Planting more trees will benefit Utah

The current issue of Newsweek magazine focuses on global warming, asserting that a contributing cause is the decimation of tropical forests. By logic, this would mean that planting more trees would contribute to reducing, if not fully solving, the problem, which will require a multifaceted approach.

I was delighted to read that Salt Lake County is undertaking a program to plant a million more trees.

While I was at the U.S. Embassy in Spain in 1971, the Spanish government was busy afforesting the barren slopes of central and northern Spain, which resemble the dry hills of Utah. There are today well-established forests on these slopes. During our last two trips to Israel, we found the Israeli government busy reforesting the even more barren slopes of the West Bank. There are now well-established Israeli forests 30 years old and older.

Seems to me that state and county governments, using seedlings provided by the U.S. Forest Service, might arrange to plant the hills north, east and west of the city. This would beautify our valley, joining our wooded mountains to our now wooded valley and probably meliorating the climate in the bargain. I suspect that the Boy Scouts and various service clubs would be happy to accept this as a project in support of a state effort, much as they have volunteered to police the verges of so many of our highways.

If one doesn't think pines would thrive (I'm sure they would — nothing is drier or more barren than the hills of Spain or Israel), there are plenty of junipers growing on the slopes of the hills at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon as well as in even drier central Utah. And for anyone who doesn't think any kind of tree would grow on these barren slopes, just look at the scrub oaks at the mouth of Millcreek or the broad-leaved trees that cover the knoll just in back of the Capitol's rear parking lot. Even Russian olive trees would be better than what's not there now.

Northern Utah's mountains are every bit as glorious as those of the Swiss Alps. If we could divert the energies of our environmentalists into pushing for tree planting and laws requiring screening of industrial sites instead of trying to forbid any kind of recreation or economic betterment, we could rival Switzerland as an attraction for foreign and out-of-state tourists while developing Utah industry and accommodating concerns about the effects of Kennecott's development on the Oquirrh Mountains.

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David Timmins was a counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Spain in the 1970s.