Growing Trees in Ghettos

RACISM IN AMERICA is pervasive, systemic, a core value, despite pretenses to the contrary. It is evidenced ubiquitously. For decades every major American city, by design, has spent far less money on infrastructure in minority black and brown neighborhoods than in wealthy and middle class white neighborhoods. There is no disputing this. People segregate themselves partly by choice, party by the exigencies of circumstance, social, financial, and other. Government institutions traditionally encourage and reflect those choices. Black neighborhoods get far fewer trees and landscaping, green space and than do white ones. But now that we as a society are finally, belatedly beginning to acknowledge that reality, we the people are finally starting to do something about it, starting to eve things up a bit, aspiring to greater equality of civic investment. It may be that George Floyd's influence extends to municipal investment, inspiring greater racial equality from his grace in more ways then either he or anyone could possibly have imagined. In Cleveland, for instance, which like most American cities has a large African-American urban population, abandoned houses in black neighborhoods are being razed and replaced with green spaces, trees included. Trees clean the air, cool concrete cities, and make people happy, aw se all know. You can cruise around any American city and make a long list of places where trees could and perhaps should be planted, but have not been. Think about the thousands of miles of divided four lane highways along which there are no trees lining either the outside of the road nor the grassy area in between the pair of two lane parallel roads. The possibilities for future trees and green space development all across America's plain, urban, suburban and rural are nearly limitless. The process is already underway. Atop many skyscrapers gardens can now be found. With persistence, our descendants may look back on us in the early twenty first century and marvel at how little we cared for the beauty of our cities, just as we now look back on twentieth century cities amazed at how dirty, littered, and air polluted we allowed them to be. Nineteenth century American and European cities were graced with open sewers and ubiquitous horse manure, and western civilization has along history of dumping chamber post out of windows sharing the contents with everyone. If nothing else, we can say that we have come a long way.