By Guest Columnist DEBRA PEARSON, retired educator with Atlanta Public Schools Never in my lifetime have I witnessed such a strong societal response to a health crisis. I am a member of the age demographic that is most at risk for coronavirus infection. I have thus been sequestered in my home for several days. Yet, I […]
Tag: Trees
Posted inColumns
Over 8,000 healthy trees felled yearly as promised protections stall
By Guest Columnist LEIGH BURTON FINLAYSON, a resident of Grant Park
According to a report distributed by the Atlanta City Planning Department at an Atlanta City Council tree ordinance work session last autumn, 48,306 healthy trees were cut or cleared in the last six years within the city limits of Atlanta (Fiscal Year 2014 to 2019). The City blessed the cutting of these trees, issuing the necessary permits for their removal.
Posted inColumns
It shouldn’t be this easy to cut down healthy trees in Atlanta
What a mess.
Back in November, I wrote a column about a couple dozen of high visibility trees in Midtown that were in danger of being cut down.
Posted inColumns, Maria's Metro
With sudden death Alvah Hardy, APS and Atlanta lose a true public servant
Life can be so fleeting.
That was the first thought that came to mind when Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Meria Carstarphen called me early Saturday afternoon to tell me Alvah Hardy had been killed in car accident Friday night.
Hardy was the executive director of facilities services for APS, and he was responsible for all the capital improvements underway at numerous schools across the city.
Posted inMaria's Metro
Public speaks out on behalf of Atlanta’s trees
Atlanta residents are speaking loud and clear. Trees matter.
For nearly two years, the city and its consultants have been working on a new tree ordinance. Countless community meetings have been held. And the public has been promised draft legislation of a new ordinance since June.
Posted inMaria's Metro
Mourning the loss of dozens of trees along Peachtree in Midtown
It is not a good time to be a tree in Midtown Atlanta.
Trees are being cut down at three high-profile sites along Peachtree Street – and what’s most amazing is that in each of these cases, these trees have been in public hands – either the city of Atlanta or the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
Posted inLatest News
Plan calls for saving oak trees, widening sidewalks at Brookhaven shopping center
A proposal to save five specimen oak trees in exchange for tweaking the sidewalk requirements at a busy shopping center along Peachtree Road in Brookhaven, near MARTA’s Brookhaven Station, has received preliminary approval from city planners.
Posted inLatest News
As furor rises over tree cutting in Atlanta, city looks to extend tree-planting program
Amid the rising furor in Atlanta over the future of the tree canopy as trees are felled for development on a continuing basis, the city is considering allocating $1.7 million to renew contracts with two organizations that plant and help maintain trees on city-controlled land – Trees Atlanta and Tri-Scapes Inc.
Posted inLatest News
Tech pays tribute to fallen willow oak that dates to late 1800s
Leave it to the folks at Georgia Tech to turn the random falling of a towering tree into a learning experience and exhibit. The willow oak that stood for more than 100 years on campus has been rendered into remembrances that are on display through March 8.
Posted inLatest News
Oakland Cemetery launches $1 million campaign to protect shrinking tree canopy
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.
Posted inColumns
The tree massacre at the Bobby Jones Golf Course a blow to Atlanta
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.
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Mass Timber Builds a Promising Future
By David Bailey. David is a Project Manager at Southface. The City of Portland will soon be home to the country’s tallest mass timber building. Scheduled to be completed in 2018, the Framework – as the building has been called – will be a soaring twelve-story tall mixed-use development that sheds light on the growing […]
Posted inColumns
APS seeks to cut down dozens of healthy trees for Howard middle school project
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.
Posted inLatest News
Struggle over East Atlanta development heads to Council committee
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.”
Posted inColumns
Atlanta striving to restore our natural amenities – our trees and our waterways
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.
Posted inLatest News
Mayor candidates talk equity, vie for green vote, at Downtown forum
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.
Posted inColumns
A growing chorus: Atlanta must be proactive to preserve its unique tree canopy
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.
Posted inColumns
Atlanta’s urban tree canopy leads the nation; but most trees are not protected
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.”
Posted inColumns
Trees in Peachtree Hills on chopping block while developer gets easement through park
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.
Posted inColumns
As Atlanta grows, let’s make sure we protect our precious 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.
