Sprinting toward sustainability.

For days, Atlanta's July 1995 heat hit a searing 95 to 100 degrees, with humidity to match. As depressing haze from milk-white skies blanketed the city, the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) was clearly concerned. What if this broiling scenario repeated itself a year hence, wilting thousands of unprepared ticketholders at the 1996 Centennial Summer Olympic Games?

But ACOG medical teams have made plans, hoping to avoid bad experiences and major emergencies for the 15,000 athletes, trainers, and Olympic officials; 15,000 media; and hundreds of thousands of visitors. "We can't control what the weather is going to be," Dr. John Cantwell, ACOG's chief medical officer told the Atlanta Journal/Constitution. "But we can control our readiness for it."

Atlanta has learned, too, that it can exert some control over the temperatures felt on city streets. Studies show that every 10 percent increase in canopy cover yields a 1 to 2 degree Fahrenheit reduction in temperature, and the Olympics will benefit from ongoing planting efforts.

Games-goers face two heat challenges: at the various Olympic venues and out on the streets. Officials are providing ample medical facilities at venues; the Olympic stadium, for example, will have 10 air-conditioned first-aid stations with towels, ice, fluids, doctors, and other medical staff. For the first time in history, the athletes will be housed in a fully air-conditioned village, set on 330 sprawling acres of the sylvan Georgia Tech campus.

And at the under-construction, 21-acre Centennial Olympic Park (the largest urban green space created in the U.S. in the last 25 years) there will be available water, trees for shade, temporary air-conditioned structures, and first-aid stations.

Thousands of new trees will shade and cool Olympic corridors, thanks to the efforts of nonprofit groups like Trees Atlanta, Park Pride, the Georgia Trees Coalition - plus the Georgia Department of Transportation, MARTA (the city's rapid transit system) - and CODA (Committee for Olympic Development in Atlanta), a public/private partnership planting eight of the public Olympic corridors. Because of them, the best athletes on earth will see some sterling examples of environmental excellence while competing on Georgia's soil.

It seems apropos that the Olympics should crown the achievements of this queen city of the South. The Southeast has enjoyed a 50-year protracted boom in the growth of its population, commerce, and industry, with Georgia ranking as the fastest-growing state east of the Rockies for the last three years.

Atlanta, long-time world headquarters of the Coca Cola Company, is now national or world headquarters of Delta Airlines, UPS, Holiday Inns, Georgia Pacific, and the American Cancer Society, among others. The city's metropolitan population has surged past three million, while the miles of public roads have doubled since 1960.

The Olympics has created its own renaissance: $2 billion was spent on new construction projects - sports facilities, hotels, sidewalks, and homes - in 1994 and 1995 alone.

But this growth has extracted its price: Atlanta has become a warming city with a declining quality of life.

Clarion calls are sounding. According to Eugene Odum, director emeritus of the University of Georgia's Institute of Ecology, Georgia's population is approaching an optimum density of 10 million to 12 million with a 60/40 ratio of urban to non-urban. "Here in Georgia, we have begun to recognize that economic development and environmental protection must be considered as one issue. Human-made market products and services and the nonmarket goods and services of nature (air and water purification and recycling, for example) are interdependent."

The Georgia legislature has thought seriously about land planning, passing a series of growth management acts in 1988 and 1989. One requires all metro counties and districts to make land-use plans that take into consideration both development and environmental preservation. But the local governments have been slow to respond because states have no direct means to enforce legislative mandates.

"In the long run, the best idea is an educated citizenry that will insist on planning as the best way to sustain quality of life in the face of powerful economic and demographic forces that promote overdevelopment," says Odum.

Ed Macie, now regional urban forestry coordinator for the USDA Forest Service's Southern Region, echoes Odum's insights. Formerly arborist for Fulton County (where Atlanta is located), Macie had been hired in 1985 to administer and enforce its first tree preservation and replacement ordinance, in recognition that some balance needed restoring. For a previous decade, Fulton County had lost 15 percent of its forest cover - not to mention a net loss of millions more as other burgeoning counties used more trees than they produced - and the county now recognized it needed to address the imbalance.

"Today there are more tree ordinances in the Atlanta region than 10 years ago, but they're being enforced with a wavering resolve. Just look at the nature of these counties - they're diffused, with no central sense of community," he says.

As for the city of Atlanta, Macie acknowledges that the approaching Olympics have occasioned an extra tree-planting push; but he maintains that, overall, Atlanta has not been any more foresighted about its tree cover than other cities. "When I compare it to Charlotte, Savannah, Charleston, or Birmingham, it could be doing so much more. I'm not sure why it isn't, except so much of our economy is dependent on growth itself.

"Atlanta could be taking advantage of AMERICAN FORESTS' GIS CITYgreen technology; it could be linking the urban forest to a lot of other environmental issues it's dealing with - like water quality and the aging infrastructure. It could lead, saying what's necessary to improve quality: investing funds to improve the urban forest by planting trees, acquiring more open spaces, making it a part of a region-wide standard. It's not a rosy picture.

"Local levels of government relinquish urban forestry to greater perceived needs, not realizing that some of those needs have arisen because we've lost our sense of place, of community, of environment. If anything is going to get done with urban forestry, it's going to have to be done with local and grass roots citizen-based efforts."

Atlanta is lucky to have nonprofit, environmental organizations whose leaders have picked up the torch. Macie singles out Trees Atlanta and its dynamic executive director, Marcia Bansley, for special praise. "Trees Atlanta is remarkable," he says. "Because of it - and the Olympics - downtown Atlanta has gone through a metamorphosis. . . one of the most positive things that has ever happened to this town."

Long before Bansley knew of Atlanta's Olympic nod, she'd begun to green the downtown's barren asphalt, steel, and concrete corridors. Since 1986, Trees Atlanta has planted 5,000 mature shade trees and 60,000 young trees, while preserving others threatened with extinction.

Nothing escaped the native Atlantan's notice: not the expressway entrances into downtown from the north and south, which weren't offering a positive approach to the central city; not the numerous, ugly parking lots; not the boulevards and avenues on which citizens walk. Oaks, maples, magnolias, elms, and hollies now cast their cooling shadows - and most locales sport Bansley's trademark green-and-white sign: "Another planting by Trees Atlanta."

Before Trees Atlanta began its efforts in 1985, there had been rapid development with little thought to maintaining tree cover, Bansley says. "Using aerial photos taken in five-year intervals by the Atlanta Regional Commission (the planning agency for the 10-county metropolitan region), we proved to citizens using real data that metro Atlanta was losing 30 acres of woodlands a day - and got many county tree ordinances passed."

Bansley also used AMERICAN FORESTS' 1991 20-city survey, which ranked Atlanta last among major American cities for the number of trees shading its streets, despite its reputation as the "City in a Forest."

"It gave us a tool for another editorial, made our more-trees-needed point to the corporate world, and embarrassed the mayor - who wrote a directive to cooperate wherever possible in planting trees."

She is excited by the possibilities with AMERICAN FORESTS' GIS CITYgreen software technology (see "Atlanta's Changing Environment," page 26). "The new, more sophisticated data we're getting with this is absolutely crucial. GIS can identify various ecosystems within areas and, armed with this information, we can explain to citizens in newspaper articles what's really going on."

"People like to deal in realities, and economic times are even tougher now. Unless we can prove that there's an environmental loss that has a direct relationship to economic loss and health loss, we can't continue to enforce the tree-protection and planting laws."

The Olympics has made Bansley's tree planting task easier, providing the impetus for funds from Congress and a private foundation. With it, Trees Atlanta is planting 54 mature shade trees in the main plaza of the new Centennial Olympic Park, while greening the stark, two-block strip bordering the Park and Coca Cola's Olympic Experience facility. It is also installing more than 90 trees in the Peace Plaza at the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site.

Trees Atlanta enjoys wide support. "We're the effective voice of the citizens; they're behind us - and government responds. The business and foundation communities support us because they see a value here: in the trees, the river, and the air."

That river is the Chattahoochee. And what Marcia Bansley is to Trees Atlanta, Executive Director Sally Bethea is to the nonprofit Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper organization. Established in 1994, it's dedicated solely to protecting the Chattahoochee - considered Georgia's greatest natural asset but one under assault for years. People who love the river quickly joined the cause; its current thousand members encompass fishermen, anglers, rafters, government officials, state wildlife biologists, and corporate interests.

Rising in Georgia's mountainous northeast quarter, the Chattahoochee plunges a total of 4,700 feet on its 524-mile run to the Gulf of Mexico, which it enters as the Apalachicola River. Upper Riverkeeper's focus extends more than 200 miles from the headwaters downstream to West Point Lake, 80 miles south of Atlanta. (A Columbus, Georgia, group oversees the middle section below this).

The Chattahoochee ran pure for centuries, serving Creek and Cherokee Indians who focused their lives on it. "But starting in the early 1800s and prevailing into this century, people turned their backs on it," says Bethea. "With the advent of the railroads, the populace without thinking let the most incredible pollution go downstream." Raw sewage, silt, agricultural fertilizers, and pesticides today make the Chattahoochee one of America's 10 most threatened rivers.

Bethea, another native Atlantan and a land planner who previously directed the Georgia Conservancy's water and wetlands programs, has an infectious enthusiasm for the river. "So few people have a sense of what the river system is all about; how small it is where it starts; where it ends up; where we are placed geographically within the watershed. Or how we use this living system: how it handles our waste; provides hydroelectric power; provides our drinking water, navigation, recreation, wildlife habitat.

"And people don't realize that Lake Lanier is the Chattahoochee dammed up - that it gave part of its life to a big impoundment which is, in turn, helping the city of Atlanta grow and develop. But the growth of metropolitan Atlanta has been the river's biggest blight . . . this large city at the top of the river basin, just where it isn't big enough to supply all the water we need or assimilate all our waste."

The Chattahoochee near Atlanta pays the price, listed by the EPA as having the top five locations nationwide for 14 toxic chemicals.

Luckily, the young, activist Riverkeeper board has a great deal of expertise in science, law, and business. "It's willing to put itself on the line, knowing there could be sectors in Atlanta or this watershed who may not appreciate some of the tough actions we have to take," says Bethea.

Those tough actions include lawsuits, like one Riverkeeper is participating in against the city of Atlanta. It asks that the federal courts require the city to agree to, and meet, a strict timetable for resolving a longstanding phosphorus problem that is fouling drinking water, encouraging algae growth, and making waterways less hospitable to living creatures.

A $50,000 grant from the Turner Foundation got Riverkeeper rolling (media mogul Ted Turner's daughter is one of the organization's guiding forces) and was followed by other support - including an EPA grant for a computer system that identifies every point source discharge in the section of the Chattahoochee that Riverkeeper monitors.

They identified 134, spatially laying them out using GIS technology, "so we could focus in on sub-watersheds or the major watershed. Every two months we visit the state offices and note any excedences, collecting trend information on these permitted discharges. Today, there are 54 industries above our drinking water intake that dump treated wastewater but who aren't always in compliance. So we really have our job cut out for us."

When asked about Riverkeeper's goals, Bethea lists: "To protect the Chattahoochee River, its tributaries and watershed. In some cases, that's to restore it where it's degraded; in others, to keep it as clean as it is (particularly in the headwaters and in the forest).

"We want compliance with all the federal clean-water permits in the system, to find unpermitted discharges and stop them, to protect riparian lands. The trees and vegetation on the river banks are essential to keep the waters cool and provide organic material for life in the water body.

"Conservation easements are another goal, through regulatory tools to try to maintain green buffers and restore them where there are none. We want to improve and/or enforce existing state and federal policies relating to water issues. And raise public awareness about the river.

"I guess you might say that we're the ultimate watchdog."

Public awareness is also most important to another committed native Atlantan, Lucie Griggs, Atlanta coordinator of AMERICAN FORESTS' Cool Communities program. In 1994 Atlanta joined the cities chosen for a pilot program involving strategically planted trees and use of light-colored building materials and pavements to reduce air temperatures in urban areas.

Griggs, an experienced business executive and dedicated conservationist, is aided by a local steering committee. It is comprised of trade associations, businesses, governmental agencies, and nonprofits like Trees Atlanta, with whom she plants trees in partnership.

When asked how Atlanta compares with the "ideal" Cool Community, Griggs replies, "This city is fortunate in having many in-town neighborhoods with dense, established tree canopies that residents appreciate and protect. It's blessed, too, to have such involved environmental and conservation groups, and those focused on energy conservation and neighborhood revitalization."

She finds minuses in the weak involvement of city government; weak public policy on trees, with poor maintenance on existing ones; and overwhelmingly dark-shingled residential roofing.

During its first year, Cool Communities located demonstration sites, determined tree canopy, and did ground truthing for AMERICAN FORESTS' GIS programs. In 1995-'96, the focus is on educating the public - from schoolchildren to home builders to television watchers.

One popular program has involved WXIA-TV, Atlanta's NBC affiliate, which last summer compared daily temperatures (as it will this summer) between a treed, residential demonstration site and Hartsfield International Airport - which records Atlanta's official temperatures.

The Olympics offer a unique opportunity to educate not only Atlantans, but the world as well. Cool Communities will distribute its brochure at the Olympic Welcome Center and at Efficiency Stores run by Georgia Power, a member of the project's Local Advisory Committee.

And the Cool Communities concept will be displayed at the Department of Energy's new Education and Training Center at the 1996 Summer Games. The Center will house a model home utilizing Cool Communities strategies - which have been shown to reduce the demand for air conditioning in individual buildings by 30 percent and to significantly reduce smog, a major health hazard in U.S. cities.

But what about Atlanta, following what are expected to be the largest, best-attended, greenest Summer Olympics Games ever? What about this city that rose from the ashes of the Civil War to become a commercial center? How will it channel, manage, and mold its growth? The Atlanta Regional Commission is making a serious effort to do just that in its Vision 2020 long-term study of what the metro area will be like. Its 41 recommendations cover traffic and land use, education, overlapping governmental services, a metrowide system of parks, better sewage treatment, a comprehensive water conservation plan, commuter rail alternatives, and the creation of a local institute to study zoning and traffic.

In the meantime, business and industry are jumping on the environmental bandwagon. One is United Parcel Service, which from the outset designed its new Atlanta corporate headquarters to enhance and protect the area's forested surroundings. By saving trees, replanting indigenous species, preserving a stream, and avoiding construction damage to tree roots, it earned a Global ReLeaf for New Communities designation from the National Association of Home Builders and AMERICAN FORESTS.

Perhaps the new Centennial Olympic Park symbolizes what's coming. The dream of Olympic head Billy Payne, its space was once a sorry acreage of parking lots, broken sidewalks, abandoned buildings, and weedy vacant land. "It is the single physical, tangible achievement of which I'm proudest," Payne says, "and will have the greatest long-term benefit for the city."

Some words of Roberto Goizueta, CEO of the Coca Cola Company and enthusiastic backer of the Park, express why Atlanta is so special. "Far more than any quirk of geography, any historical trend, any specific industry, or any particular 'great men' or 'great women,'" he says, "the aspect that sets Atlanta apart is the record of its people getting together to do important things when they had to be done."

Nancy Anne Dawe, a freelance writer/photographer from Decatur, Georgia, often covers urban issues for American Forests.