Greetings participants,

It is an honor to join in this information-sharing forum as a panelist. Kudos to Jacky Foo, chairpersons and fellow panelists.

The movement and discipline of Urban and Community Forestry is spreading rapidly in the Unites States across government, academia, green industry and nonprofit organizations, as population growth impacts all of us. Associated ills, including sprawl, heat islands, higher tropospheric ozone, loss of shade-tree canopy, rising skin-cancer rates, particulate pollution and water runoff, accompany the dramatic increase in impervious surfaces and loss of tree canopy as our cities and towns expand.

The bad news: According to Harvard ecologist E.O. Wilson, the No. 1 threat to plant and animal life is loss of habitat. That principle applies equally to the habitat of people. This is not rocket science.

The really bad news: Our cities are experiencing dramatic loss of tree canopy, as shown in satellite photos, as population growth leads to building and impervious surfaces - blacktop, concrete, buildings - expand.

The good news: We have the knowledge to create communities that are both economically and environmentally sustainable.

The really good news: We now have the technology to share that knowledge. This EcoCity conference is a great example. While researchers in academia and government have traditionally remained insulated in institutions and isolated geographically, new technology makes it cost-efficient to share information for the public good.

I humbly submit that we all should strive to reach a wider audience with our information and increase public awareness and advocacy for our goals, just as the corporate sector does with mass marketing. New technology makes this possible and affordable today.

The more forums of this nature, the better. Utility companies are becoming major funders of Urban Forestry efforts (see below); green companies, primarily nurseries, are growing as suppliers, and communities are the longterm beneficiaries. Municipal governments are creating prototypes to plant trees systemwide in school districts in major metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles and Chicago.

I personally have worked in journalism for 20 years, primarily in world news, and I know that we need to reach a wider public audience to gain the public and political momentum for support for local leaders to build smarter cities.

Our work is barely a blip on the radar screen, but the new technology can change that with your ongoing participation.

I speak publicly on these subjects now as the director of TreeLink, where I am currently building a Who's Who International of individuals working in Urban Forestry and Ecology. Here is an example of how we share information:

Is Our Future Growing Gray or Green?

Urban and Community Forestry continues to grow as a national movement and a discipline taught in universities from coast to coast, despite budget constraints. Since 1996, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has supported Salt Lake City-based TreeLink - www.treelink.org - as the national Urban Forestry communications hub.

As population growth impacts our communities, planning initiatives emphasize a need for sustainable cities that include trees as the one aspect of infrastructure that actually appreciate in value while all other infrastructure depreciates.

From Sacramento to New Haven, utilities are partnering with community based organizations in programs to support Urban Forestry. In Chicago and Los Angeles, school districts are removing blacktop to plant trees to reduce energy costs, lower ozone-damage from air-conditioning, and cut irrigation expenses beneath shade trees.

Tree planting has always been popular for aesthetic reasons, but today there are five Urban Forestry research stations quantifying significant´ long-term health, economic and environmental benefits of strategic planting to offset the ills of our graying cities, including:

• Energy costs: Proper tree selection and placement may be the best long-term investment for reducing home summer cooling costs by reducing utility bills by as much as 50 percent, according to research by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Clearinghouse (EREC). In addition, energy conservation reduces the need for power plants to produce or purchase energy which also helps to reduce air pollution.
  
  
• Air and Water Quality: Air and water pollution are severe impacts to the health and economic well being of communities across the nation. Trees play a critical municipal infrastructure role by absorbing pollutants, filtering water runoff, and cleansing groundwater.
  
  
• Psycho-social benefits: Social scientists have demonstrated that interaction with plants in urban settings produces numerous psycho-social benefits, including: reduces emotional stress and anxiety; reduces traffic stress and road rage; reduces levels of domestic conflict; improves rate of medical recovery and convalescence; contributes to greater job satisfaction and; lessens absenteeism and enhanced work productivity. These are derived from empirical social science studies.
  
  
• Public Health: Increased shade from tree canopy has long been encouraged to reduced skin-cancer rates and tropospheric ozone associated with respiratory ailments in children and the elderly. More than a dozen studies have linked smog to low birth weight, premature births, stillbirths and infant deaths. A National Center for Disease Control report (Nov. 1, 2001) verifies that poorly planned development and transportation projects facilitate urban sprawl that fuels air pollution responsible for skyrocketing children's asthma rates.

Finally, we are seeing dramatic examples of private funding for Urban Forestry programs, including $50 million for trees in Washington, D.C. and another multimillion-dollar fund established for greenways in Detroit.

Dollar for dollar, there may be no better investment in the infrastructure of our cities than trees, since trees are the only portion of the infrastructure that actually increases in value.

We need not choose between economic development and environmental sustainability. Urban and Community Forestry makes sense!

For a full report on the "Benefits of Trees in Urban and Community Environments", visit TreeLink at www.treelink.org or call us at 801-359-1933.