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"In the electric business trees are always friends and foes. Friends from the perspective that we live here also. This is our community and it’s one of the most beautiful things about the Mississippi Gulf Coast is our trees. We love our trees. Trees are also our foes from a utility standpoint in terms of getting limbs into lines, but we have a very aggressive program to go and just trim trees back. So that once the storm is over and people are able to get back to their lives, there are as many of those beautiful trees still left to help them in the rebuilding process as possible. " iPod | Windows

"It was very difficult to ride around our service territory and see what had been an electric system built in seventy years that was devastated, demolished in, you know, one day. We ended up having 30,000 poles on the ground. We had 10,000 transformers to replace, millions of linear feet of wire had to be restrung. So it really was a Herculean task. " iPod | Windows

~ Ron Barnes, Vice President Marketing and Public Relations, Coast Electric Power Association, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi

 

"In years past, when a wildfire would go through an area like that it wasn't making the news. But now, when those homes are there in areas which have historically burned and suddenly houses are burning and schools are burning and thousands of people are being evacuated, suddenly it becomes very obvious, strong evidence of urban sprawl that's happening and how it's really impacting the wild land, you know, urban interface." iPod | Windows

"Currently the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks is exploring different software opportunities where there's off-the-shelf tree inventory and management systems which will help us identify exactly what our tree inventory is here in the parks and exactly where they are positioned in a map layer. So that a technician in the field knows specifically what tree he's being asked to perform work on and we can start to track the record of the work being performed on those specific trees because they're being GPS and GIS layered in the inventory system. The other wonderful benefit of having a complete inventory of your trees as assets is the ability to take that information and to plug that into existing tools like i-Tree, which give us the opportunity to run some fancy programs which help quantify the benefits of our urban forests. So we're very much looking forward to having a good standing inventory so we can take advantage of assessment tools like i-Tree."iPod | Windows

~ Laura Bauernfeind, Principal Forester, City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks

 

"Most folks don't necessarily see trees as a part of their responsibility as a resident or a citizen. And what our, a big part of our mission - although it sounds very environmental, restore and enhance the tree canopy - there's really a lot to it, a lot more to it especially on the social side. And working with residents, having them understand the importance of watering trees, working with the city agencies, getting people to see that they need to be an active participant to make the city a green place is really critical to what we do."iPod | Windows

"Resources are always at a premium and collaboration is key to our survival. But it's also a little bit touchy because everybody's fighting for scarce resources." iPod | Windows

~ Mark Buscaino, Executive Director, Casey Trees, Washington, D.C.

 

"Taking a holistic approach to urban forest management is really important. And that means integrating the work of lots of different departments in the city or in the county, or in the region, which you may not really think have an impact on trees. When you hear public works, you may not realize that nearly half of the tree care managers in our country are working out of public works departments rather than Parks and Recreation Departments. When you think of Department of Transportation, you don’t necessarily think of the green infrastructure but green infrastructure is part of what those agencies impact. So there’s a lot of opportunities there. "

"I think the more that we see research that quantifies in dollar terms what trees are doing for our cities, you’ll see policy change."

~ Alice Ewen Walker, Executive Director, The Alliance for Community Trees

 

"In some parts of the city we lost 30% of the canopies. Some parts of the city we lost 70% of our canopy. Some parts of the city like the lower Ninth Ward, we lost 100% of the canopy, or New Orleans East, 100% of the canopy. To lose that magnitude is just unbelievable. So replacing could never be more critical than now."

"The hardest thing is when a good, healthy, strong tree that survived that storm, survived that wind, survived those floods, goes down because of a construction company. It’s very important that citizens are aware of how they can protect their trees so that they can have them for their future."

~ Jean Fahr, Executive Director, Parkway Partners, New Orleans, Louisiana

 

"With the advance of technologies, we now have transformed the earth into a single production unit. When you create a single market space you also transform the way business is done to serve that market space. So we are building faster connections to move people, goods and information. We are also redistributing economic activity around the world which is leading to this vast explosion of capital and wealth across the world. At the same time, that is leading to higher standards of living of former communist countries and third world countries. All that wealth can only by created by the conversion of resources. "

"Human consumption is endless. We’ve got to rethink how much can we take? How much can we consume? How much do we need? And then we’re going to have to find a way out because if we continue this way, we will take every fish in the sea, every animal on the planet, and every tree will be gone. And we’re gonna ask ourselves when the lightning bolt arrives, what have we done? "

"The way we're using resources and the way we're building our cities, the vast networks are highly inefficient networks. We have to begin to rethink human habitation of the planet based on high efficiency networks with low environmental impact. (abridged)"

~ Michael Gallis, Regional Development Strategist, Michael Gallis & Associates, Charlotte, North Carolina

 

"Chances are the water that you drink out of your tap today fell on a national forest a few days ago. So they percolate water, they clean air, they filter it. They do all kind of good things for human beings as well as other wild life and so helping people understand that is important. It is really what American Forests does, but there are benefits that we haven’t even started to measure. "

"We need to sit down with the people that are building and developing, people that make concrete, people that build houses, the people that put in railroads and make transportation. We need to be sitting at the table with them so that we’re sure that the environment is just a highly regarded as the other concerns that they have. "

~ Deborah Gangloff, Executive Director, American Forests

 

"Los Angeles has the largest urban forest in the nation. We have over 700,000 street trees, about 850,000 park trees, and over 10 million trees on private property. It was mainly chaparral, grassland, and really the urban forest that you see now in Los Angeles was essentially manmade."

"Fortunately, in LA the utility is a city agency. Our Department of Water and Power has been right there with us, working on a million trees and working on just the care of the urban forest because they have a vested interested in urban forests. They recognize that by planting trees strategically around a home, you can reduce the energy use in that home, so they encourage that. They encourage the use of trees to mitigate storm water runoff, particularly our Bureau of Sanitation because they know that the more water the tree captures, the less water they have to treat downstream that’s going into our rivers, our harbors, our beaches. So we’ve had a tremendous, tremendous benefit working with these departments. "

~ George Gonzalez, Chief Forester, Urban Forestry Division, City of Los Angeles

 

"This whole thing wouldn’t have happened without the school and the principal, teachers and the students here being enthusiastic. They wanted to do this reading circle. And it was such an anomaly having this little piece of green space in this sea of asphalt. When I brought the city officials by here they were like almost embarrassed. Then we created this wonderful idea of asphalt removal using storm water mitigation money to do this and it’s become very popular. We’ve moved 14 acres of asphalt off of city schools citywide. "

"A healthy community development process, I think, that’s going on as a part of improving water quality. But actually as we’re seeing with global warming and as we get more and more into drought areas or we have periods with very little rain and then a lot of rain, we need storm water harvesting in these urban places. "

~ Guy Hager, Director, Great Parks & Green Communities, Parks & People Foundation, Baltimore, Maryland

 

"All of us have to raise the tide of saying parks are important. Parks are part of the solution. Parks are not at the bottom of the barrel to be considered last. We have to be at the table where all of the important decisions are being made about cities. It's not that the mayor will sit down with the economic development director and the tourism director and the department of transportation and the housing director and make some really important multi-billion dollar decisions and then inform everybody else. It's saying that parks are very much part of this and need to be at the table to add their part of the solution to some of these problems." iPod | Windows

"So when you actually go to the people, they're voting for park land and they're voting for buying land, preserving land from development. And this has been a wakeup call for a lot of politicians because they're not always - they're mostly hearing from the lobbyists. They're not always hearing from the regular people. And when it gets put to a vote of the regular people they're getting these huge majorities. So some of them are saying, "You know this would be an okay thing for, we wouldn't actually have to run this through the ballot measure. We could vote on it right in our own city council or county council." And I think that is beginning to turn the corner." iPod | Windows

~ Peter Harnik, Director, Center for City Park Excellence, Trust for Public Land

 

"Well, the damage here at City Park– we had $43 million worth of damage, and 90% or more of the park flooded anywhere from a foot to eight feet of water. You know the public has sent lots and lots of money. Local folks have been incredibly supportive. Lots of local businesses have not only donated money but sent their employees out here and volunteered to help clean up the park. We hear these stories, you know, 'I proposed to my wife at New Orleans City Park.' 'You know I lost my house. Here’s $10.' You know it brings a tear to your eye and at the same time you – you feel good. You say, 'Well, we need to ramp back up because people want this park back.' " iPod | Windows

~ John Hopper, Chief Development Officer & Director of Public Affairs, New Orleans City Park

 

"So what kind of city would we have if it was all gray infrastructure? It would be a terrible place to live. And likewise obviously we have to live in homes and go to work in buildings and have ways of getting to work and so on, so of course we have to have gray infrastructure. The reality is we really have to have both and what I think we’re trying to do through American Forests is to really understand how these systems, the gray and the green infrastructure, can work together and really build off of one another." iPod | Windows

"So when communities are not meeting their air quality standards they’re trying to figure out how in the world can they do that and one of the best management practices would be increasing the urban tree canopy. " iPod | Windows

~ Cheryl Kollin, Vice President, Urban Ecosystem Center, American Forests

 

"In 2001 the trees in Orleans Parish were removing 1.2 million pounds approximately, of air pollutants. In 2006, because the trees are no longer there, that has dropped to 625 thousand pounds of removal. What that means is there are 600,000 more pounds of air pollutants in that small parish just because the trees aren’t there."

~ Mike Lehman, Director, CITYgreen Software, American Forests

 

"Strategically planting those trees, cooling down streets, parking lots, schoolyards, all the sources that heat up the city gives you a double and triple whammy on preventing pollution. "

"There’s a real passion that gets unleashed as people know that they’re planting these trees for their health, that they’re protecting their families, that they’re protecting their communities. "

~ Andy Lipkis, Founder & Executive Director, TreePeople Los Angeles, California

 

"The city had flat-lined at least thirty days. There was no power, no electricity anywhere. We had to really closely monitor tree companies that were coming in hired by Entergy to make sure that they were trimming the trees within our specs and guidelines. That was a huge challenge because the bottom line is people wanted power. They wanted to start the recovery process. "

"After the storm, there were a lot of tree removals done illegally, mainly in neighborhoods that were just barren and vacant. A lot of citizens were gone so we did have the tree contractors and the debris removals that did get paid by the load doing some illegal tree removal. It was just very difficult to monitor; very difficult."

~ Ann Macdonald, Director, Department of Parks & Parkways, City of New Orleans

 

"Nature's not a place where we go to get away. Nature's a place where live and that we nurture to survive. "

"We need to build our cities within a new framework that integrates the gray with green in ways that we maintain the function of the ecosystem while still accomplishing what we need to do as we build our cities."

~ Ed Macie, Regional Urban Forester USDA Forest Service, Southern Region

 

"Oh, I don’t know if there’s any vocabulary in the world that could describe the damage of Katrina. It was close to annihilation."

"I’d say if you have a problem you have to get on it right away. The longer you wait, the worse it gets. So the sooner you get to the problem and start working on it, the quicker it will be resolved. You know the choice is that or cut and run. And where are you running? "

~ Chipper McDermott, Mayor, Pass Christian, Mississippi

 

"Efficient development is the best way to save natural systems. To understand ecology is to first realize that it isn’t just about your place, the place where your yard is, the place where you city is. Your ecology, the natural system is really large. It is all around you."

"So, how do we manage the unnatural world sort of becomes our challenge for today and we realize that this challenge is not one for the so-called conservation community or environmental alone. It is really part of the whole community, all the business community, the managers of towns and cities. All the people need to participate in that. "

~ Gary Moll, Senior Vice President, Urban Ecosystem Center, American Forests

 

"Well absolutely, trees are an important component of what we in the parks service describe as the cultural landscape. They tell the story of how places were laid out, what the design was. Originally this cemetery had several parallel rows of trees. And in fact the hurricane damage to trees in this cemetery goes back quite a ways. And much of it was done was done during hurricanes like Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Hurricane Camille in 1969. And for whatever reason many of those trees were not replaced at the time. So the park undertook back in 1999-2000 to research the history of the plantings here in the cemetery. We were able to find old drawings and landscape plans, even descriptions of what trees had been planted. And we began replanting those alleys of trees that had been here historically. " iPod | Windows

~ David Muth, Director of Natural Resource Management, Jean Lafitte National Historical Park & Preserve, New Orleans, Louisiana

 

"We moved 2.9 million cubic yards of debris. It’s a football field stacked over a quarter of a mile high. The big convention center in New Orleans, that’s 3 million square feet. Take that entire property and stack it, I think it was forty-two feet high would be the debris we hauled off, hauled out of here. "

"I think the better developers and the developers that have been in the game for the long haul understand that green sells. And green sells their property and green sells their lots three times faster than if you just strip it off and you've got bare dirt. "

~ Eric Nolan, City Arborist, Biloxi, Mississippi

 

"By providing this information through eco-system services assessments that the community, the politicians, the local users can understand, they can make those informed decisions as to how many eco-system services should we have and how much forest should we have to get in return. In the past, no one really knew about it, they knew people liked trees, but now they’re saying okay, this is worth this many dollars, it means this many tons of air pollution, this many kilowatts in energy savings to the homeowners. So we get this economic return coming back from the forest. So we are making hopefully smarter decisions into the future of how we develop these forests to get the maximum, optimal return for the investment that we put into the forest. "

~ David J. Nowak, Ph.D., Project Leader, Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service

 

"Oh, they could have chopped off my head before I would have let them take down my trees. "

"I believe the biggest roadblock to reforesting the City of New Orleans is the construction that’s happening. It’s got to happen but I do believe that that’s the biggest issue; that Parkway Partners needs to let people know that there still could be some damage done to so many of these trees because of the big trucks, the demolition that’s still happening. "

~ Amelie Oriol, New Orleans Resident, Parkway Partners Tree Trooper

 

"Number one you need to understand the amount of tree canopy and natural assets you have in a given area - in your city, in your county, whatever the jurisdiction your trying to preserve in your state. So establish a baseline. And then the other lesson we’ve learned, it’s absolutely vital that we have a change in terms of our view, how we view natural assets. Right now we plan in all of our cities and towns for all these man-made surfaces, the street networks, where the buildings are going to go, where the utilities are going to go. And we don’t plan where are natural assets are going to go."

"We are seeing cities like Atlanta that are within 90 days of running out of drinking water. Raleigh, North Carolina is less than 90 days away from running out of drinking water. So our leaders are finally waking up to see that we have to change the way we are treating the natural assets. Our leaders must account for the natural assets, plan for them, and integrate the man-made structure and the natural assets together so that we grow in sustainable fashion. "

~ Rick Roti, Attorney, Chairman of the Charlotte Tree Commission

 

"When we came home outside in the yard looked to me like pick-up-sticks. We had probably a hundred or more trees in the woods in the back and we lost all of them. They’re still dying. That concerns us a lot, not just in our yard, but all over the coast. And all over our town, but all over the coast, they’re still dying. They’ve been way too stressed. "

~ Gayla Schmitt, Pass Christian Resident, Advisory Board Member for the Land Trust for the Mississippi Coastal Plan

 

"There is a significant amount of development going on in the District and fortunately, there is also a lot of attention to how to develop in a more environmentally friendly way. So green building standards have been developed. We are seeing a lot more green roofs and we’re seeing a lot of attention to and concern about the space - the area that is needed for healthy trees in a developed area. "

"City life is tough on trees and it’s tough in Washington as well as across the country. The concrete boxes are too small. Cars run into them. Weed wackers that are used around them inflict damage that is often fatal. There’s a lot of stress on trees in urban environment. "

~ Dan Smith, Senior Director of Communication, Casey Trees, Washington, D.C.

 

"Urban ecology is so important now. I think we’re at a critical time in our society, in fact, if not in the entire world because we have been relying on systems that developed when nature was in abundance around us and nature was in abundance around our cities. And because of population growth and because of the dysfunction of cities, that’s no longer true. Urban ecology is absolutely important as something that needs to be reintegrated and reconnected to our everyday systems and our everyday lives. "

"We have many products in our lives that are derived from natural systems. Our food, building supplies, lumber, those sorts of things and what I see in our society is that many people are disengaged from these products. They don’t really recognize where they come from and they don’t really support the sustainability of these products so our farmlands around many cities are being gobbled up by new development. "

~ Kathleen L. Wolf, Ph.D., Research Social Scientist, College of Forest Resources, University of Washington, Seattle