Trees that ease learning: when students open their school books this autumn, here's why you'll want greenery nearby - Perspectives

American Forests, Autumn, 2002 by Charles Enloe

The school projects are not Chicago's first greening campaigns. In 1997, the city embarked on a $10 million tree-planting venture to line the Windy City's streets and parks with 20,000 trees. In June, Mayor Richard M. Daley announced a plan to use landfill to create two miles of parkland along the shores of Lake Michigan.

Smith says she continues to fight for projects designed to increase Chicagoans' interaction with nature, such as rooftop gardens and transportation to parks for the elderly. But winning approval for those kinds of projects is not always easy, as there is much competition for social services funding.

"They said 'How can you spend money on trees and gardens when there's so much else to spend money on," Smith says. "They were brutal in challenging this strategy."

But she says research like that being done in Illinois helps convince people of the extended benefits. "There are so many other quality of life issues, like medicine and food," Smith says. "But we can show that [greenspaces] can actually reduce the need for medication."

The impact of the research is not limited to Chicago. Kuo says that within a few years of a talk she gave in Providence, Rhode Island, an urban forestry group had successfully pushed for more than a dozen municipal tree ordinances and the public housing authority had relandscaped public housing projects.

One policy change Kuo would like to see would alter how zoning codes are established. Right now, city design codes focus almost exclusively on everything but greenery," Kuo says, noting that the research shows nearly the opposite. "Almost nothing except trees really matters... what matters most is whether there's a tree in front of it."

Kuo, Faber Taylor, and Sullivan plan to continue their work and have several new experiments lined up. An ADD study extends the results of their original experiment to a national level. Faber Taylor is also taking children on controlled, identical 20-minute walks through different physical settings--a park, city streets with trees, and a city area with no trees--to see how the children's reactions change.

Faber Taylor says the public is starting to realize how many positive effects nature can have.

"We definitely want to continue pursuing this," she says. "It makes people appreciate nature as valuable and it has a positive impact on our health and our well being. They're starting to realize it's worth the effort." AF

Charles Enloe is an intern at American Forests magazine.