Greenwich Free Press: Greenwich Sustainability Committee Speaker Series – Save the Dates

Join the Sustainability Committee for informative and educational discussions on how the Greenwich Sustainability Sectors are responding to the challenges of the climate crisis.

The Speaker Series takes place at the Second Congregational Chapel from 1:00 – 2:30pm

Please visit our webpage: greenwichct.gov to sign up for our newsletter and follow us @greenwichsustainability to receive updates.

LAND AND WATER: September 28, 2023
Forests, Trees and Brain Health
Community Partner: Greenwich Tree Conservancy

WASTE REDUCTION: October 24, 2023
Waste Injustice: Impacts and Solutions
Community Partner: Waste Free Greenwich

COMMUNITY CULTURE: November 28, 2023
Building Ecological Climate Resilience Through Native Plant Landscaping
Community Partner: Greenwich Land Trust

FOOD SYSTEMS: January 30, 2024
Regionalizing the Food System in Response to Climate Change
Community Partners: Greenwich Community Gardens and The Foodshed Network

LEGISLATION AND ADVOCACY: February, 2024

BUSINESS: March 26, 2024
The Business Case for Sustainability: Why is it Important for Business to Adopt Sustainable Practices?

CLIMATE RESILIENCY: April, 2024
Climate Change Impacts in Greenwich: What Do We Need to Prepare For and How?

TRANSPORTATION AND AIR QUALITY: May 28, 2024
Spare the Air: Smog Season Starts with a Call to Drive Less and Landscape Responsibly

Contact Kim Gregory @ staglanefarm@yahoo.com with any questions.

Greenwich Sustainability Committee Speaker Series is in partnership with Coffee for Good and Second Congregational Church.

Original Source: Greenwich Sustainability Committee Speaker Series: Save the Dates | Greenwich Free Press

 

More info on this month’s event. To RSVP, email Kim Gregory at staglanefarm@yahoo.com.

CT Post Opinion: Time for the Forest Service to Protect Old Trees 7.18.2023

The Greenwich Land Trust, in conjunction with the Greenwich Tree Conservancy, holds its "Winter Walk -- Identifying Trees without Leaves" guided tour at the new Converse Brook Preserve in Greenwich, Conn., on Tuesday February 7, 2023. On this guided forest walk, visitors were shown ways to look closer at the diverse features of bark, branches, and buds to see a varied winter landscape.
The Greenwich Land Trust, in conjunction with the Greenwich Tree Conservancy, holds its “Winter Walk — Identifying Trees without Leaves” guided tour at the new Converse Brook Preserve in Greenwich, Conn., on Tuesday February 7, 2023. On this guided forest walk, visitors were shown ways to look closer at the diverse features of bark, branches, and buds to see a varied winter landscape.
 

An Excerpt from “Opinion: Time for the Forest Service to protect old trees” by Henry Foushee, first published at Our climate depends in part on protecting old-growth forests (ctpost.com).

Who would’ve thought that the U.S. Forest Service could fail to see the forest for the trees?

National forests contain over 90 percent of federal mature and old-growth forests. More than three-quarters of this area is open to logging. That is shortsighted. New growth takes decades to reach maturity, and potentially centuries to attain the structural and biological diversity of an old-growth forest. Such harvesting also jeopardizes the stability of endangered species populations and increases wildfire risk.

Climate change makes protecting these areas all the more important. Mature and old-growth forests remove enormous amounts of carbon dioxide from the air. When these forests are logged, much of this carbon returns to the atmosphere, and their carbon removal capacity is lost. Yet, even as the Forest Service seeks public comment to guide new regulations, it intends to open up hundreds of thousands of acres of mature and old-growth forest to logging. To do so would severely harm efforts to combat climate change. The Forest Service must ban logging in mature and old-growth forests.

Click here to read the full story.

An Excerpt from OHP BLOG – Greenwich – “A Town in a Forest” By Mary A. Jacobson 7.12.2023

“Don’t think of Greenwich as a town with trees in it. Think of Greenwich as a town in a forest.” So spoke former Greenwich Tree Warden Bruce Spaman, who served the Town of Greenwich from 2002 to 2018, when interviewed by Anne Semmes for the Oral History Project in 2019.

town in a forest

Former Greenwich Tree Warden Bruce Spaman beside a 100-year old Sycamore tree. Photo by Anne W. Semmes. Courtesy of Oral History Project.

“If you were to take a bird’s-eye view of Greenwich and then look down on it, you would see that…It truly looks like a town in a forest, although the part of the forest I was managing was just publicly owned trees.”

According to Spaman, Greenwich contains about 1100 acres of parks, including open-space properties, formal parks, and pocket parks. In addition, there are 250 acres of school campuses and 75 acres of athletic turf and fields. Add to that “a forest of street trees that’s probably 650 acres on over 265 miles of town roads. So, that’s a considerable forest that people drive in every day.” That responsibility only adds up to about six percent of the total land area in town.

Spaman’s interests in arboriculture and forestry began early. As a young boy, “I was in Boy Scouts . . . and I was always just out in the woods and on my own. I didn’t know you could make a job out of it.” He graduated with a degree in forestry from Paul Smiths College in Paul Smiths, New York, in the Adirondacks, in 1974. “From there, I just basically got immersed in trees in general, arboriculture doing tree work, learning the climbing, doing all that.” In the early eighties, the field of community forestry started to emerge which “brings together the arboriculture business and the forestry business . . . mostly with regards to managing municipal or town-owned trees.” Spaman worked for over thirty towns in Connecticut before being hired in Greenwich in 2002.

Read the full post on the Greenwich Sentinel at OHP BLOG – Greenwich – “A Town in a Forest” – Greenwich Sentinel