Rejoice, America! Donald Trump’s war on wokeness has chalked up another victory over the forces of Marxism and divisiveness, so we will never again be torn apart by racial hatred aimed at white people. In the name of combating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (this is the new rightwing code for Black people and gay people existing in public) as ordered by the Great Leader his first day in office, the US Forest Service in February cancelled all unspent funds in a $75 million grant that had already started planting trees in communities all over America. You probably thought that trees were green, but it turns out that these particular trees were also anti-white, at least according to the Trump administration.
The program was meant to help grow trees in neighborhoods that lacked them, to provide shade, make the places nicer, reduce the “urban heat island effect” that makes cities more miserable in the summer, and even capture some carbon. The grant, from funds in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, was administered by the revolutionary cadres at the National Arbor Day Foundation, which distributed the money to around 100 cities, nonprofits, and tribes.
As NPR reported Friday, such dangerous slight improvements to the lives of some Americans had to be stamped out, as the Forest Service explained in a form letter advising the affected green freaks that the tree ride was over. The program, the letter said, “no longer aligns with agency priorities regarding diversity, equity and inclusion.” And so the program had to be not just nipped in the bud but destroyed, root and branch.
Oh yes, and let’s once more remind you, dear reader, that pulling back the funds doesn’t merely breach a contract between the Forest Service and the Arbor Day Foundation, it’s also blatantly unconstitutional, because Congress appropriated the funding for the IRA, and Trump has no legal authority to stop it from going for its intended purpose.
Arbor Day Foundation Executive Director Dan Lambe said the sudden termination of the program uprooted some terrific efforts, telling NPR that the project had been an opportunity to join with partners to “plant trees in communities, to create jobs, to create economic benefits, to create conservation benefits, to help create cooler, safer, and healthier communities.” Now, it seems, these communities will have to do without the magic of frondship.
Among the local tree-planting programs shut down was an effort to 1,600 plant trees in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. The city lost some 200,000 trees in Hurricane Katrina, and replanting was an important part of improving climate resilience, since trees not only cool urban neighborhoods, they also help slow stormwater and improve air quality.
The project in the majority Black Lower 9th Ward was managed by local nonprofit Sustaining Our Urban Landscape, or SOUL, which had a $1 million Forest Service grant for urban forestry. SOUL Executive Director Susannah Burley suspects that the labeling of the tree planting program as a crime of “equity” may have at least partly been due to the kind of boneheaded CTRL-F search for wokeness that we’ve seen in other parts of the War On DEI:
“That has nothing to do with this grant funding. The word ‘equity’ is pervasive in the grants that were funded by this, but in a totally different context,” Burley said, adding that in this context, equity meant planting trees in neighborhoods without them.
“Funding would have allowed us to finish planting the Lower 9th Ward, which is a really big deal,” Burley said. “That’ll be the third neighborhood that we’ve planted every street.”
Nobody in the Trump administration ever explains anything, so it’s possible that seeking to have an equal distribution of trees wasn’t at the root of the cancellation. More likely, it was because the urban forestry grant was part of Biden’s Justice40 initiative, which sought to direct 40 percent of the benefits of his administration’s major climate programs to help disadvantaged communities, especially those that bore the brunt of pollution and damage from fossil fuels. While that often meant minority communities, like those in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” it also included places that were in economic peril because they’d depended on fossil fuels for most of their jobs, like majority-white towns where coal mines or coal-fired power plants had closed.
The NPR story also looks at municipal forestry projects in infamously woke inner-city ghettos like Butte, Montana (90.8 percent white), and the small town of Talent, Oregon (population 6,332, 86.5 percent white). In Talent, a scary DEI grant of about $600,000 was supposed to go to replanting parts of town scorched by the 2020 Almeda Wildfire, including mobile home parks where greenery has been slow to come back, but thank goodness, Donald Trump ensured the place will continue looking like a lifeless post-fire hellscape for the foreseeable future.
Maybe both communities should simply be thankful Trump hasn’t decided to help them out by flooding them.
Ladd Keith directs the University of Arizona’s Heat Resilience Initiative, and points out that trees in urban areas are a great investment, resulting in far more benefits than they cost, in the form of improved health, lower utility bills, and even higher property values, not that Trump wants anyone but himself seeing those.
Keith dared to suggest that planting trees in low-income communities wasn’t actually some sort of pinko-greenie plot to harm wealthy white people who don’t also get money for trees in suburbs, seeing as how they have ‘em already.
“Our governments historically have disinvested in low-income communities, and so it’s our responsibility to make that right now,” Keith said. “These grants allocated to these lower-income communities to plant trees would have done a little bit of justice, in bringing that urban canopy back up to more on par with higher-income neighborhoods.”
God God, man, you’re talking about arboreal reparations!! We were about to make a joke about Trump eliminating funding for the U of Arizona, my graduate alma mater, but then we remembered that’s exactly what the fucker is already doing, so good luck, Dr. Keith.
Considering that the clawback of funding for this modest program is insanely unconstitutional, we hope there will be lawsuits by states and nonprofits harmed by it. Trees should be an uncontroversial good. But in the larger picture of Trump’s attempts to undo democracy, and to make sure Americans can never have nice things, this one may get lost in the chaos. That would be a damn shame. Maybe some of the donors who have been quietly filling in part of the funding gap for other frozen climate resilience efforts will help out.
God damn what that man is doing. God damn the people who fell for, or willingly embraced, his lies. We want our trees back, goddamn it.
But eventually this Trump winter must end, and if the roots are strong, all will be well again in the garden.
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[NPR / Heatmap News]
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