Trees Make Us Better, Not Just the World
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Originally posted at:
http://www.knee1.com/news/mainstory.cfm/326


Trees Sweeten the World

While the nation's parks and recreation spaces are a focal point for Healthy People 2010, Richard Killingsworth, MPH, director of the Active Living by Design and associate research professor in the Department of Health and Behavior and Health Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wants us to think more in terms of our every day lives: how we might get more activity in just by going about our business.

"Unfortunately, physical activity has been engineered out of our daily lives," Killingsworth told the Trust for Public Land. In our haste to pave paradise when we were moving from the farm to town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we got a bit overzealous.

Kathleen Wolf, PhD, a research social scientist in urban forest environment and behavior at the University of Washington (UW), talked to us about the problem. "With all the concern about obesity and physical activity, the transportation industry is having to rethink how streets are designed because people want to walk to get physical activity," she said. "So the research is starting to come out on how streets with trees on them affect this.

"The walk-ability of a community depends on the density of service nodes in a block, but it seems that the tree factor is part of that as well," said Wolf. "Studies at the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M found that parents who have school-age children are more inclined to encourage the kids to walk to school if the route is lined with trees.

"Also a team of graduate students at UW looked at residential neighborhoods that had grocery stores in walking distance. They compared streets that were tree-lined to those that were not and found that residents perceived that that distance was less if there was greening. So people may be more inclined to walk if they think it's not as far."

Plant a Street Tree?

If you're inspired and want to be part of increasing what's known as the urban canopy, there are a number of national and local organizations that offer help. The National Arbor Day Foundation promotes the planting and maintenance of urban forests at www.arborday.org. Also, most cities and towns have various groups that will assist homeowners and communities interested in adding the joys of the urban canopy to their environs.