By Chloe Kowalski ’12, Contributing Writer
\nDECEMBER 5, 2011<\/p>\n
Imagine your city has a spare $1 million. Then, try telling the city commission the money should not go to improving education, roads, sewer lines, public health, or social services. Instead, the funds should go to planting trees.<\/p>\n
Sound crazy?<\/p>\n
For Will Wilson, associate biology professor at Duke University, it\u2019s all in a day\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do I say \u2018No, take $1 million from the pre-K program and plant trees with it?\u2019 To do that, you really have to know how it\u2019s going to help the city,” he says.<\/p>\n
Holding a doctorate in physics from the University of Hawaii, Wilson recently began working with the city of Durham, N.C., to encourage planting more vegetation in city areas. Last Friday —\u00a0on\u00a0Arbor Day —\u00a0Wilson visited Furman to ask and explain the question: What good are urban trees?<\/p>\n
For starters, Wilson said trees help keep a\u00a0city cooler during the hot summer.\u00a0Shopping malls and areas with lots of development can have temperatures 10 to 15 degrees warmer than\u00a0forested areas.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019ve done is we\u2019ve removed the trees, we\u2019ve removed that cooling process, and now we\u2019re stuck with the heat,\u201d he said<\/p>\n
Wilson noted a connection between areas with low levels of urban vegetation to economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.\u00a0He said the poor are even more disadvantaged without green space.<\/p>\n
Studies, Wilson said, show that as vegetation increases, domestic violence and stress levels decrease, while child development and air quality improves. Furthermore, water evaporation\u00a0decreases with less impervious surfaces, which translates into better ozone levels and rainfall.<\/p>\n
The bottom line, Wilson said, is that people matter in the equation for determining sustainable ways of life, and people have to recognize the positive benefits of creating green canopies. In budgeting for social programs, he said, cities need to consider the long-term implications of improving mental, physical and environmental health through planting urban trees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Chloe Kowalski ’12, Contributing Writer
\nDECEMBER 5, 2011<\/p>\n
Imagine your city has a spare $1 million. Then, try telling the city commission the money should not go to improving education, roads, sewer lines, public health, or social services.\u00a0Instead, the funds should go to planting trees.<\/p>\n
Sound crazy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":253,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,17,37,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-centers-and-institutes","category-earth-environmental-and-sustainability-sciences","category-shi-institute-for-sustainable-communities"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}