by admin | Aug 9, 2014 | Activism, Chicago, Environment, Urban forest, Urban Planning
Would you imagine that the trees in the metropolitan Chicago region provide compensatory value of $51.2 billion? This is the calculation produced through i-Tree, a free software program provided by the U.S. Forest Service to estimate tree canopy and the ecological...
by admin | Jul 28, 2014 | Disaster, Environment, Public safety, Restaurants, Travel
At first, it looks like something straight out of the Old West, and perhaps it is. The Gold Hill Inn is now 52 years old, which plants its origins in the 1960s, but the building was originally the dining hall for the adjacent but now closed Bluebird Lodge, built in...
by admin | Jul 15, 2014 | Disaster, Disaster policy, Environment, Urban forest, Urban Planning
For the last two or three years, if not longer, I have been engaged in an ongoing discussion with people from the U.S. Forest Service and the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) about the role of trees in post-disaster recovery. Phillip Rodbell, an urban and...
by admin | Jul 10, 2014 | Disaster, Disaster policy, Environment, Public safety, Urban Planning
I won’t go into great detail, just enough to entice you to click the link below to watch the interview I conducted with Scott Davis, formerly director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Recovery regarding Sandy recovery operations and...
by admin | May 6, 2014 | Chicago, Environment, Urban Planning
Spring has sprung in Chicago, and along with it, construction progress on the Bloomingdale Trail. I can hear the hammers pounding as I write, installing guard rails at the edges of the trail. Other equipment is tearing out old rail debris and erecting access ramps....