, satellite photos speak volumes. The tree canopy of Atlanta has diminished 40 percent in twenty years, and nothing shows this better than remote sensing technology, or satellite photos. If you look at satellite photos of a dozen cities from ten years ago, then view shots of the same cities today, the difference is stark.
Every state legislature should see this dog and pony show. The images are profound. You clearly witness the expanding stages of sprawl, population density and urban decay.
The Human Principle
What you DON'T see are the social ills associated with living in urban environments that already have become asphalt jungles for millions of Americans, underlying ills of social pathology emerging in the detached youth in our cities.
3) Scientists define pollution as energy waste. Another principle that applies to humans. Says Andy Lipkis of Los Angeles-based TreePeople: "People have an immense amount of energy, but for the most part, it isn't being used. The result is a kind of pollution in our cities: despair, frustration, depression, rage and crime."
As the late President John F. Kennedy observed: "Our youths are our greatest natural resource." What then will become of them in these asphalt jungles? What empirical study over how many lifetimes is proof enough to justify investments early and often to connect our youths with our habitat?
4) The No. 1 indicator species of a healthy urban environment is trees.
This is not just warm and fuzzy beautification. The current Urban Forestry movement has morphed and evolved in the past 25 years with population growth and urbanization.
The Old Saw
Don Willeke, a Minnesota attorney, former American Forests president and champion of this cause for three decades, once said, "To hell with beautification. We plant trees for economic, social and environmental reasons."
Think about it. Trees are the ONLY element of the urban infrastructure that actually appreciate in value. Name one other part of your infrastructure that does that! Yet in most cities the urban forest is so taken for granted that trees are not considered part of infrastructure. In Salt Lake City, Urban Forestry is under the Division of Waste Management. Lots of room for improvement here. Lots of room for growth.
I was a journalist for 20 years, an editor packaging international news, and so I know first-hand that Urban Forestry is not even a blip on the radar screen of the media. But for more than 12 years I carried a deep conviction that this extraordinary Urban Forestry movement can change the world. It's elemental.
If you have ever seen that bumper sticker that says, "Trees Are the Solution," then I hope to tell you that truer words were never spoken. I use capital letters when I write about Urban Forestry now, because this movement has come of age. Soon it will receive the recognition it so richly deserves.

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