Hot Enough? and getting hotter See Page 4 Eat Local to reduce your footprint See page 2 Water, Water Can I have a drink? See page 3 4000 Trees and counting – See page 3 AEROTROPOLIS The current discussion about building Hamilton’s economic future around the airport may have some large implications for greenhouse gas emissions. Indymedia journalist John Milton did some calculations on the impact of flying a fullyloaded jumbo-jet from Hamilton to Vancouver and back once per day. The annual fuel consumption for this “one more jet” would be 107,000 litres of fuel. That’s the equivalent of adding 68,000 cars to the streets of Hamilton. Milton goes on to calculate that adding 10 such jets per day “would mean that every man, woman, and child in the city would have to reduce their greenhouse gas production by 3 tonnes per year just to ‘break even’ with the increase caused by the airport expansion.”

HELP US COUNT TREES!

Two new Trees Count inventories are underway and looking for volunteer assistance. After three successful tree counts in the west end – in Westdale, Kirkendall and Strathcona – the popular census of neighbourhood urban forests has shifted north and east.

This summer’s inventories are taking place in the North End and Delta West neighbourhoods. The latter includes Gage Park, while the North End lies east of Wellington between Barton and the harbour.

Every week several volunteer sessions will take place in each area until the end of August. The times are set to best suit the volunteers and include evenings and weekends.

No experience or particular skills are required, but if you’ve participated in a previous count, the coordinators will be thrilled to have you help out again.

For new counters, the training takes about half an hour, and the inventory sessions are generally two hours in length. You can come to as many as you like. Call (905) 549-0900 or email to the address below to volunteer or to find out more about the counts.

The Trees Count coordinators, Margo Sloan and Erin Callery, are hoping to enlist the help of about 30-40 volunteers from each commuity to help survey at least 1000 trees.

Thirty pieces of information are collected for each tree, including location, species, size, and numerous indicators of tree health. The information is sent to the University Of Toronto at the end of the summer, where the data is analyzed and summarized into a comprehensive report which is made available to the public through the Environment Hamilton website.

Get involved: treescount@environmenthamilton.org

Call Environment Hamilton at (905) 549-0900 for more information about activities in this newsletter