These venerable columns, this verdant roof,, these fair ranks of trees, massy and tall and dark, . . This mighty oak by whose immovable stem I stand and seem almost annihilated--not a prince.

-- William Cullen Bryant (A Forest Hymn)

For over three hundred years, these woods have been a landmark of America.

Oaks and maples, elms and evergreens were all part of an ancient forest that stretched as far as the eye could see.

To untold millions who emigrated here, the wildness offered refuge and freedom.

It was unfettered ground -- a place to build, to play, to meditate.

Nature in America was important as any monument in Europe.

But today, these woods face an uncertain future.

ROBERT MILLER: We tend to think of deforestation going on in tropical countries. But around our cities weíre doing a lot of deforestation.

NANCY WOLF: It never occurred to anybody that the cities were a forest of a type and that that forest ought to be cared for and paid attention to.

GREG McPHERSON: Itís a dynamic forest, Trees, its composed of trees that are dying, growing, constantly being regenerated by people. And its a forest that is really essential to our well being, the quality of our life.

It affects air. Water. The very climate of our cities.

This is the forest where we live.

Around our cities today, trees must contend with urbanization on a scale unknown before.

It's affecting land from the downtown of American cities to the edge of suburbs. This is the nation's urban forest. Some 70 million acres. An area more vast than any of our national forests.

GREG McPHERSON, Research Forester, USDA Forest Service: About 2400 acres per day is being converted from rural to urban land use. So for every acre there are 20 to 30 trees that all of a sudden are part of the urban forest. Or we're protecting trees that were in forests and now are surrounded by buildings and shopping systems.

In recent years, America has witnesssed an explosion of population and economic activity. And it has come with a price. In too many cities, the space for trees doesn't exist. Growing conditions are poor. Urban soils are often little more than construction rubble. Areas for planting are becoming smaller and smaller.

GARY MOLL, American Forests: Cities still lose more trees than they plant. That's the biggest crisis that cities have with trees as they're simply losing them and they have no place to put them back.

America's relationship with nature has been a wavering one since settlers first came here. Debates over the environment have happened before, notably in the conservation movement that swept the country in the l9th century.

JURETTA JORDAN HECKSCHER, Library of Congress: I think its safe to say that nature was overwhelming to the Europeans who came here. It was threatening, and the importance of their survival as a society depended on taming it. And the importance of personal success depended very specifically on cutting the trees back so one could farm.

In the mid-19th century, rapid industrialization led to extensive deforestation and worsening urban conditions. Forest fires took their toll each year. What wasn't burned was harvested at an alarming rate.

HECKSCHER: The industrial revolution revolutionized the American relationship with nature, that's very clear. For the first time large numbers of Americans were living most of their lives separated from the natural world in the sense that earlier generations had known it.

Most of the forests on the East coast were gone, and those in the West were under siege.

There were some who warned of overdevelopment. One was George Perkins Marsh, a 19th century Vermont Congressman. "Even now we are breaking up the floor of our world," he said, "disrupting the invisible bonds that link all the myriad forms of life." And, he said, "The destruction of woods was man's first violation, for the woods served to protect the earth."

HECKSCHER: For the most part Americans I think still felt that the way toward progress which was the great 19th century word and the emblem of Americans' aspirations, progress still meant cutting back the forest, it still meant making room for what they thought of as civilization.

Soon, there was equal concern for the cities.

NANCY WOLF, Alliance for Community Trees and Environmental Action Coalition: Streets, sidewalks, houses. So many people, so many needs for housing -- they didn't leave open space as a matter of course, it wasn't part of the planning. Block after block after block, just eating up land.

Finally, some began to seek solutions. One of the first took place in 1858 with the creation of New York City's Central Park.

The man behind it was landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead.

HECKSCHER: He was the first person who really made a strong intellectual case for the importance of wild scenery, parklands and beautiful places within cities that could refresh the body and the mind and the spirit.

WOLF: So they just captured land in the nick of time, and you can imagine what Manhattan would be like if they had not done that. These cities would be unlivable without these huge parks.

By the 1870s, a movement to preserve American forests came of age. The U.S. Forest service was founded. The first Arbor Day was observed.

Between 1905 and 1907, Theodore Roosevelt established 180 million acres of land for wildlife refugees and national parks for the United States. Four years later he established forests in the East, acquiring lands for watershed protection.

Advocates of forest preservation arose. Guifford Pinchot, the first chief of the forest service. John Muir, a passionate defender of wilderness. Aldo Leopold, who called for a land ethic. They represented the culmination of sixty years of conservationism and environmental awareness that had evolved throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But if anything had been learned in one century, it appears to have been lost in the next. After World War II, the American landscape was again suffering radical change.

ROBERT MILLER, Professor of Forestry, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point: Following World War II, the automobile became much more widely available. And people bought them, and people had higher incomes after the war. And they wanted to move out of the cities and into the countryside. We weren't living in apartments or row houses, we wanted our own little piece of suburbia, a quarter acre or half acre or whatever.

And then disaster hit. Dutch Elm disease and later infestation by gypsy moths spread throughout the land. The urban forests were more fragile than anyone had understood.

MOLL: The Dutch Elm Disease was brought in from Europe and it spread like wildfire through these trees.

McPHERSON: Dutch Elm Disease was working its way east to west across the country.

There was no cure. They just had to tag infected trees and get them removed.

McPHERSON: It's one thing when you lose the tree outside your home, but its another thing when you lose the trees along a whole street.

MOLL: They no longer had shaded streets, they no longer had tree-covered roadways. They now had clear cut communities.

MILLER: And people took them for granted. When they died, they didn't take them for granted anymore.

McPHERSON: Dutch elm disease made people realize how much they missed trees. We don't realize how important a part of our lives trees are until they're gone.

Dutch Elm disease marked the beginning of the modern urban forestry movement.

MILLER: And so the environmental movement really started in the 60s, and expressed itself particularly in the 70s. A lot of legislation passed. People in cities became much more interested in nature. The interest in gardening, the interest in camping, backpacking, a whole host of outdoor activities dramatically increased. And along with that people were interested in making their communities better places to live.

But the Reagan administration challenged these developments. Funds for urban forestry were cut. Political support had to be raised. It came in 1990 under the Bush administration.

JAMES R. LYONS, Undersecretary, Natural Resources & Environment, USDA Forest Service: We put together legislation, I was on staff in the House Agriculture Committee then, and drafted the legislation that was called the Urban and Community Forestry Assistance Act.

It became known as the Farm Bill. Funds for urban forestry expanded twentyfold. A network of federal & state organizations was established, dedicated to community and urban forestry.

ROBERT SKIERA, Retired City of Milwaukee Forester: The importance of the Farm Bill was that it sets up urban forestry funding at the federal level, in a way that we can pipe it to every community.

JOHN DWYER, Northeast Coordinator, USDA Forest Service: It really created a real resurgence in urban forestry because people saw this was great attention at the federal level, and I think it caused many others to respond in kind. It really created a new era in urban forestry, like a higher plateau than it had been before. A very significant event.

Others saw the Farm Bill as a step in the right direction, but they remained concerned that the real threat to American forests was not being addressed.

MARCIA BANSLEY, Trees Atlanta: All around the country they're have been some plantings done, but the overall effect has not changed the entire way people do development. It hasn't gotten down to the public works crews, the information's not out there.

What has been hard, say scientists working in the field, has been persuading policy makers and city planners that the urban forest is important. In the past city forests were not considered worth study. They were not even thought to be natural.

LYONS: The forestry community overall has always focused on rural areas. They focused on national forests and natural resources that tended to be outside city limits.

McPHERSON: Would you rather be, you know, doing research in Lake Tahoe or in a Walgreens or Wal-Mart parking lot, for example? And that's where so much of the funding, much of the support, and much of the emphasis in gaining new knowledge about ecosystems, is directed -- towards non-urban environments.

Today, scientists are redifining the way we look at forests within cities.

ROWAN ROWNTREE, Urban Forest Ecology Research, USDA Forest Service: It's important to see the city not as just a set of artificial buildings and impervious surfaces, but as having an infrastructure or a circulatory system weaved through it of live material. It's a vibrant renewable resource that unfortunately we take for granted as we walk through the city. But it's critical to the life within the city. If we look at it as a rich tapestry of dynamic processes and interacting components. If we're going to just look at is as a set of street trees, or as single elements we're just not going to comprehend it.

Throughout America, cities have been expanding at a colossal rate.

HENRY DIAMOND, Author, Land Use in America: Land use controls, and quite rightly so, traditionally were local in nature. I mean the town meeting decided whether someone could add a new roof to their house in New Hampshire or whatever. Now that we're dealing with huge systems we're no longer dealing with individual issues, we're dealing with massive highways, massive shopping center developments, massive power developments, the local government becomes in many cases obsolete.

JAMES SCHWAB, American Planning Association: About 80% of Americans at this point are living in metropolitan areas. Over half of those, about 53%, are living in metropolitan areas that are already above one milion people. So we're a very urban nation. Today, the central cities are not where most Americans are locating. It's not where most of the development activity is taking place. Most of it is taking place in the suburbs.

DIAMOND: As jobs have moved to the perimeter, the so called edge city phenomenon, people will go even farther out. And we tend to get this flight from the city, but it becomess an absolute mob flight when the jobs go out the corridors, chewing up land, and in a very uneconomic way, because the corridors are not compact, and they cut down trees, they demand sewer and other services.

They move in ever widening rings of development that often leave the inner rings vacant and empty.

Or there are vast corridors of growth.

SCHWAB: There are some very rapid growth areas even without the population growth, such as Howard county between Washington DC and Baltimore. Suburbanization has moved people out of the inner city even in relatively stagnant overall metropolitan areas, and more into the suburbs and thus more land gets consumed in the process. That is the real crisis, trying to slow down that trend before that whole pattern of land use becomes so implanted that there's nothing we can do about it.

New voices have risen, warning of a silent crisis, a specter hovering over the land. The vast American countryside, the fountainhead of national myth, memory and identity, is vanishing.

DIAMOND: Americans have not been willing to accept even the most modest restraints on growth. It's been this frontier and old English law that I can do anything on my land from the sky to the center of the earth and politically it's been absolute murder to try to touch it.

HECKSCHER: We can't simply make it make a question of property. There are these larger issues of health and spirit and imagination that are directly affected by the landscapes we live in and that in turn create us. And that's at least as much true in a city as in the countryside.

Despite its reputation as a "City in a Forest," Atlanta ranks last among major American cities for the number of trees shading its streets. Built surfaces have rapidly replaced the city's natural landscape.

WILLIAM CHAMEIDES, School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Tech: We're losing tremendous amounts of forests. We have so many more cars in Atlanta than we used to, we have so many more people, so many things are happening at the same time we're losing our forests.

ED MACIE, Director, Urban & Community Forests, USDA Forest Service - Southern Region: Citizens became concerned that so much forest cover was lost for land development. And so I think the emphasis, at least here in the metropolitan region, the focus is really the loss of tree cover as part of the overall land development process rather than the care of public trees on public lands.

Development had been consuming 50,000 trees a year. But it took satellite photographs to reveal the full extent of deforestation.

MOLL: Atlanta's one of those cities that has grown rapidly. It has sprawled out over the last 20 years. And we're able to measure that change, first using Geographic Information Systems, so we can see the change in land cover. The Landsat satellites have been circling the Earth for over 20 years. So you can look at an image from 1972 and all the years in-between, and find out how the landscape has changed.

MACIE: Everything has to come with a balance. And I know for example here in Atlanta we are experiencing a cost.

Atlanta had lost some 65 % of its trees in twenty years. A heat island was expanding steadily from downtown Atlanta to the Hartsfield International Airport. The central city core was at times 6 to 12 degrees warmer than the surrounding suburbs.

CHAMEIDES: Trees have a major impact on the climate. Local climates, urban climates. When you cut down trees, you cut down green spaces, and you put up parking lots and roadways, you end up increasing the temperature by anywhere from five to ten degrees. And that hot temperature really has a lot of negative impacts, both climatically, it has a negative effect on people's health, and it also hurts the environment in terms of air quality because it affects the chemical reactions that occur.

HASHEM AKBARI, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, University of California: Typically when the cities are being developed the very first thing that people do, they chop down the trees and orchards and replace them with impermeable surfaces, that most of them are dark, either rooftops or pavements. And this temperature difference between the city and the suburban, rural area is defined as a heat island.

Atlanta's Olympic ring was in the red hot center of the temperature grid. Higher temperatures were contributing to increasing smog, ozone and air pollution.

The impact of deforestation is being felt far beyond a city's borders, affecting entire regions. The loss of trees reduces the amount of carbon dioxide that can be absorbed. Worldwide, scientists detect an alarming rise in CO2 levels and global warming.

AKBARI: One of the ways that man is having an effect on the environment is burning more and more fossil fuel. This fossil fuel which is burned will show up in the form of CO2 in the atmosphere. That CO2 acts like a blanket, a thermal blanket around the globe.

CHAMEIDES: Atlanta and the state of Georgia have spent something on the order of a billion dollars in the last ten years or so to clean up our air pollution problems, and we haven't made any progress. That is not a record that we're proud of.

BANSLEY: The obstacles, of course, are the development pressure. There's a huge amount of development pressure here. Everybody wants to live in Atlanta because its such a lovely place, and they don't realize that the place that they want to live in is going to be destroyed by all the new housing and the new buildings that are coming in.

Atlanta is not alone. In 1987 and 1991, American Forests surveyed the condition of streeet trees in 20 cities.

SKIERA: Many of the cities were planting far fewer trees than they were removing, but many of them were not even inventorying what they had, so they really didn't know how bad conditions were.

In many cities, maintenance funds are cut.

MARTIN FITCH, Park Superintendent, City of Sacramento: The problem is that there are fixed number of dollars available, and we have police and fire that are really considered very important in any community. And we've been faced with on-going budget cuts for the city as a whole, so in that environment, its been very difficult for us to get more money to do more tree work.

Some say reduced funding has forced many city foresters to become nothing more than undertakers for dead and dying trees.

The lack of maintenance has made the trees vulnerable to disease and infestation.

In New York, the Asian beetle is sweeping through communities wreaking devastation not unlike that of Dutch Elm Disease.

These plots in Brooklyn are all that remain of an entire street of trees.

PAT FERRIS, Brooklyn Resident: I just couldn't picture our backyard without that tree. My granddaughter was like, knew that I was going to be devastated when this happened because I just kept talking, they're gonna take our tree down, and I was really upset, and my granddaughter wrote me a note saying, "don't be sad, don't be sad." And my husband said I used to say, "When that tree goes, I go with it. "

Nationwide, citizens are grappling with the effects of a changing landscape.

MACIE: With changing land use patterns there will be conflict, a lot of different conflicts. There's going to be more people, not less, with greater demands on a diminishing base of resources.

With development has come conflict over competing needs.

McPHERSON: I think there are issues as to how much green space do we need. How effectively will it offset the impacts associated with economic development as this community grows. How can this green space be best configured and managed to provide net benefits.

In some cities, the utility lines have proved to be a battleground.

LYNN MORRIS, Baton Rouge Green: One of the most tragic things is the desecration of a live oak. A live oak can be trimmed to canopy up over lines, it doesn't have to have a hole cut in it, or a crotch cut, or any of the very severe pruning practices that you see today.

Natural cycles are disrupted. Trees are not replenished, raw materials end up as waste.

Or there is flooding and water pollution.

SCHWAB: We're seeing serious problems in allowing too much development too near floodways, allowing the development of too much impervious surface -- you know, concrete, pavement, buildings -- things that don't allow the water to percolate through the soil, consequently forcing more water into our waterways causing the rivers to flood more often and suddenly those hundred year floods are happening a lot more than once a century.

MORRIS: About 44,000 trees have gone down in one development alone, and when you realize that we've planted, its taken us 7 years to plant 10,000 trees and they took down that many trees in 3 months, you know, it's just a significant impact on the ecosystem in that area. And all the wildlife that's supported by the trees is forced into other areas. It interrupts innumerable patterns that are intimately related to each other in terms of our whole environmental existence. We can't live without air and water, nor can any other creature, and yet we are destroying the primary mechanism to clean our water and provide the oxygen for us to breathe.

In Atlanta, the conflicts involve the billboard industry.

BANSLEY: The billboard industry, sees trees as vegetation that gets in the way of delivering their message to their paying customers. And many of them have no qualms at all about cutting down trees so that they can have their billboards visible. Its all done very quietly and a lot of it happens at night so nobody knows how it happened, and there's no smoking gun lots of times, it's an ongoing difficulty for all of us.

MILLER: You know most of our existence as a species we lived out in the woods or in the savannas. And its only in the last couple of hundred years that we've decided to live in cities. And I don't think you can cut off from nature and say it doesn't have any consequences.

One city began to look for solutions. In Chicago, the mayor and political leaders called for a study of the city's street trees. It came to be called the Chicago Urban Forest Climate Project.

ROWNTREE: It came to fruition primarily because we'd done a study in Dayton, Ohio in the early 1980's where we looked at the role of vegetation and trees in modifying the climate and air pollution levels of Dayton, Ohio. Mayor Daly and his staff learned of that study and asked if my staff and I would conduct a three-year, one million dollar study of the city of Chicago's urban forest ecosystem. This was the first time we really focused on one city, particularly of that size, and that complexity, for a period of time with reasonably adequate resources.

DAVID NOWAK, Research Forester, USDA Forest Service: We looked at meteorology, air quality, carbon, energy, costs and benefits, and tried to wap it all together into the physical ecosystem, understanding of that.

They found that the benefits of trees were larger than anyone had imagined.

ROWNTREE: The role of vegetation in an urban system ranges from air cleansing, through energy conservation, through reducing peak runoff during storm events, into the very important visual and perceptual and social aspects of a community.

NOWAK: In areas that were high in tree cover you could get up to five and ten percent short term air quality improvements.

Air pollution was reduced. Temperatures dropped. The amount of smog declined. Trees absorbed water, reducing stormwater drainage.

McPHERSON: The benefits from those trees was nearly 2 1/2 times greater than the costs associated with the planting and management of those trees.

City officials have become dedicated to improving the inner city environment. They realised that not everybody can or should move to the suburbs. And the urban forest helps encourage people to stay in town.

In Sacremento, similar results were found.

McPHERSON: Six million trees provide about $64 million worth of benefits every year. And even though that's a substantial amount, that's really modest when you consider the impact that we're having on our environment. Trees can make a big difference to the quality of lives in urban areas. They modify the microclimate of our environments, they clean our air, they reduce flooding and rainfall runoff, they protect our soil from erosion. They just contribute to the quality of our environment, and the quality of our life in many, many ways.

RAY TRETHEWAY, Sacramento Tree Foundation: City planners and public works officials in Sacramento took to this rather quickly, this being urban forest, science, technical information that the urban forest does make a difference if there's investments, if there's planting, if there's care, if there's management. And that's principally because Sacramento's striving to become the best city possible. Last year the city took its first public opinion survey ever, and trees just came right off the top as the most important thing to the citizens of Sacramento.

At the Lawrence Berkeley labs, Hashim Akbari has found that tree planting and light color surfacing can contribute in a major way to cool cities.

AKBARI: By all means, shade trees appear to be one of the lowest-cost energy efficiency measures that exists. Typical payback that we expect for trees is to be something less than one to two years.

Others have begun to measure how trees might affect social conditions in a community and social health. A study was undertaken at the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago.

CAROL ADAMS, Chicago Housing Authority: Robert Taylor Homes is the largest public housing development in the world. 28 high rise buildings, from 21st Street to 55th Street. Concentated poverty, and high hopes.

WILLIAM C. SULLIVAN, Human Research Laboratory, University of Illinois: Some of the buildings have quite a number of trees, or a fair number of trees, right next to the buildings. And then you walk down a little bit further and you'll notice that not only are there no trees but there's hardly any grass or any green space at all. It's really a concrete jungle.

ESTHER DAVIS, Resident, Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago, Illinois: When I first came to Robert Taylor, there was more trees and grass and benches. You know, more grownups downstairs, a lot of, you know, parents and children. Now that they have took the grass away and added concrete, took the playgrounds away, there's less adults down and there's young kids but they have nothing to play on. You feel depressed and look at the concrete, nothing, no flowers, no grass, sometimes its a warm day and it feels, you know just depressing.

FRANCES KUO, Human Research Laboratory, University of Illinois: Before we started our research I would have said, its nice, you know, trees are nice, but the problems we're facing in our cities and our budgets are such that I'm not sure its worth it, and I think that through this research I have become convinced that, no, trees are really an important part of a supportive, humane environment. Without vegetation people, are very different beings.

SULLIVAN: People that live in intense poverty have to count on their neighbors for a lot of the social support that they need in their lives. We're finding trees produce settings in which neighbors get to know each other better and violence is reduced. Therefore, trees are associated with the reduction of one our most significant important public policy concerns of the day.

DAVIS: The trees give you and grass gives you, you know, the breeze it just vibrates through you, you feel calmer.

ADAMS: Trees have to do with beauty, and aesthetics, and appreciation of life, and a capacity to see growth. And we hope that the trees are a metaphor for the kind of growth we're going to see for the families and the individuals who live here.

SKIERA: The environment sets up a sense of place. I think it has a tremendous psychological impact on people in the environment. So I think we've just touched the top of the iceberg as far as what trees do to us psychologically. And what they do to us environmentally. And what they do to us physically. How they can modify climates, and sequester carbon dioxide, clean the air, slow the waters. We hear this story so much but we need to keep it up because political management needs to hear that story so that they understand that trees pay and they don't cost.

Robert Skiera was part of a model tree program in Milwaukee, where trees came to be at the center of city planning, not an add-on at the end.

SKIERA: One of the most important things in planting a tree is not the time of planting, it is the plan that allows the space both underground and overhead, and then the compatible tree that is set up by the forestry people that will fit into that site. So the site has to be prepared and the tree has to be engineered into the site so they both fit and complement themselves, the right tree in the right place is going to cost you 2.2% of the entire construction project for that road.

But planting is only the beginning. Milwaukee places a great deal of emphasis on maintaining the trees it plants.

SKIERA: We can plant the tree but we can't walk away from it. When we plant that tree we expect that tree to be there sixty years, and that means that you have to set up a dedicated funding source so that that tree will be pruned and maintained in a proper manner so that it will perform, maximum performance with minimum liability. Funding source for maintenance, funding source for maintenance, because that is the key.

Today, scientific knowledge is in hand and model programs have been created, but ironically, cutbacks have become the order of the day.

Austin's city forester turned to the local community for support.

JOHN GIEDRITIS, City Forester, Austin, Texas: Austin is a fairly new city in terms of its population. About half of the people who live here have lived here less than ten years. And we don't have a traditional tax and spend sort of mentality in Texas. Taxes are low, there's no business tax, there's no income tax at the city and state level. So we don't have a lot of money to provide the direct services like they do in other areas of the country. But along with that sort of philosophy of not having much money, there's also a philosophy that people have that when they want to get something done, they go out and do it. They help each other, sort of a frontier mentality.

They have developed model tree replanting programs at a fraction of the cost faced by other communities.

GIEDRITIS: And that idea of government acting as a facilitator as opposed to a direct provider has been a very, very powerful concept in Austin, and one that we've mined pretty heavily. And the way that we do that is we know which areas of town have low canopy cover or need trees, and we know what trees do very well. And we have a local dry cleaner who will pay us to buy the trees that we need to plant along the streets. And then we go to the individual homeowners and say "Would you like a tree in your front yard?" And we actually mark a spot in their front yard where they can plant a tree and we leave a little door hanger. And they tear the card off the door hanger and send it back to us and say yes, I'd like to plant a tree there and this is the kind of tree I want. We order the trees, the local dry cleaner pays for the trees, we drop the trees off at the peoples' houses, and they plant and water them. So the big expenses in tree planting, which are to buy the trees and plant them and water them, are overcome. So within the past three years we've planted about 10,000 trees, at an average taxpayer cost of about six dollars each, and a total cost per tree of about twenty five dollars each.

But elsewhere, others feel the government must be more involved.

ROWNTREE: The funding for urban forestry research is inadequate because of the complexity of the system that we're studying, because of the fact that we're on the steep part of the learning curve and because not everyone fully understands the science of urban forest ecosytem analysis and how it can be applied very quickly and in a leveraged way to produce large public benefits.

McPHERSON: We're just beginning to understand how urban ecosystems function. We're really just at the cusp of even learning how to study them.

MILLER: Urban forestry became an issue at universities in the late 60s and early 1970s. So that would beabout when these courses were first taught. At the University of Wisconsin at Steven's Point, we started our program in 1973 with the teaching of a course in urban forestry, and within a few years developed an undergraduate program in urban forestry. In recent years it's been much more recognized. Early on, I think rural foresters tended to think of urban forestry as something they didn't have to deal with.

Another such program was established at Southern University in Baton Rouge.

BOBBY PHILLS, Dean & Research Director, College of Agriculture, Southern University: We have not only the first BS degree in urban forestry, but we have been recently approved to offer a masters and a Ph.D. in urban forestry and this will truly be the cream of the crop for urban forestry in the nation academically.

The students from these programs have already begun to be involved at the community level.

Elsewhere, leaders of youth programs have discovered the vital role of wilderness and working in the out of doors. In Chicago, the "River Rats" were formed.

ANDREW HARTT, Chicago Youth Center Fellowship House: We all went over to an area about a half a mile from here on the Chicago River, and the young people called it the Amazon. The kids started adopting the name River Rats because they were down there cleaning up; they brought over nine or ten tons of garbage up out of that site.

These studies and community programs have received some support, but only only a small percentage of cities receive help. Others have felt the government should do more.

Some in the U.S. Forest Service agreed.

DWYER: We began to realize the significance of the urban forest in so many different dimensions, and started looking more towards an ecosystem or a more holistic view. So it's been a matter of broadening of our approach. People are still moving from the city to the suburbs to find different types of environments but we're seeing a great deal more emphasis on improving the inner city environment.

MACIE: We have experienced a certain degree of political support over the last ten years and its produced significant results nationwide but I think there could be more, you know, a doubling of that effort would probably have a quantum increase in the amount of impact.

LYONS: And there was a group of us who were concerned that street trees and urban parks and open space wasn't getting adequate attention, that those resources were declining, that they were being impacted by disease and human use and pollution and that they required some attention because 80% of all Americans live in cities and metropolitan areas.

This support has come none too soon for many ordinary citizens. In Los Angeles dense smog was killing even the trees in the mountains. Andy Lipkis began planting trees and launched a formal organization called "TreePeople".

ANDY LIPKIS, TreePeople: The reason why TreePeople is one word is because it implies that joining hands, that together and working together with each other and with trees is really where it all begins.

In Baton Rouge, great tracts of green space were being cut down.

MORRIS: A group of citizens, about 12 people, got together, they were very concerned about the changes that were occurring in the urban forest and the lack of planning from the city government. So they decided that if there was going to be something done to alleviate that they would have to do it themselves.

Atlanta had become a treeless maze of concrete.

BANSLEY: By the time Trees Atlanta came into existence in 1985 we had almost no trees downtown. So now we're trying hard to restore some of that.

In Sacramento, severe budget cuts in 1981 led the mayor and citizens like Ray Tretheway to establish the Sacramento Tree Foundation.

TRETHEWAY: Tree planting was not on the agenda for county planning. City and county planners and public works officials and department heads have only recently been acquainted with the technical, scientific benefits of our urban forests.

In New York City, the Environmental Action Coalition was formed.

WOLF: Open space and trees were not part of the concept of New York. And so you have extraordinary parks like Prospect and Central, you have huge woodland parks in the northern Bronx, and then you have neighborhood after neighborhood with almost no open space.

By the late 1980s, non-profit groups were being formed in cities and states throughout the country. In 1993, they formed the Alliance for Community Trees.

WOLF: The Alliance for Community Trees is a network, it's a nationwide network of not-for-profit groups that work with urban forestry. Right now we have 43 members. We are not in all states. We're in 28. We are hoping eventually to have about 60 or 70 members, and to reach all states with at least one group.

The oldest non-profit and most influential is American Forests, based in Washington, D.C.

MOLL: American Forests has been in the role of organizing the national urban forest conferences since 1982 and at each conference we try to gather the information that's available in the urban forestry community and in the conservation community and pick out the most important issues for developing the urban forestrry movement.

These organizations are part of an expanding movement, and yet they are still struggling just to get recognition of the importance of urban forests. A wall continues to exist between environmentalists and policymakers at the city, state and federal levels.

MOLL: The science of urban forestry is developing rapidly. Yet we still see cutbacks in programs in communities to take care of their trees. And there is a gap of course between science and public policy, and that to a great extent is what American Forests is concerned about. How do we communicate the scientific information to people who are making decisions in communities?

WOLF: I've worked with a lot of city administrations over the past twenty years. And I would say that until recently they have had no, like NO, understanding of why green space is important.

When many non-profits began it wasn't easy. There was no system. Every single hole had to be hand dug. It was a lot of work.

BANSLEY: In our very intensely developed downtown area, it's hard to put trees along the sidewalks. Our first trees, I think we planted like only 10 trees, and it was a big effort, but we got it done.

To Andy Lipkis in Los Angeles, the experience of planting trees was life changing. Working with people and seeing a dead land come back to life was a powerful inspiration.

Baton Rouge Green is working with a local university and the public school system.

The Sacramento Tree Foundation works with city officials.

SKIERA: I think that the non profits are in a unique position to be able to help the urban forestry condition by disseminating information, taking the scientific information we have on all the benefits of trees and putting it before the policymakers.

The results can be impressive. The Martin Luther King Boulevard in Los Angeles was transformed in one day.

Trees Atlanta expanded.

BANSLEY: We were planting about, I'd say, about 40 trees a year. And then the Olympics hit. And the funding quadrupled. We did what, 4.5 million dollars worth of trees in the downtown area. We were planting about a thousand trees a year for the Olymics, and that was really a lot of moving and a lot of action. And we're still carrying on that momentum right now.

New York citizens began working with school children.

WOLF: When we took them out to kind of do tree work and identify trees and kind of get close to trees, I realized you know, we tapped into something more powerful than anything we ever dreamed.

The Chicago River Rats have transformed the lives of former gang members and their families.

HARTT: I see young people involved in this project who say things such as "you know, before I started working on this project, I'd walk by trees, and I'd walk by flowers and not really pay that much attention, but all of a sudden things like trees became more important to me. And families become involved, and it's just a snowball effect. And I certainly see that happening here, and it's an exciting thing to see happen when young people are involved in gardens then all of a sudden it goes up generationally and then their parents come out and say "What's going on out here?" and they see what's happening.

ANTWONNE PERSON, Chicago River Rats: I think it has shown a togetherness of the community around here, because they see what we're doing and some people they like to volunteer their hours around here and help out and once you get to talking to them they really seem interested in nature. And that's a way we've been able to help the community, and they're very concerned about this project.

JOSE LOPEZ, Chicago River Rats: It's just like a place where you can come and see a lot of green. It makes you feel good to know you helped, you know, your neighborhood out. We're making this a better place.

GIEDRITIS: We are forest creatures. And we can't live without the forest. I mean, we don't plant the tree for today, you plant it for the future. So it's a sort of thing that people do that can give them hope in their community.

The work of non-profits and community groups has been important, but the management of the urban forest, say many scientists, is more than a volunteer job. It will require a team effort of government, business and citizens.

McPHERSON: When we think of the urban forest we think of trees and being solid and permanent and long-lived, but in fact the urban forest is really a very fragile resource. We can look at what happened to our communities with Dutch elm disease and how all of a sudden the forest was decimated. We can look at the impact of hurricanes and the removal of large numbers of trees, and realize that this resource can disappear in a very short period of time.

MILLER: I think people need nature. It's not going to be worth the effort to live in a city if I can't have something green around me, if I can't go out and hear birds, if I can't have some piece of nature available to me its not going to be a very interesting life.

McPHERSON: All of humankind has its roots tied directly to the land and that's an inescapable truth. And I think the further we get removed from it, the more disconnected we are, the less functional we are, we become more dysfunctional. And that's really the final analysis, when you're thinking of an ecosystem, you're really a community. All of this stuff, this nature, is an extension of our community. We're really not that different not far removed from the land. We just have to remind ourselves of that.

SKIERA: Urban forestry is in a key position to do great things for the future. We have the science. We have the people now that have the degrees in urban forestry. There's still a long way to go. All we have to do is want to do it.

America, said Olmstead, was the one country where democracy made trees and parklands available to everyone. Here, nature was not merely the soil, it was the fountain of energy that flowed through and gave diversity to American life -- and as we are now discovering, protected the very biological processes on which we depend.

Today the fate of the forest falls increasingly to cities where the great vast majority of Americans live.