For the millenium: a new role for trees.

Two-thirds of the way through the 1990s we're seeing a shift in the priority society places on trees and forests. New reasons are being added to the old stand-bys to plant and care for trees: for biological diversity, energy conservation, ecosystem restoration, stormwater and pollution control, for solitude and wildness, urban and rural community revitalization and sustainability, and for carbon storage. People are affecting and depending upon forests in new ways that could profoundly impact the way we care for them. Take carbon storage, for example.

As environmental ministers met in Geneva last summer to propose that nations adopt mandatory C[O.sub.2] emissions targets as a way to slow global climate change, our Summer issue provided the forestry community's first comprehensive assessment of trees and forests' potential to store carbon.

This potential amounts to a whopping 20 to 40 percent of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. Not all of this is economically feasible, nor is it all necessarily desirable. But there are a wealth of ecologically and economically significant opportunities - such as planting more trees on family-owned timberlands in the South.

There is much to do, however, before climate change policies effectively recognize a place for trees and forests. One who has followed these matters closely, forestry consultant Mark Trexler, tells us on page 33 that the forestry community - and potential allies in the natural resources and sustainable development fields - are conspicuously absent from this significant global policy debate.

We've tried in this issue to personalize the link between global change and trees through a worksheet designed to calculate your household's carbon dioxide emissions. And in keeping with our Global ReLeaf 2000 campaign, we've estimated the number of trees you would need to plant in a Global ReLeaf Forest to offset each ton of those emissions. (The good news for AMERICAN FORESTS members: Your regular membership includes the planting of 10 trees a year - offsetting a third of the average per capita household emissions in the U.S.)

Trees and C[O.sub.2] emissions are just one concern for the 90s. We asked eight experts with a range of perspectives and experiences - including Trexler - for their views on a critical tree and forest issue they believe to be of importance. The responses, which begin on page 23, range from changes in the Brazilian Amazon, to a deep need to rebuild stewardship values in our inner cities, to the importance of loggers in the success of the industry's sustainable forestry initiative.

To these concerns we'd like to add two: 1) New systems to quantify and map the benefits of urban ecosystems, examined by Lynn MacDonald on page 26 and for which AMERICAN FORESTS is a pioneer, thanks to the work of our Urban Forestry Center; and 2) The humbling power of nature.

At summer's end hurricane winds and flooding produced severe damage in the Carolinas and Virginia, much of it inland; it's been a record year for western wildfires; and severe winter flooding ravaged areas in the Atlantic states and the Pacific Northwest. To what degree have our changes to the landscape exacerbated the damaging effects of these forces? An initial survey by the Bureau of Land Management and the USDA Forest Service found that more than 80 percent of the landslides caused by severe winter storms and flooding in the Pacific Northwest were associated with roads and logging. Just 17 percent of that damage occurred in the "natural forest," prompting those agencies to more rigorously assess cause and effect. We'll be following their investigation with interest and will report on their findings and the larger topic of trees and water in the next issue.

National forest policy has suffered this year from a breakdown in trust, an escalation of rhetoric, and political warfare. Jane Braxton Little has probed many of the issues at the heart of the debate, and reports that, beneath the headlines and rhetoric, she found conscientious people trying out better approaches. Her report, "To Cut or Not To Cut," begins on page 18.

We may not all have the same reasons to plant and care for trees. But the benefits may offer a basis for resolving how we live with our forests in the new millennium, just around the corner. And that is why planting and caring for trees will continue to be at the core of the work of AMERICAN FORESTS.