GREEN – Greening Residential Environments Empowering Neighborhoods – allocates resources, procured from both municipal funding and private donations, to the installation, maintenance and protection of trees in public spaces within the collective urban forest of Los Angeles, and to the enforcement of environmental justice.
How is that for a mission statement?
It is no coincidence that GREEN is also Brent’s last name. He is quite vain. Really though, it works.
Brent has been planting street trees since we were in school in the 1980s, and did his first big project of thirty trees in the median of San Vicente Boulevard on his thirtieth birthday in 1998. This January, twenty years later, he will be planting fifty more trees.
Here and there, I will be writing more articles about these projects. They are too involved to write just one article about. For now, I would like to mention the Facebook page for GREEN, at https://www.facebook.com/GREEN-1518459741733375/. I am sorry that I can not devote more attention to it. I really should be writing more articles about what GREEN does.
There is more to it than just planting. Trees also require staking. Street trees need pruning for clearance above the roadways that they shade. Some trees needed to be injected with systemic insecticide for homopteran insect infestation. When mature Canary Island date palms were being stolen from the embankment of the Santa Monica Freeway and sold into other neighborhoods, GREEN was there to stop it, and to get at least one of the trees returned (although the neighborhood is still waiting for other reparations). GREEN has organized neighborhood clean-ups and graffiti abatement.
GREEN is in Los Angeles, but could be duplicated in other municipalities that could use more trees, or that already have trees that need maintenance. So many trees in America have tree preservation ordinances, but some of the biggest cities need to enforce their ordinances more diligently.
If you continue to read my blog, you will be reading more about GREEN. Again, the Facebook page is at https://www.facebook.com/GREEN-1518459741733375/
Projects like that are wonderful. Cities can be harsh and trees soften things up and add so much.
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It was perfect for us because I happened to have bad crops (for example, trees with small kinks at the bases of their trunks. I could not sell the trees, but the kinks were not really a problem.) Instead of burning the bad crops, I would take them to Los Angeles, where we would plant them as street trees. It has worked out quite well. Los Angeles is greening anyway. It started that trend a few years after we started planting our trees. In some places, it is as green as parts of San Jose. I really do not like Los Angles much, so it is nice to see these slow improvements.
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