(photo credit: Street Stars on Flickr)What a lovely idea! Plant a million trees in New York City in the next 10 years as part of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC initiative. A big undertaking in a city that can't even take care of the trees it already planted, but hey, I am not complaining. Plant away, I say!
It sure won't be easy. Even Park's Commish Adrian Benepe seemed sceptical about being able to plant all these trees in our fair city.
If you would like to request your own street tree in front of your home, click here. If you have a great spot in mind for a tree anywhere in the city , click here. The Parks Department will put you on their list and will show up one day with a tree for your special spot.
Below is an article from New York Magazine from May.
THAT’S A WHOLE LOT OF TREES
The most immediately persuasive— and apparently easy-to-envisage—part of Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC is the initiative to plant 1 million trees. Who doesn’t love trees? Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff called it “the most ambitious tree-planting program ever undertaken, certainly by any American city.” It easily out-reforests Chicago, where Mayor Richard M. Daley has won awards for planting fewer than half that number. But is it even possible? Planted at the standard 350 per acre, our new trees would blanket 3.4 Central Parks. If you planted the trees 25 feet apart on both sides of a street, your lane would be shaded for 2,367 miles—from here to Salt Lake City. It’s also 69 percent more trees than the 592,130 now planted on city streets. The city plants 8,000 trees a year, mostly to replace dead ones; Bloomberg’s plan installs 23,000 annually for ten years. What about the other three-quarters of a million? Some will go to reforesting parks. But “to hit 1 million trees, we can’t do that just on public property,” admits Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. “We could probably get about halfway there; the rest has to happen in other people’s initiative.” Institutions, backyards, and nonprofits will need to pick up the slack.
—Carol Vinzant
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2 comments:
Is this so the Dept. of Sanitation can issue more tickets for fillty sidewalks??
I doubt it. I am sure it is a genuine attempt to beautify and to help clean New York's air. My point is that the Park's Department has trouble maintaining the trees and the parks its responsible for now. I wonder if the city will increase the funding for that department to go along with this initiative. Right now, Parks does not have the manpower or the money to actually prune street trees on a regular basis.
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