Charm City's Eco-Workforce - Baltimore, Maryland, to create workforce to maintain plants and trees - Brief Article

Civic Works, Baltimore's youth service corps, and AMERICAN FORESTS are partnering to destroy the myth that ecological and economic vitality cannot coexist. Working in inner-city Baltimore in collaboration with businesses, scientific researchers, communities, and governments, the two groups are creating a workforce to handle the unique needs of today's urban forests.

The project, part of AMERICAN FORESTs' new urban-rural community initiative, has as its goal building regional workforces that cohesively restore lands from urban cores to the development-threatened rural fringe. The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded the partners a $200,000 brownfield job-training grant to instruct this new workforce.

Urban foresters traditionally have focused on street tree pruning and park maintenance, but a lack of inner-city jobs, an excess of contaminated vacant land, and depleted urban forests in old industrial cities such as Baltimore have created the opportunity to build a new ecosystem restoration workforce.

The workforce will have the skills to handle uniquely urban situations: dealing with hazardous materials, rebuilding native plant habitats on unusable land, and planting trees for phytoremediation, which uses trees and plants to clean contaminated soils.

Throughout the program, Civic Works will train underemployed individuals to supply skilled labor for this "green collar" industry.

AMERICAN FORESTS, together with the Communities Committee of the Seventh American Forest Congress, will work to build market demand through partnerships with landowners, businesses, and governments. The partners also will develop restoration enterprises and hope to use the project to influence national policy.

"The local and national benefits to urban communities and forests could be monumental," says Ian Leahy, AMERICAN FoRESTs' urban-rural projects manager. Similar pilots are planned for Seattle and Pittsburgh.

COPYRIGHT 2001 American Forests
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group