Pittsburgh Seeks To Become An Urban Forest!

The city of Pittsburgh currently houses more than 2.5 million trees... but that's not good enough for the city. There are currently plans to add to the huge number by more than 20% over the next 20 years! Why is this good for the city? The city's current trees have sequester 13,900 tons of carbon dioxide a year, saved residents $3 million in energy bills last year and remove 519 tons of pollution at a savings of $3.6 million a year. Street trees alone diverted 41.8 million gallons of stormwater last year.

The Post-Gazette did a story about bringing this new forest to the city, Michael Henninger writes:


As the bus lumbered through the city on a day that cried for shade, Arthur "Butch" Blazer fanned the barely conditioned air with his black Western hat. At every turn, trees swept past the windows -- the mature canopy in Allegheny Cemetery, the new line of saplings in the median on Penn Avenue in East Liberty -- until the bus stopped in North Point Breeze at Tree Pittsburgh's seedling nursery.


Mr. Blazer, the U.S. Agriculture Department's deputy under secretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment, joined Tree Pittsburgh's Thursday afternoon tour, after which it presented its urban forest master plan at an evening reception at Bar Marco in the Strip.
The $275,000 plan resulted from two years of data collection, analysis, consultations and benchmarking, and the USDA helped pay for it.


"The master planning process here is extremely important because it connects to the president's Great Outdoors Initiative," Mr. Blazer said. "When people think 'great outdoors,' they think of places like Yosemite. They need to start thinking about places like Pittsburgh, too. Eighty percent of our country's population is in urban areas, and we know the importance trees have on the psyches of humans."




Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/the-maple-plan-bringing-the-forest-to-the-city-642591/#ixzz204NCEtmH