Friday Tree Fodder: local & national news
- The Oregonian reported yesterday that a for-profit subsidiary of Portland-based Ecotrust will begin selling carbon credits from the land it owns in the Pacific Northwest.
The deal, to be announced today, is a milestone in Ecotrust Forest Management’s long-term plan to purchase hundreds of thousands of formerly clear-cut acres from Alaska through Northern California using revenue from carbon credits and timber sales.
- Want to hear what a tree’s percussion section sounds like? “Bioacoustician” Bernie Krause has recorded what he calls the rhythmic vascular system of thirsty trees, according to a story in boingboing.net.
- A new stretch of waterfront trees irked some Seattle homeowners enough to request their removal last night at a neighborhood association meeting, reports the prolific West Seattle Blog. The parks department apparently planted the trees to counteract their irrigation problems, but nearby homeowners are worried about their waterfront views.
- What’s an arborist? Washington D.C. nonprofit Casey Trees should know—they have six of them on staff and recently wrote a great description on their blog.
- In many ways, New Orleans is still in recover mode. One aspect brought to light this week by The Times-Picayune: tree canopy.
Armed with $750,000 in federal grant money, the Department of Parks and Parkways in New Orleans is embarking on what city officials say is the city’s most ambitious greening project in two decades: a citywide initiative that calls for planting nearly 4,000 trees, including some unusual varieties, during the next year.
The effort is the latest push by Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration to rebuild an urban canopy that lost an estimated 100,000 trees after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, many of them because of saltwater intrusion.
–Toshio Suzuki