Ecosystem value & trees: greener, cleaner, more financially savvy environments include trees. The evidence is all around us.

Every day on my way to work I pass the site of a new "starter castle"--the sixcar-garage kind springing up in farm fields and open land across the country. In its front yard, hundred-year-old oaks lay ripped from the ground like matchsticks dropped from the hand of Paul Bunyan. If the proud owners knew what those trees were really worth--in air and water quality, real estate values, and aesthetics, would they have sacrificed them for more lawn to mow?

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AMERICAN FORESTS' challenge is to help people understand the value that trees and forests bring to an ecosystem. A focus on ecosystem values shifts the traditional view from seeing natural resources as a checking account that can be drawn down, to that of a savings account from which you might draw interest earned but keep the principle untouched. The ecosystem values of a forest don't disappear when one tree is removed. But if a significant portion of its trees are lost, the cycling of air, water, and carbon are disturbed and the ecological benefits decrease.

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More than 150 years ago, pioneers on the Tahoe National Forest searched for gold and other precious metals by shooting water through high-pressure hoses to eat away at hillsides and slopes. I visited one of those sites, Buckeye Diggings, with U.S. Forest Service silviculturist Gary Cline last year. Establishing forests back on these sites is difficult--and exactly why we created our Global ReLeaf campaign: to sponsor the planting of native trees to restore damaged forest ecosystems.

AMERICAN FORESTS has pioneered the technique of measuring and valuing the work trees do in cities and towns. With the newest generation of our CITYgreen software, CITYgreen for ArcGIS, cities and towns can more easily learn the dollar values of trees and create models that will allow them to set goals for expanding and improving tree canopy.

Healthier economies are also achieved through environmental improvement. In "Doing Well by Doing Good' (page 32), Jane Braxton Little proves that a better economy and a healthier environment go hand-in-hand. Many companies, some supporters of AMERICAN FORESTS, have shown they can increase profits and market share by producing cleaner, greener products and supporting the work of nonprofit conservation groups. It's getting easier to be green.

And there's no better symbol of the ecosystem values of trees than our very own National Register of Big Trees. This catalogue of arboreal treasures stands as a tribute to majestic specimens of nature that are the largest of their kind.

Whether they are 275 feet tall, like California's General Sherman giant sequoia, or tiny, like the long-spine acacia in Florida, our national champion trees stand as silent symbols of the interdependence of humans and trees. If a tree can grow large, it's an indication the environment is healthy--healthy enough to support a tree, the world's oldest and largest living things.

Big trees are a way to help people understand the ecosystem values that trees provide. Big trees have more leaves to trap air pollution and transpire water into the air. They have more roots to hold the soil against wind and rain erosion, and their wealth of branches and twigs cradle nests and dens. And big trees can absorb more greenhouse gases.

There's a reason AMERICAN FORESTS launched the Big Tree program 64 years ago. When our imagination is captured by a 275-foot tall sequoia or a powerful, spreading oak with limbs that reach 100 feet, perhaps we'll also stop to think how trees make life possible for our species. Then maybe we won't so easily toss a hundred-year-old living thing aside and rev up the lawn mower.

DEBORAH GANGLOFF EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR