The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Center for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment will host a one day webinar on Community Forestry in Changing Times: Climate, Sustainability, and Environmental Justice. The event takes place February 28 from 8:30 – 3:30. Speakers include Yoni Glogower of the City of Holyoke on the Pioneer Valley Healthy Air Initiative, Liza Meyer, Chief Landscape Architect with Boston Parks & Recreation Department on the Boston Urban Forest Master Plan, David Meshoulam, Executive Director of Speak for the Trees on Bringing Tree Equity to Boston, and more. Complete agenda and registration link may be found at www.ag.umass.edu $75. You may also contact Ellen Weeks at weeks@umass.edu The event will not be recorded.
The City of Boston recently released a new Urban Forest Plan that aims to grow the city’s urban forest equitably. In this hybrid talk on January 24 co-sponsored by the Brighton Garden Club and the Friends of Faneuil Library, David Meshoulam, Executive Director of Speak for the Trees, Boston, will introduce the idea of tree equity and discuss its critical importance in a rapidly changing climate. The organization has been examining how the distribution of trees has been shaped by race, politics, and history, and works to grow the city’s forest as a tool to build resilient communities.
The live presentation will be held in the New Balance Room, Presentation School Foundation Community Center, 640 Washington Street in Boston. This is a free event.
This event will also be livestreamed to YouTube. To sign up for livestream, click HERE
Tower Hill Botanic Garden is dedicated to understanding the ways climate change impacts our world and exploring methods we can use to combat its effects and improve our climate outlook. “Climate Talks” are an opportunity to connect with experts in the field to learn and understand the current effects of climate change and explore ways we can make a difference. This Climate Talk is sponsored by CounterAct Climate Change Project.
This talk will explore Tree Equity. Trees play an important role in building healthy and resilient communities. Yet, depending on where they live, not all residents receive the same benefits of trees. Some residents may live in rural communities surrounded by trees while others may live in urban “tree deserts”. The unequal distribution of trees in our landscape has a long history tied to issues such as redlining, land use patterns, and geography. The patchwork of tree distribution has become referred to as “Tree Equity” and is tied to issues of race, class, and wealth. Using various sources of data, including environmental and demographic data, Speak for the Trees partnered with Boston University’s Graduate Program in Urban Biogeoscience and Environmental Health (URBAN) to create an interactive map that explores the relationships between people, place, and tree canopy coverage in Boston. In this talk David Meshoulam, PhD, Executive Director of Speak for the Trees, and Raquel Jimenez, graduate student in the URBAN program, will discuss their partnership and will share the results of their Tree Equity map and how it informs the work of the organization. They will also share tools available for similar analyses in other communities. David (pronounced Dah-veed) co-founded Speak for the Trees in 2018. Trained as a science educator, his work has focused on ways to increase understanding of the connections between science, culture, and history and to empower them to be change agents. He holds a PhD in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a Senior Fellow at the Environmental Leadership Program, and is co-chair of the Urban Ecology Collaborative. Free to attend thanks to our Sponsor (Please register for Zoom linkHERE)
Many things make up urban areas: buildings, parks, roads, rivers, and trees. When we talk about tree canopy, we are looking at what percentage of an area is covered by trees.
The maps on the Speak for the Trees Tree Equity website show the distribution of tree canopy cover across Boston’s neighborhoods and census block groups. You can scroll over a census block and see the tree canopy percentage for that area. SFTT is proud to present this Map Series to help residents, organizations, and municipal officials explore the distribution of canopy across Boston and the relationship between trees, demographics, and environmental justice.
We encourage you to explore your neighborhood and share the results with your friends, neighbors, and elected officials with the hashtag
You may wonder: where are these trees within the census block groups? Are they in parks? In streets? In people’s yards? The maps and overlays on this site are eye-opening.
