Why Detroit Residents Pushed Back Against Tree-Planting
▻https://www.citylab.com/environment/2019/01/detroit-tree-planting-programs-white-environmentalism-research/579937
Detroiters were refusing city-sponsored “free trees.” A researcher found out the problem: She was the first person to ask them if they wanted them.
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“This shows sidewalk damage and a large limb that has fallen from a street tree planted, likely by the city, many years ago,” said study author Christine Carmichael. “Residents who were resistant to tree planting also often noted that they felt existing, large trees on city property were not adequately cared for and affected the appearance of the neighborhood, and presented a safety concern.” (Christine E. Carmichael)
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After all, who would turn down a free tree on their property, given all of the health and economic benefits that service affords? Perhaps these people just don’t get it. As one staff member told Carmichael in the study: You’re dealing with a generation that has not been used to having trees, the people who remember the elms are getting older and older. Now we’ve got generations of people that have grown up without trees on their street, they don’t even know what they’re missing.
However, environmental justice is not just about the distribution of bad stuff, like pollution, or good stuff, like forestry projects across disadvantaged communities. It’s also about the distribution of power among communities that have historically only been the subjects and experiments of power structures.
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A couple of African-American women Carmichael talked to linked the tree-planting program to a painful racist moment in Detroit’s history, right after the 1967 race rebellion, when the city suddenly began cutting down elm trees in bulk in their neighborhoods. The city did this, as the women understood it, so that law enforcement and intelligence agents could better surveil their neighborhoods from helicopters and other high places after the urban uprising.
