Keeping The Emerald City Green
by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA on 09. 7.06
From Seattle, a duo of stories aiming to keep the Emerald City from losing it's green hue. First, Mayor Greg Nickels wants to plant a new tree for every man, woman and child in Seattle (about 649,000) to help "regreen" the city over the next three decades. Since the early 1970's, Seattle has lost more than half of its tree canopy to growth and development; aside from giving us more trees to hug, they're valuable urban assets for filtering pollution from the air, reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and absorbing rainwater before it becomes contaminated and runs into area waterways. A few miles north of the mayor's office, Seattle's Ballard neighborhood is looking to become the nation's first climate-neutral community. The initiative, sponsored by politicians, environmentalists and businesspeople alike, would offset the neighborhood's carbon footprint through investments in alternative energy through Climate Trust (we've featured them before, twice), a Portland-based organization that develops and oversees carbon neutralizing projects. Seattle non-profit NetGreen, who is directed by Flexcar founder Tracy Carroll, will be helping to get the word out to the 2,400 Ballard residents and businesses, with a goal to get everyone to commit to offset their carbon emissions by the end of 2006. If successful, the initative would likely spread throughout Seattle and King County. ::Mayor's Tree-Planting Plan [Seattle P-I] via ::Hugg and ::Ballard Goes Climate-Neutral [Seattle P-I] via ::Gristmill
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As a life-long resident of the Seattle area, I am very excited about this initiative to "regreen" the city. The one thing that I continue to struggle with is understanding how to calculate my personal carbonfootprint. What the equation used to determine this number and what is the equation for offsetting it? make sense?
What Seattle needs is not just more green in downtown, but more greenspace. There are really only two parks in 'downtown' Seattle. One is laughably small, and the other is literally on top of the freeway.
In recent years they have made two new parks available, but in both cases they are dog parks (gravel, chainlink, and a handful of trees). In one of those cases it was a reclamation of another park that had been lovingly dubbed by the locals, "Crack Park". The other is a stone's throw from the park over the freeway.
We have a lot of tall buildings going up north of downtown in an area that's still predominantly parking lots and 2-story buildings. There's a tremendous opportunity there to take out essentially undeveloped properties and build a park (or two!) inside of a growth area that's within walking distance of the business and shopping districts, but I don't think it's on the city council's radar.