Losing Trees

THE FACTS, as they often are these days, are unpleasant. Last year approximately thirty six million trees are removed from America's cities, mostly from urban and suburban development but also from disease. Furthermore, in recent years, the average number of tress per American city has steadily declined, as has the total number of trees thriving in American cities. Overwhelming teh cause is dirt being replaced with concrete, and new buildings going up on valuable real estate. What is needed, of course, is exactly the opposite; for Amerian cities to increase the number of trees each year, while limithing growth an development to sustainable levels, environmentally friendly levels. American cities would contributemore to human and environmental survival by focusing future growth on building up, not out. Humanity needs to stop developing more and more land every year, and instead set aside a suzeable portion of the Earth's surface as permanent wildnerness and wildlife habitit. In face these movements, tree planting projects and international agreements on development limitations are ongoing; currently there is much support, growing support for setting aside a minimum of thirty percent of the Earth's land and water areas exclusively for non human life and nature. And, needles to say, the global human population needs to startlevelling off and even perhpas declining. Just the hotoher day human being number eight billion came into the world; what is the optimum number of human inhabitants of Earth? Estimates very; most say somewhat less than eight billion. Global warming cannot be stopped and reversed merely by planting trees. We cannot plant our way out of our dire predicament. There simply isn't enough surface area on Earth to plant enough trees to offest the damage we have already done, in terms of climate change and general environmental destruction. But a couple trillion trees planted during the next few years would certainly help. The good news is that the climate change deniers are dying off, albeit painfully slowly, and the new "up and coming" generations are much much more aware of and concerned about the Earth's fufure and the future of humanity living on it. Its about time. Its a tough job, but, as they say, somebody's gotta do it...When I was in ninth grade I joined a high school club called "The Ecology Club". In those days, the late sixties, there was. Our club participated by picking up litter and garbage at local widespread concern for the environment. Our club participated by picking up litter and garbage at local public parks. Pollution was a big issue, but nobody had any real idea back then how dire our environmental destruction and climate change emergency actually were, and are. Now we know, and have only ourselves to blame for our inaction.