By Robbie Franklin
The Young Adult Foresters (YAF) program concluded this week after eight weeks of tree watering. I spent this last week reflecting on my time supervising the program as I wrapped up my final duties of the summer. Two things stuck out while thinking about the program. The first was how relevant the work we did was to climate change conversations in the media this summer, and the second was how well the YAF program functioned as a community development and youth development project. I feel that the YAF program succeeded by having a positive impact on Worcester’s urban forest as well as on the lives of young people living in the city.
This summer was an interesting time to work on a tree watering project. Tree plantings were regularly in the news over the last couple months, beginning with a paper published in Science referenced by The Washington Post (Parker, July 23, 2019), Time (July 4, 2019), Aljazeera (July 4, 2019) and others that claimed the most cost-effective solution to global warming is to plant 1 trillion trees. Shortly afterwards, on July 20th, a reforesting effort in Ethiopia planted 350 million trees in one day. Urban forests also made noteworthy news as an article in the Boston Globe (Crawford, 2019) on August 16th discussed the importance of urban forests in combating climate change and the challenges to maintaining urban forests that led to Boston abandoning its goal of planting 100,000 trees by 2020. Each of these news stories inspired more interesting conversations with residents and helped the Young Adult Foresters program feel more relevant. Tree planting was at the center of climate change discussions throughout the summer and we were able to contribute to this discourse by watering 400 trees each week. We were able to learn what it takes to make the tree planting projects suggested in the news successful after trees have been planted and I feel numerous neighborhoods in the city benefited from our work.