Who Will Think of the Trees?
A week after 9/11, Bram Gunther, the head of forestry for the Parks Department, was dispatched to Ground Zero to survey the ecological effects of the attack. What he found resembled a volcanic blast zone: an ashen, smoking moonscape of dust and debris. Amid the rubble, he and his co-worker, Michael Browne, discovered a burnt, decapitated Callery Pear tree “sort of soldered in between the cracks of the cement at the World Trade Center.”
Mr. Browne wanted to rehab it, to restore the arboreal casualty to health, but Mr. Gunther was pessimistic. “The damage to that tree,” he explains, “in those circumstance, any arborist, any forester, is going to leave a tree like that alone.”
And not just because it was damaged. Read More
