By Kayla Benjamin and Robert R. Roberts
Inside Congress Heights’ new all-wood building at Sycamore & Oak, 90 high school kids from around the District watched as carpenter and forestry expert Trey Lord showed off the array of woodworking tools he uses to give new life to fallen trees from the District. Lord, a senior technical manager at American Forests, joined other experts in forestry-related fields to show off various green career paths Upward Ground: A Nature Equity Experience, a summit held Oct. 12.
“I feel like I’m here because it’s part of my duty as a Black girl in a city to make sure that the environment is safe for people that look like me,” said Mikayla Decker, a senior at Friendship Technology Preparatory, which hosts a specific Academy of Urban Ecology focused on teaching environmental justice and urban agriculture.
At Upward Ground, experts in tree-related careers showed off virtual reality headsets used to illustrate urban design to water system models demonstrating how vegetation reduces flooding and pollution. American Forests and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service Urban and Community Forestry Program put on the summit.
College students of color, including several from Howard, designed and led the summit, which aims to expose kids from underrepresented communities to the wide range of possible jobs in forestry. It’s the second in a series of similar events that kicked off at Southern University, an HBCU in Baton Rouge.
Jerri Taylor, a former school career counselor and director of Diversity in Career Pathways for the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, said that Black people make up less than 3% of workers in the U.S. forest conservation industry. As a Southeast D.C. resident, she said she sees firsthand how problems like heat islands — when a lack of green space and tree cover makes a neighborhood far hotter than surrounding areas — impact communities that don’t have representation in the forestry industry.
“One of the questions I asked [my former students] was like, ‘How many people in here family members have diabetes or asthma?’ And every student’s hand was raised,” Taylor said. “When I started to talk to them about the connection to the environment, that’s when it hit them — a lightbulb went off.”
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