why is green

The Pittsburgh Advocates for Smart Urbanism (PASU) held its second meeting last night, welcoming the Friends of the Urban Forest. PASU is organized by myself and LV focusing on smart urbanism ideas and educating its members about the local community. The group’s meetings are a deconstructed version of the idea for our event later this year. We plan to welcome a different group each month to present their ideas, activities, and knowledge about Pittsburgh to our members.

Last night we had about 10-15 people turn out for the event at New Amsterdam in Lawrenceville. Friends works with the city to plan, plant, care, and advocate for city neighborhood trees. We learned that despite having a very healthy number of trees across the city, Pittsburgh’s trees are concentrated too heavily in its parks causing the city to actually fall below the national average for street trees. This is measured by calculating the ratio of street trees per capita. In Pittsburgh’s case that ratio is 1:11, whereas the national average for US cities is 1:3. A city study released last year, STRATUM (see page 15), estimated that Pittsburgh would need to plant an additional 90,000 trees to reach this benchmark.

We also heard from Molly, who is a Lawrenceville Tree Tender. Friends offers a Tree Tender training program throughout the year to learn how to plant and care for young trees. Molly, who has been tending trees for eight years, shared her experiences with us. She is part a Tree Tenders group, who plan regular weekend events to clean up and tend local trees for businesses and residents of Lawrenceville. The impact of the presentations was that we all realized how important trees are to a thriving neighborhood.

Following the presentation, we launched the event idea to the group. I was hoping to find a couple people who were (a) willing to volunteer time with me to get this planned and executed, and (b) experienced and skilled in planning large events. There was some good and bad news to come of my announcement. First of all, the good news is that the idea was received well by the group and I even got a few people to sign up to help me out (most notably, a very experienced event planner and good friend of LV).

However, the bad news is that we realized that another event idea is gaining momentum for 2009 in Pittsburgh and comes from a much bigger organization. The good news is that this organization happens to be Bioneers. There is a group in the city trying to get the Bioneers to host a satellite conference in Pittsburgh this year. We hope the PASU can collaborate with this group. We will be following up on this in the coming days by attending a meeting on Monday with our new friends at Friends. Being a host for part of the Bioneers conference would be a huge boost to the local movement in Pittsburgh and give the community a chance to come together around some common goals just as our original event idea intends to do.