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Trees absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen, as everyone knows but did you know that trees capture pollutants on their leaves and that their presence on city streets mitigates rainwater and helps prevent flooding and erosion? Addtionally their canopies shade pavement thereby extending the life of the pavement. If placed in parking lots trees capture the carbon right from the cars’ exhaust. On the other hand it takes 240 trees to absorb the carbon emitted by one car annually. One gallon of gasoline spews 25 pounds of pollution into the air.
“The percentage of the earth’s land surface covered by rainforest is estimated to have slipped from 14 percent to around six percent — the sudden disappearance of millions of hectares of the earth’s natural defenses against climate change is likely to have consequences far beyond local communities and wildlife.
Around eight percent of the earth’s forest carbon storage is trapped in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 86 million hectares of rainforest. At current rates, forest clearance is set to release more than 34 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2050 — the equivalent of the UK’s total emissions for the past 60 years. Some scientists predict all of the planet’s natural rainforests could have disappeared by the mid 21st century.” CNN.com 4/16/07
That being said it would seem that the planting, care and watering of trees has moved out of the realm of soley beautifying the city into an extremely important undertaking that needs to be taken very seriously. So is it? Don’t we NEED to be planting and caring for trees here to contribute to Global Cooling?
Can the city provide a well funded Arbor department? Friends of the Urban Forest does all this work for the city on a volunteer basis, and they formed because the funding had been cut for trees. But isn’t it essential that the city be responsible for planting, watering, caring for the trees in our commercial and residential neighborhoods?

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