By David Pendered
Oakland Cemetery is launching a $1 million fundraising campaign to preserve a tree canopy that has suffered a loss of about 50 percent since 1982. This is the latest push in the cemetery’s ongoing effort to promote and protect trees in the city’s original garden cemetery.
Back during the Civil War, the land that is now known as the Bobby Jones Golf Course was a battlefield that witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of the Atlanta Campaign.
Today, the Bobby Jones Golf Course has become a battlefield once again. But this time, the casualties were more than 800 trees that were cut down to make way for a redeveloped Bobby Jones Golf Course.
The Atlanta Public Schools is seeking to cut down 60 trees on a key piece of property in the center of the city.
The trees have been growing on the land that surrounds the former David T. Howard Elementary School from the days when Martin Luther King Jr. attended the elementary school – only a few blocks away from his birth home.
Atlanta’s Zoning Review Board voted a moment of relief to some of the folks in an East Atlanta neighborhood yesterday, when board members recommended the city deny a developer’s rezoning plan that envisions building 20 houses in a place known as “Ormewood Forest.”
East Lake. Lake Claire. Vine City. Parkway Drive. Lakeview Avenue. Ponce de Leon Avenue.
Atlanta is full of streets and neighborhoods with names that hark back to a different time – when the city’s natural environment defined communities before they became built up, paved over or tunneled under.
Now a comprehensive effort is underway to bring back Atlanta’s natural amenities and make them part of our city’s future.
The organizers of an Atlanta mayoral candidate forum on green space Thursday night had to move their event to a bigger auditorium — their first venue couldn’t hold everyone who wanted to know more about what candidates propose for the city’s trees, watersheds and parks.
This is the third column in a series about Atlanta’s trees
A groundswell of community leaders are doing all they can to make sure Joni Mitchell’s song “Big Yellow Taxi” doesn’t become Atlanta’s reality.
The song’s chorus feels all too familiar:
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Atlanta is uniquely positioned as a city in a forest, and there is a movement afoot to make sure it stays that way.
This is second in a multi-part series about Atlanta’s tree canopy.
We have always described Atlanta as a city in a forest.
Amazingly, it is true. Our old growth forests are among our most special treasures in metro Atlanta.
Joan Maloof, founder of the Maryland-based Old Growth Forest Network, is an author who has written several books about the environment including her latest: “Nature’s Temples: The Complex World of Old Growth Forests.”
Hundreds and hundreds of trees will be cut down in the Peachtree Hills community as a result of two developments currently being proposed.
Ashton Woods – an ironic name for the developer – is planning to clear cut a 4-acre parcel next to Peachtree Hills Park – removing a total of 148 trees.
For too long, growth in the Atlanta region has translated to the clear-cutting of mature trees – undisputedly one of our greatest natural assets in Georgia.
It happened again in early February.
Several groves of mature oaks and magnolias in front of Piedmont Atlanta Hospital on Peachtree Road were cut down to make way for the new Piedmont Atlanta Hospital Tower.
The concept of the City of Atlanta doubling or tripling its population in the next 30 years may sound overwhelming.
Where are we going to put all these people? And will we need to sacrifice our beautiful tree canopy, our treasured neighborhoods and our quality of life?
By Guest Columnist KATHERYN KOLB, director of EcoAddendum, which raises awareness of Georgia’s natural environment
The greater metropolitan area of Atlanta was predominantly old growth forest less than 20 decades ago. For those of us who have lived a few decades, this seems perhaps not such a long time. For trees and forests and ecosystems, whose maturity is measured in centuries rather than decades, it is but the blink of an eye.
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