It seems our settlers thought that in order to tame the wilderness, the first step was to cut down all the trees. Take a look at some of Ray Hanley's images in the Democrat-Gazette and note the bare city streets and sidewalks in photographs of historic towns.

According to various sources, each mature tree removes 40 pounds of carbon a year from the atmosphere; one study calculates that a worldwide planting of one billion trees would ultimately begin to reverse climate change.

Over a several-year period, Clara Jones and I, working with 50 For the Future, managed to get over 1,000 trees planted in Union County. We considered downtown El Dorado's beautification as the primary objective and pointed out several towns in Texas and Mississippi as examples.

Beautification is a good reason to plant trees,........

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