What’s a tree worth?
An estimator will tell you the value of its lumber. A developer may tell you that it has negative value if he has to pay to remove it. An environmentalist will tell you the tree is priceless.

Canadian ecological economist Mark Anielski figures the globe-spanning boreal forest is worth $225 billion a year to we humans.

That’s the value he puts on the ecosystems’s ability to reduce atmospheric carbon and filter water filtration, something governments and industries fair to acknowledge.

Storing carbon and absorbing carbon dioxide are just two of 16 positive ecological values that tress provide. It didn’t include functions such as providing food, or habitat for bees that pollinate crops.

Anielski will make his case this week at Canada’s 10th National Forest Congress. The coniferous boreal forest cover more than 6.4 million square miles across of northern Canada, Russia and Scandinavia — one third of the planet’s total forest area. It is key habitat for more than 200 bird species, as well as caribou, lynx, moose, black bear, timber wolf and other mammals

Trees are natural air conditioners. According to the Christian Science Monitor, conventional wisdom says that a shade tree can cut cooling costs by $80 a year. After Commonwealth Edison’s coming rate hike in northern Illinois, that number is likely to be even larger.

The Christian Science Monitor says that trees also reduce runoff of pollutants into waterways, a problem caused by impervious surfaces like concrete. And leaves slows rain so it gets absorbed instead of overwhelming drainage systems, which is what happened on Labor Day on Rockford’s southeast side.

And how many millions would have been saved if trees, prairies and wetlands had been preserved instead of been replaced by bluegrass, rooftops and parking lots?