Stimulus could build green infrastructure, create jobs

By Tom Horton

03/17/2009

The stimulus package President Obama signed Tuesday contains tens of billions of dollars to repair and expand the nation's "infrastructure", its networks of highways, bridges, rail and power lines.

Renewing the transportation infrastructure alone will get some $800 million in Maryland, $800 million in Virginia, and $897 million in Pennsylvania.

But what about the equally vital green infrastructure, the trees that shade city streets, the forests that sop up air and water pollution and trap climate-changing carbon dioxide?

Environmental managers around the Chesapeake say the stimulus does direct $2 to $3 billion nationally toward green infrastructure "and other innovative water quality measures." Beyond that, the package contains tens of billions for environment and energy. To the extent states in this region can use such monies to renew forests they could make a real contribution to saving the Bay.

This is an area with immense and cost-effective potential that is easily overlooked--the forest doesn't charge for services, it just works for free, forever, if we just protect it.

These "ecological services" from the Chesapeake watershed's 37,000 square miles of green are conservatively worth $24 billion a year, according to The State of Chesapeake Forests, a recent book by the Conservation Fund.

And that's "an extremely conservative figure," says Sally Claggett, liaison from the U.S. Forest Service to EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program. The study did not include all of the forestland's well-documented abilities to cleanse both air and water, or attempt to value its scenic attributes.

Nor did it include the value of the wood products industries in the Chesapeake watershed, estimated at $22 billion a year, with 140,000 related jobs.

From the standpoint of water quality, the greatest value of Bay forests is their ability to absorb nitrogen, a principal pollutant of the Bay that enters in runoff from farms, urban stormwater and in fallout of nitrogen oxides from dirty air.

Existing forests across the watershed are removing an estimated 184 million pounds of nitrogen each year. Nitrogen washing into the Bay shoots up several fold where roofs, or pavement, or other impervious surfaces replace trees. The forest stores and filters six times more rainwater than other open spaces like grass.

Even in a developed watershed like the Jones Falls in Baltimore, trees are controlling and cleansing stormwater enough that it would cost $3.8 million a year to duplicate their services by building ponds and other control devices, says a study by American Forests, a conservation group.

Opportunities to use stimulus money to create jobs by planting more green infrastructure abound, Claggett says. The goal of the federal-state Chesapeake restoration is to line 70 percent of all streams and rivers feeding the Bay with forested buffers at least 35 feet wide.

To date, about 6,100 miles of buffers have been planted, which leaves a whopping 22,000 miles to go. In addition, many cities also have a goal of increasing their tree canopies to improve air quality.

The stimulus plan puts a premium on financing traditional infrastructure such as roads and bridges that are "shovel ready," to get the economy moving quickly.

There are plenty of green infrastructure projects ready for the shovel too. Maryland, for example, has already developed an innovative "GreenPrint" program that maps all the state's ecologically important forests and ranks them in terms of protection.

The gaps in this green infrastructure that remain in need of protection and restoration total nearly a million and a half acres, compared to about 650,000 acres already protected.

There's spectacular precedent for combining green infrastructure and national economic stimulus: "Roosevelt's Tree Army" it was called, the old Civilian Conservation Corps created as part of the president's New Deal approach to the Depression.

During about a decade, the CCC employed some three million men across the nation, planting more than three billion trees on more than two million acres.

CCC projects all across the country ranged from constructing state parks to replanting national forests, to constructing the Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge parkways in Virginia and North Carolina.

Planting trees today is just as important as it ever was. The cost around the bay to put in a two-year old specimen, Claggett says, would be less than a dollar a tree. Ironically in many areas, to insure the trees survive hungry deer they must be surrounded by a staked, plastic tube, which costs an additional five dollars a tree.

With the bay watershed losing 100 acres of trees every day--more than a square mile a week--and given the huge value of the forest for clean water, clean air, reduction of carbon, production of wildlife, and sheer beauty, it's clearly time to rebuild the natural as well as the human-made infrastructure.