“Tree equity”: Ottawa wants race-based tree planting - Canada's most treed urban city is looking for solutions to a problem that has taken root: tree racism

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“Tree equity”: Ottawa wants race-based tree planting​

By
Cosmin Dzsurdzsa, True North Wire

June 20, 2024


The City of Ottawa hopes to dictate which neighbourhoods deserve more trees based on race and other identity factors, ensuring that even the urban forest canopy aligns with its diversity, equity, and inclusion priorities.

A report by Ottawa’s climate change and forestry officials is headed to City Council on Jun. 26. The report calls on the city to undertake a “tree equity analysis” across all urban areas to govern Ottawa’s tree planting strategy.

“The distribution of urban tree canopy is frequently associated with socio-economic factors, with lower canopy cover neighbourhoods often having a strong representation of equity-deserving communities,” the report reads.

“The City requires a methodology to identify areas of tree inequity and to prioritize tree planting in areas of the city that need it the most.”

The proposed methodology is called a “Tree Equity Score” and was established by the U.S. non-profit American Forests.

“The Tree Equity Score method uses tree canopy cover data in conjunction with socio-economic and health measures of inequity. This approach produces a score that will identify neighbourhood-level gaps in the urban forest,” the report reads.

The identity factors that the score takes into account are race, age, language, employment, health and income, among other things.

“Neighbourhoods with lower Tree Equity Scores will be priority areas for tree planting. The lower Tree Equity Score for these areas indicates a need for increased tree planting to provide urban forest services and benefits,” the report reads.

While the report asserts that neighbourhoods won’t be denied access to tree planting initiatives the “Tree Equity Score” will “guide the prioritization of tree planting and the development of neighbourhood-specific planting plans and programs, helping to ensure trees are planted where they are needed the most.”

Other proposed scoring mechanisms include one proposed by Nature Canada that maps “the relationship between tree cover and income, as well as tree cover and proportion (of) racialized populations.”

Meanwhile, the “Nature Score” was also floated which is based on public health measures.

If the proposal is approved by council, the resulting analysis will be used to determine priority areas for future tree planting.

 

[S.C.U.D.]

Sometimes I wonder how people come up with this bullshit. Genuinely, where does this fucking nonsense come from?

We don't have real problems anymore so we have to invent new ones. When war or famine finally comes, this shit's going away real quick.

 

[TowinKarz]

"We need to plant more trees to save the world from climate change!"
"Oh wait, we need to make sure we plant the trees in an equitable way."
I don't get it.

The world can only be saved by the Right (tm) people using the Right (tm) ideas.....

 

[WonderWino]

Canada is beyond saving. It's time to wipe it off the map with cleansing fire.

They've been trying that in california every year and it never seems to work

 

[generic sauce]

The blackest area of the city has some of the most tree cover. The city is the most treed city in Canada. China Town and downtown lacking, sure, but the Neighbor Neighborhood is dense with trees.

Yeah penny, heatherington, walkey and trappers all have a fair bit of trees.

 

[Sonic]

Blacks have no respect for nature, especially if it's part of public infrastructure. This is a complete waste of money becaude those trees will be spray painted, pissed and shit on, sliced up and torn apart within the year. It's a waste of trees and completely antithetical to the goals of environmentalism

 

[MightyMorphin'Willbender]

Trees everywhere are lovely but the city/hoa would need to stop being absolute pricks about it.
The last thing actually disadvantaged people need is some busybody getting on their ass about keeping the sidewalk pristine of leaves and fruits.

Easier to just cut down any trees.

 

[Nicholas II of Russia]

Plant trees is cool and all but why do you have to add the DEI bullshit to get people invested in it?

 

[Meat Target]

Tree racism

I imagine the Ents chanting the TND copypasta as they march.

They've been trying that in california every year and it never seems to work

The fires have been hitting the still-healthy parts of Cali, not the urban tumors.

 

[Criticallacitirc]

Counter argument:

When People Resist City Tree-Planting, It's Not From a Lack of Awareness

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.

www.bloomberg.com

No matter what, someone's gonna cry an 'ism

Whenever I see some idiot suggest fruit trees in urban environments, you know they've never once lived anywhere with fruit trees.

"Yes half eaten fruit by birds & rats, littering the ground is exactly what this neighborhood needed"

 

[AssignedEva]

“The City requires a methodology to identify areas of tree inequity and to prioritize tree planting in areas of the city that need it the most.”

Does this actually boil down to "we're going to plant trees in the areas where there are the least trees? Sorta. I found the Tree Equity people.

The first step is working out how many trees you want there, based on normal canopy cover of the biome and adjusted for building density (more buildings = less space for trees).

Then you calculate existing canopy coverage and work out what the difference is between how many trees there are and how many trees you want there. You then use the surface temperature and compare what areas are on average hotter than the average temperature for the urban area, so places that experience more heat stress (e.g. they have way more concrete and tarmac than other areas that have grass, so they got hotter in the sun) get extra priority. So far so good.
This leads into the priority index, which has a bunch of indices based on how different the place is compared to the maximum and minimum values for the city on the following: age dependency ratio (number of under 18s and over 65s compared to working age population), unemployment rate, health burden (prevalence of poor mental, physical, respiratory and cardiac health), income (percentage in poverty), linguistic isolation (householders where nobody age 14+ only speaks English, and households where nobody age 14+ speaks English well), race and heat extremity (what's the hottest it ever got there in 2022). You then also compare

I can't find the real stats to play with so let's say we're looking at two neighbourhoods in the same city: the Old Industrial District and the Crappy Detroit Suburb. I'm going to bodge the figures a bit here but generally use their approaches. For the sake of argument we'll say they're the same density.
Old Industrial District
This is a predominately white area with a high level of poverty and unemployment and mostly everyone speaks English. There is poor health. There are lots of old people living here. The district has relatively few trees and experiences an urban heat island effect as everything is concreted over. Summer temperatures can peak at 110F, 4 degrees higher than average max.
Crappy Detroit Suburb
This is a predominately black and Hispanic area with a higher level of poverty and unemployment and lots of households struggle with English. There is poor health. There are lots of old people living here. The suburb has some tree cover, and there's lots of grass and some bodies of water that means the neighbourhood only hits 107F, 1 degree higher than average.

Plant the trees in the place with more trees and less heat stress.

Admittedly I had to massage the figures here quite a bit to get this outcome and in real life the weighting is still much more heavily in favour of focusing on temperature difference and lack of tree cover but it's possible to achieve this outcome so that's not ideal.

 

[innocent jogger]

World looks like it's running out of honks! when I see shit like this.

 

[Cybertonia]

Blacks aren't capable of taking care of street trees and that's why they all die. Anyone who has ever lived any length of time in any of the east coast cities already knows this fact.

 

[JackoVerde]

race based trees, is the Japanese neighborhood gonna have bonsai trees or cherry blossoms, is the Arab neighborhood gonna have catcuses
is the white neighborhood gonna have pine trees.

 

[Super-Chevy454]

Wow cool getting it all prepped for gentrification

Now then you mention it, we could wonder if this was only a masquerade and gentrification was the real goal?

 

[TowinKarz]

Blacks aren't capable of taking care of street trees and that's why they all die. Anyone who has ever lived any length of time in any of the east coast cities already knows this fact.

Remember when that group of volunteers went to Baltimore or wherever with a roll-off dumpster and started picking up trash? And the black folk living there told them to fuck off and stop "messing up" their neighborhood?

 

[Rei is Shit.]

Sometimes I wonder how people come up with this bullshit. Genuinely, where does this fucking nonsense come from?

Its a very simple grift; the government will spend loads of cash beautifying the neighborhoods that have the lowest property values. Try and guess what happens next.

 

[Loose Goose]

This plan takes a simple thing cities do (plant and cut trees in public according to a long term plan) and lets the DEI parasites syphon off a percentage from the flow of money. No more trees will be planted than usual. Some of the tree planting money will go to a new tumor of laptop class activists who will write reports, do studies, and make demands on the visibility vest guys actually doing the tree planting. If the trees are planted in ghettoes, they will be destroyed by the ferals, so the "problem" is never solved and the grift can go on in perpetuity. Authorities will just forget about its existence until it gets slashed in a time of crisis a decade later. This is not even specific to DEI, it is just the standard form of big city corruption.

 

[Bloodthirsty Nosenigger]

Have we reached peak nigger-fragility?
How pathetic do you have to be when even the trees are oppressing you?

 

[Coptakhenaten]

Blacks have no respect for nature, especially if it's part of public infrastructure. This is a complete waste of money becaude those trees will be spray painted, pissed and shit on, sliced up and torn apart within the year. It's a waste of trees and completely antithetical to the goals of environmentalism

Blacks aren't capable of taking care of street trees and that's why they all die. Anyone who has ever lived any length of time in any of the east coast cities already knows this fact.

I was thinking and while IQs won't magically jump, going full singapore on society regarding anti-social behavior will limit the spread of genes that create this sort of high-time preference behavior and after a few generations, African Americans might not be a demographic of geniuses, but they won't have these issues now where all social pressures are lifted and permit them to be antisocial litterers.

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

Tax money is being wasted on this.. god only knows how many millions.

Also another case of "I thought climate change is existential?!"
If it is indeed, it's biggest opponents don't seem to actually treat it that way. Time and time again they place other ideological goals in front of it whenever convenient. Treating it like just another bit of ideological propaganda/dogma.