Call For Action - Making A More Equitable Urban Forest
New Yorkers have the good fortune of living amongst a powerful network of 7 million trees. This wide-spread tree population lines streets and roadways and is found clustered within parks and greenways. Using the New York Parks interactive forest maps a close-in view of where exactly trees can be found. What we find is that the City’s trees appear unequally distributed across City neighborhoods. From this spatial vantage point we can speculate that as tree density changes, so do the benefits associated with trees. As such, we might view the urban forest as a marker for neighborhood inequalities in health and environmental factors associated with tree densities. Alongside the Park maps, tools such as those developed by Spatial Equity NYC help visualize where parks, trees, and open space intersect with neighborhood and political jurisdictions.
In the context of climate mitigation and social equity, the urban forest has the potential to be a catalyst for change. But what is the surest path to an equitable urban forest? The NYC Parks Department, who has jurisdiction over all street tree plantings, regularly seeks new locations guided by factors such as Heat Vulnerability Index. The Parks Department also considers 311 “street tree requests” by citizens; however, wait times currently take years. Even non-profit efforts to fast track trees through donations can take six months. Dots on a map can reveal quantitative distribution patterns, but they say little about the qualitative experience and condition of the trees. It's one thing to plant a new tree, but that’s the easiest part: keeping it alive is most of the work.
Advocacy offers one path to tree equity and greater tree care. As urban tree advocates, Assemblage sees the gaps in our urban forest as a call to action for greater connection between people and trees. To facilitate participation, we have joined with Forest for All NYC, a coalition of organizations working together to advocate for the urban forest. Assemblage supports their vision for growth of the city’s tree canopy by 8% by 2035.
Another path is citizen tree stewardship. With stewardship skills and education made accessible and available at no cost to individuals, we believe all neighborhoods can be empowered to participate. Below are a few of the opportunities available for community members to learn more about tree care and stewardship at no cost.
The NYC Parks Department offers programming to learn about tree care. MillionTreesNYC provides free instruction and resources in tree care. Find out how to care for young street trees, adopt trees in your community, and take a free tree care workshop. Give a little TreeLC and help maintain our urban forest!
Tree Time is another program providing tool and maintenance support for tree care through NYC Parks & Recreation in partnership with the City Parks Foundation. Tree Time fosters public and private partnerships to enable the installation of tree guards, tree planting, and sidewalk repair.
The New York Trees Citizen Pruner Certification Course. New York’s Citizen Pruner Tree Care Course trains volunteers in tree care, biology, identification and pruning. Trees New York trains an average of 200 citizen pruners each year. As certified citizen pruners, Assemblage is adopting the trees on blocks near our Gowanus office.
Become a Volunteer Tree Steward: Join the New York Parks Department as a volunteer tree stewards and learn basic and advanced tree care activities that you can do to help our urban forest. With all levels of stewardship, the NYC Parks offers opportunities to help care for the urban forest. https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/tree-map/learn
written for Assemblage by Lori Ball Horton