Free Republic

London’s leafy streets and gardens have long been prized for their beauty — and more recently their ability to counteract carbon emissions and improve air quality. But the value of urban trees can also be measured with money. A new report from Britain’s Office of National Statistics estimates tree cover saved the capital more than 5 billion pounds ($6.56 billion) from 2014 to 2018 through air cooling alone. Additionally, by keeping summer temperatures bearable for workers, trees prevented productivity losses of almost 11 billion pounds. The estimates underline just how vital the role trees play is in making cities comfortable...

Hiker, 28, is killed when 200-foot redwood falls on top of him on national park dirt trail Subhradeep Dutta, 28, of Edina, Minnesota, was hiking at Muir National Woods Monument north of San Francisco with two other people Tuesday. Five giant redwood trees suddenly fell while the trio were on a marked dirt trail about 4.30pm, including a 200-foot tree that struck Dutta. He was pronounced dead at the scene. A female hiker also was injured by falling debris and treated at a nearby hospital. A second man was not hurt The trees may have fallen due to wet ground...

Hundreds of Central Texas students debut projects Tuesday that illustrate their advocacy on local issues they care about, like homelessness, school safety and climate change. Civics Day — a sort of science fair, but for government — is the product of the national nonprofit Generation Citizen, a group that gives middle and high school students hands-on experience working with local governments. “I can’t think of a more important thing to teach my kids than that their voice matters,” said Kyle Olson, a government teacher at Austin ISD’s Northeast Early College High School... Olson’s AP government class brainstormed ideas at the...

Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?

Lee County District Attorney Brandon Hughes tells WRBL-TV that Harvey Updyke is being ordered to appear in court Oct. 30 to explain himself. Updyke served more than 70 days in jail in 2013 and was ordered to pay about $800,000 in restitution after admitting to poisoning trees at Toomer's Corner in Auburn. Fans traditionally rolled the trees with toilet paper after a win.

I repeat: 500,000 trees. Killed. (That’s all U.S. Sunday newspapers combined.) What a bummer. **SNIP** What I found was bad news… >> 500,000 trees must be cut down just to produce each week’s Sunday newspaper (all U.S. Sunday papers combined). >> In total, newsprint consumption in the U.S. (2009) meant a loss of 95 million trees, generation of 126 billion gallons of waste water and emission of 73 billion pounds of greenhouse gases. Ouch! >> Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees. >> If all newspaper was recycled—including the daily papers—we’d save about...

Most people think—and charlatan environmentalists are happy to reinforce the impression—that deforestation is taking place on a massive scale, that the world is literally going to run out of trees. I have noted from time to time the data from the United Nations Global Forest Resource Assessment (UNGFRA) that has found that deforestation stopped at least 25 years ago, and that net reforestation has been taking place. But the UN data is not as good as one would like. This week, however, Naturemagazine published a major new studywith much more precise measurements and analysis than the UNGFRA based on 35...

A team of researchers from the University of Maryland, the State University of New York and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has found that new global tree growth over the past 35 years has more than offset global tree cover losses. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes using satellite data to track forest growth and loss over the past 35 years and what they found by doing so. There has been a growing consensus in recent years that because humans cut down so many trees (most particularly in the rainforests) that global tree cover is...

Eat a bug and save a tree: that is the message being sent to the residents of an east China city where an annual explosion in cicada numbers is having a devastating effect on the local greenery. The earnest appeal was made by Sun Xiaoping, the official in charge of green spaces in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, according to a report by local newspaper Dushi Kuaibao. Cicadas reproduce in huge numbers in July and August, with the average female producing about 100 eggs at a time. When the young insects emerge they gorge on the sap of the willow...

Scientists announced they are on the cusp of perfecting technology that would pull CO2 from the air and convert it into a fuel source. The tool could help humans reverse some of the effects of global warming and perhaps give our planet a second chance. In a study published Thursday in Joule, scientists at the Canadian company Carbon Engineering explained their CO2 extraction plans. The machine works by sucking air into cooling towers, the. Once inside the towers, the CO2 comes into contact with a liquid that captures the gas. Once captured, the CO2 would then be used as the...

A group of female activists in Oaxaca, Mexico, held a mass marriage ceremony where they each wed their own splintery groom to draw attention to illegal logging – a serious and devastating problem in the country. Around a third of Mexico’s land is covered by forest. Oaxaca is one of five states hit hardest by deforestation, mostly caused by criminal groups, Metro reports. The women are trying to take a stand against the practice and are hoping the mass marriage will get people more involved with saving the woodlands.|

The Kumano-zakura, photographed in Kushimoto, Wakayama Prefecture, in March 2017 (Provided by the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute) Photo/Illustraion WAKAYAMA--A botanist says he has identified a new species of cherry tree in the Kii Peninsula, which, if verified, will be the first to be discovered in the wild in Japan in about a century. The early-blooming “Kumano-zakura” (Kumano cherry) is thought to be distributed in Wakayama, Nara and Mie prefectures over an area measuring 90 kilometers from north to south and 60 km from east to west. Toshio Katsuki, 50, who heads the cherry tree preservation team at the...

Climate change is a sprawling, complex problem. But there is an astonishingly simple way to make a difference: plant more trees. Trees scrub pollution from the air, reduce erosion, improve water quality, provide homes for animals and insects, and enhance our lives in countless other ways. It turns out that ecosystem restoration is also an emerging business opportunity. A new report from the World Resources Institute and the Nature Conservancy says governments around the world have committed to reviving nearly 400 million acres of wilderness — an area larger than South Africa. As countries push to regrow forests, startups are dreaming up...

Palm Springs [California] will remove a row of trees blocking a historically African-American neighborhood from a city-owned golf course. [Snip] Many longtime residents of the neighborhood previously told the (Palm Springs, Calif.) Desert Sun they believed the trees were planted for racist reasons in the 1960s, and remained a lasting remnant of the history of segregation in the city. Residents said the invasive tamarisks, which block views of the Tahquitz Creek Golf Course and San Jacinto mountains, have artificially depressed property values and prevented black families from accumulating wealth in their property over the past half century.

Renowned Italian architect Stefano Boeri has argued that public spaces should be redesigned to include natural barriers such as giant plants to protect pedestrians from possible terror attacks. Boeri is the brain behind the sustainable residential building project Vertical Forests, the first of which was built in Milan, hosting thousands of trees and plants on a tower block. He has championed the idea of incorporating greenery into urban planning to tackle problems caused by urbanization, including air pollution, and a larger green “city” will be built near the Chinese city of Liuzhou in the next few years. Now Boeri has...

Hippies - Crying Over Dead Trees

SEATTLE (AP) — Another federal appeals court has upheld a decision blocking President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban. The ruling Monday from a unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals deals the administration another legal defeat as the Supreme Court considers a separate case on the issue. The judges say the president violated U.S. immigration law by discriminating against people based on their nationality and that Trump failed to show their entry into the country would hurt American interests.

Peter Wohlleben’s bestselling book claims that trees can talk to one another and have relationships and social structures. A petition started by German academics is now circulating to denounce these “fairy tales.” “Trees are very social beings,” says German forester Peter Wohlleben; “the parents, the ‘mother trees’, look after their offspring…they like to stand close together and cuddle.” They also talk to each other, have sex, form friendships and feel physical pain, he told the Canadian documentary series “Intelligent Trees.” Wohlleben’s bestselling book “The Hidden Life of Trees,” caused a stir at Britain’s Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts...

President Donald Trump ran up a steep security tab in New York City before taking office in January.   Now, a Bronx golf course operated by the Trump Organization might be in need of a little more protection. Two men with a chainsaw jumped over an 8-foot-high fence along the 15th hole of Trump Links at Ferry Point in New York and started toppling trees on Tuesday morning, CBS New York reported.

The trees that shade, cool and feed people from Ventura County to the Mexican border are dying so fast that within a few years it’s possible the region will look, feel, sound and smell much less pleasant than it does now.“We’re witnessing a transition to a post-oasis landscape in Southern California,” says Greg McPherson, a supervisory research forester with the U.S. Forest Service who has been studying what he and others call an unprecedented die-off of the trees greening Southern California’s parks, campuses and yards. Botanists in recent years have documented insect and disease infestations as they’ve hop-scotched about the...