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The Greening of America
Ambitious Tree-Planting Programs Are Sprouting Up Nationwide
William Booth, Washington Post
Spurred by visions of their cities frying in a warmer world, mayors around the nation have grasped a green solution: trees! Like Johnny Appleseed, they have vowed to sow their seeds in great profusion, promising millions of new trees in the coming years. Arbor Day, that old fusty holiday, is getting a makeover.
Cities once planted trees because they were beautiful. Now trees are being retasked as “green infrastructure” managed by “urban foresters” to work as powerful energy-saving, carbon-sucking, wastewater-treating tools to save the planet. But as the mayors spin their green dreams, their releaf teams have had to confront a brutal reality: Planting a tree is a lot harder than it looks.
Urban tree farming can be a time-consuming, expensive and exasperating experience — like children, trees require years of maintenance. Businesses complain about the cost, neighbors about the sap. Their roots are murder on sidewalks; their limbs tangle with power lines.
“The city sidewalk can be one of the most hostile environments for a young tree,” a cramped cell of garbage soil surrounded by smothering asphalt, says Gregory McPherson, a scientist with the federal Center for Urban Forest Research. “A virtual conflict zone,” as one arborist put it, beset by disease, pollution, drought, insects — not to mention drunk drivers and staple guns and trip-and-fall lawsuits. “It’s a tough life,” sighs Marcia Bansley, executive director of Trees Atlanta. It’s hard out there for a poplar.
(25 April 2008)
The Qingdao Ecoblock project: mass-produced sustainable living?
The Green Dragon via Global Public Media
This film is part of the extensive additional resources compiled by the creators of the documentary film The Green Dragon, about the potential for expanding sustainable construction and development in China. See the film trailer and much more information on their website.
(1 January 2008, but just posted)
YouTube at GPM. More at The Green Dragon website.
Picturing Suburbia
KunstlerCast #11 via Global Public Media
When James Howard Kunstler isn’t railing against suburban sprawl, he’s painting it. Vincent van Gogh painted the peasant sleeping by the haystack because he was living in a landscape populated by people. Our landscape is populated by cars. So, as a sur la motif painter of our time, Jim’s subjects include cars on the road, gas stations and the industrial ruins of America’s manufacturing past. Making this landscape legible on the canvas is a challenge, but it’s also dangerous! An angry manager once told Jim that painting the Burger King is not allowed.
(24 April 2008)
