<
https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2023/11/07/volunteers-caring-planting-street-trees/>
"As a child, Abdallah Tabet would leave his home in Beirut during the summer to
visit his grandmother in the lush mountains. When he’d return to the city, it
felt like a “concrete jungle” in comparison, he says, leaving him longing for
the sight of trees.
“It’s funny how you appreciate things more when you don’t have them,” Tabet
says.
Several decades later, while he was living in Philadelphia and working as a
landscape architect, that feeling resurfaced. For a while, Tabet had lived on
the west side of the city, which was filled with tall sycamores, poplars and
maples. But when he moved to the Graduate Hospital neighborhood in 2013, it
seemed there were “almost no trees.” Motivated to change that, Tabet
volunteered to be a “tree tender” with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.
Now he’s the leader of his neighborhood’s tree tender group, which gathers
several times a year to plant and help maintain local trees.
“It feels very rewarding,” he says. “All the volunteers that I work with …
we’re contributing to a big positive change for the city.”
It’s easy to take street trees for granted, but it takes many hands to get them
there and keep them healthy. Thousands of people across the country volunteer
to help plant, prune and care for trees. Many go through basic training with
their city’s parks department or local nonprofit organizations. Though the work
can be hard, those who do it say it’s a labor of love. Plus, they reap the
rewards of walking on greener streets. A wide body of research shows that urban
green space has a positive influence on people’s well-being. For example, a
2020 study by researchers in Germany found that a higher density of street
trees may reduce the likelihood of being prescribed antidepressants for some
groups. As a bonus, caring for trees gives people an opportunity to make
friends, spend time outside and feel more connected to their communities."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-domestic-violence-australia-malaria-rwanda-whales-dominica/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
