http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12prof.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
“She [Diana Beresford-Kroeger] favors what she terms a bioplan, reforesting cities and rural areas with trees according to the medicinal, environmental, nutritional, pesticidal and herbicidal properties she claims for them, which she calls ecofunctions.”
“Wafer ash, for example, could be used in organic farming, she said, planted in hedgerows to attract butterflies away from crops. Black walnut and honey locusts could be planted along roads to absorb pollutants, she said.”
“The Center for Urban Forest Research estimates that each tree removes 1.5 pounds of pollutants from the air. Trees are also used to remove mercury and other pollutants from the ground, something called phytoremediation. And, of course, trees store carbon dioxide, which mitigates global warming.”
She’s advocating a portion of what’s known as permaculture. Much of what she says is useful and important to know. Unfortunately, she mixes in a lot of unproven data (and some outright junk science information and flakiness) in with hef sounder reasoning. One good thing she’s done is attract the attention of scientists who can (and probably will) test her theories and collect stronger data.
Tree ecology is a sadly under-represented field – how trees fit into the greater ecological environment, the differences between old growth forests and forest plantations.
We’ve lost over 90% of our old-growth forests and seriously need to preserve what’s left and start new fofrests that are allowed to evolve into old-growth forests.
The new forest plantations are kept too sterile and too monocultured. We prune them, and harvest the trees while they’re still young (tree-speaking), and spray them for bugs and diseases so they can’t develope a diverse ecology like the old-growth forests.
Cities uproot trees for buildings, then plant small canopy trees and shrubs to replace the large canopy trees they removed. Small wonder so many cities are so hot and stifling – with no large canopy trees to offer shade and absorb the heat, and only concrete and asphalt to reflect the sun, it can be brutal in them. It feels hotter even when the temperatures aren’t all that hot.
Then we uproot trees for croplands. Vast acres of once-forest are now vast acres of mono-crops.
Even suburbs are guilty of removing the large canopy trees – powerline companies prune them and chop them down to prevent power outages, builders hack them down to build houses so close together on plots of land so tiny there’s no room for small canopy trees, let alone large ones, or to establish a healthy vegetative culture. We have vast acres of lawns we have to mow and edge and trim and spray for weeds and bugs – and those who try to change that are fined by the cities for not adhering to the carbon copy of the neighborhood.
National Arbor Day barely scratches the surface. It’s a good start. We need to take it farther.
Ebonypearl 
I’m very glad that my city has an ordinance requiring trees along all roads, at no worse than a given spacing. And that, within it, there are lots of large oak trees. There’s one at the entrance to my apartment complex, which is just slightly taller than the 3-story building next to it.
A town I lived in in New Mexico had an ordinance against cutting down trees. This went so far that, when the city wanted to put a road through a place where a tree was, they built a central green for the tree and had the road divide around it, because that was easier than the paperwork for removing a single tree.
We need more. Badly. But it’s a start.
Comment by feonixrift — August 12, 2008 @ 4:56 pm
Yeah. We do need urban forestry planning.
Comment by ebonypearl — August 12, 2008 @ 11:34 pm