Word: sprucely
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Harvard has been eminently reasonable about the whole project, holding a series of meetings to hear community concern about the issue, as well as offering to donate about $300,000 to go towards tress, landscaping, and a mini-park to spruce up the Broadway St. site. It is even offering to pay the city $16,000 a year for "air rights" over the public street. What we have here is not a pay-off, but legalized extortion...
...some sections of Georgia and South Carolina, yellow pine trees seem to be growing much more slowly than they once did. In southern New Jersey, patches of pitch pines have stopped growing altogether. So have parcels of spruce trees on Whiteface Mountain in New York. On Camels Hump, a major peak in Vermont's Green Mountain range, and Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, the highest peak in the East, red spruce are losing their foliage and dying, leaving barren patches on the once lush slopes. Says Botanist Hub Vogelmann of the University of Vermont: "There are some pretty...
...Camels Hump has shown a rapid decline in nine species of trees on the 4,083-ft. peak. The biomass (the combined weight of tree trunk, branches and foliage) has dropped sharply for several kinds of trees: 25% for sugar maples and beech and 34% for white birch. Red spruce has been the hardest hit, with a biomass decline...
Another clue comes from a study of 7,000 trees, sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency. Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee examined 14,000 core samples of the tree trunks. Their findings: beginning in 1960, in eight Eastern states, pitch and shortleaf pines and red spruce started to show narrowing growth rings, a sign of sluggish development. Similar changes have been noted in West Germany's stricken trees...
Indeed, the most severe damage has occurred at high altitudes to such trees as the red spruce and Fraser and balsam firs. The summits of Camels Hump and Mount Mitchell are enshrouded for as much as a quarter of the year in clouds, which are loaded with acidic chemicals and toxic heavy metals. Says Arthur Johnson, a soil expert at the University of Pennsylvania: "Vegetation essentially combs polluted moisture droplets out of the clouds." Mountain tops at this altitude are also exposed to high concentrations of ozone and get more rain, which washes chemicals onto the trees. "Most people think...