Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Tales...Story 7: Tree Ordinances

SFX of clear cutting in Kennesaw

Narration: Just north of metro Atlanta, near Kennesaw, Georgia, workers bulldoze everything, trees and topsoil included. A tractor with a huge claw picks up the fallen trees and drops them in a large metal dumpster. Clear-cutting like this is popular in Georgia, but that doesn’t mean it was always like this. Virgil Eady (EE-dee) is a retired builder. He says that today’s developers do face increased regulations and higher up front costs - building a new home in today is done differently.

VIRGIL EADY: So today it seems like the emphasis is on yield and density, which is not consistency with the desire to keep trees. I come from the old school where you didn’t cut if you didn’t have to.

Narration: To help deter clear cutting, some of metro Atlanta’s counties have ordinances in place to protect trees. Marcia Bansley is the Executive Director of Trees Atlanta. A group working to protect Atlanta’s green spaces.

MARCIA BANSLEY: If you are a developer, or a home owner or somebody and you need to take down a lot of trees and you can’t put them back on your property then you have to contribute to the Tree Recompense fund, and that money is used to plant trees in other areas around the city basically to keep the tree cover up other than just loosing it once and for all.

Narration: As of last year that Tree Recompense Fund was well over a million dollars. But fines don’t deter all developers.

LUCY GRIGGS: –Generally it’s easier to just cut the trees down – and then if there is a fine because it was a big mature tree, they just paid the fine and put that cost back into the home.

Narration: Lucy Griggs is with Cool Communities, a group which looks at ways of keeping cities cooler – one of those ways is by keeping tree cover.

LUCY GRIGGS: A home owner would rather have a mature shade tree -- and pay more for that house because it has a mature shade tree then to have the tree sitting in grass, with these new, very small decorative trees that aren’t really helping. And I think once you translate that benefit and the developers understand that you’ll see more tree preservation.

Narration: And when it comes to preserving trees, some subscribe to the 5 to 1 rule. Kim Coder is a professor of Community Forestry at the University of Georgia, in Athens.

KIM CODER: Every time we loose a tree we have to plant five back if we’re going to maintain the canopy level. Cause if you don’t we are going to de-nude our cities and we will be bare naked within about 25 years at the rate we are loosing cover.

Narration: But Pam Sessions of Hedgewood properties is an Atlanta developer who literally builds subdivisions around the largest trees.

PAM SESSONS: When we first laid out neighborhood it was around the specimen trees of size or beauty. As we walked the center line of our proposed roads if there were trees that were in reality we would modify the road. And we also had a tree rescue program where we transplanted 55 trees 16 inches in diameter.

Narration: And while trees have benefits, like filtering pollutants, some fear that too much emphasis is being put on trees alone. Once again, Kim Coder.

KIM CODER: And so the old myth about ‘just as long as we have trees we’re fine’ just is not the case . . . They won’t be able to handle what millions of people generate and throw into the water, the soil and the air.

Narration: And questions as to ‘which’ trees and ‘how many’ many trees Atlanta keeps, is likely to be a continual question. Metro Atlanta is forecast to expand by 50-percent over the next generation.

For Soundprint, I’m David Barasoain.