Cooling Off!

The heat has been in the news lately to the point where it's almost becoming scary. The Greenpeace organization claims that a 15,000-sq.-km ice shelf in Antarctica may collapse by the millennium, causing ocean levels to rise as much as 20 feet. Across the globe news reports show extreme heat levels in some areas and unusual floods in other areas while temperature inversions and extreme levels of smog choke other areas. It's enough to make you want to move to Mars, isn't it?

The headlines stare you in the face. You stare back. It's time to take your future into your own hands and do something.You can:

• Move to the mountains and start learning to raise your own food and hunt.
• Join a religious group and prepare for the end of the world.
• Join an ecological organization or donate money to an ecological cause.
• Plant a tree.
• Contribute to programs to help the needy who are suffering from heat
• Forget about it because there's nothing you can do.
• Write letters to the appropriate public officials and urge action.
• Start living in a more environmentally conscious way

Would it surprise you to learn that the best thing you can do is to plant a tree - and that planting a tree isn't a trivial impact activity? The others are helpful and most of them can make a difference, but none of the above has as much an effect as if you plant a tree and start encourage others (your workplace, your place of worship, your clubs, your neighborhood) to plant trees on medians, in parking lots, on private property, on public thoroughfares, and in parks.

Let's ditch the feel good, oxygen-generating, reduce-your-utilities-by-10-cents-a-month logic for a moment and look at a the souce of the matter - something called the Urban "Heat Island". Although studies on Urban Heat Islands are fairly new (most have been done since 1996 - a handful are older than that), in some places the need to plant trees to cool down an area was known as long as a century ago. You'd think it was a matter of common sense - that places with trees are cooler and that temperatures rise as people move into an area and that we really should plant trees. But until the early 1990s, nobody bothered to ask the questions "is this true?" and "how much cooler?" and "how much of a difference?" The answers are surprising.

The city of Atlanta and its surroundings clearly show the effects of urban development and how moving in parking

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