“Katrina: 20 Years Later” is Word In Black’s series on Hurricane Katrina’s enduring impact on New Orleans, and how Black folks from the Big Easy navigate recovery, resilience, and justice.
On August 29, New Orleans will mark 20 years since Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city, leaving it changed forever. Two decades later, there are many ways in which the city has never or will never recover entirely.
While some of these changes are quite well known, like the fact that New Orleans now only has charter schools and no true public schools, others are somewhat less familiar, if no less significant. Like the many trees that were destroyed back in 2005 — all 200,000 of them. Trees that — despite the best efforts of many New Orleanians, in particular those who work with the nonprofit Sustaining Our Urban Landscape — the city still has not gained back.
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The organization, which is better known as S.O.U.L., was founded in 2016, well after the storm, in response to the city’s lack of a plan to reforest New Orleans post-Katrina. “The first year, we planted 200 trees, just bringing tools in the back of our cars and stuff; this year we’re going to plant at least 2,000 trees,” says Susannah Burley, the organization’s founder and executive director. Not only is the organization planting more and more trees year after year, but S.O.U.L. is also working to expand the urban canopy in parts of the city that never had many trees to begin with.
“We’ve evolved our strategy over the years, and now what we’re doing is we’re planting entire neighborhoods at a time,” she says. “We’re working in frontline communities that were historically redlined and suffered racist housing practices, and so today, those are the neighborhoods that flood — that are the hottest, that have the least amount of trees, that have the most disinvestment.” Simply planting trees can quite quickly create huge benefits in such neighborhoods, particularly when you’re starting from as close to zero trees as possible in some cases.
A 10% Tree Cover Goal
When S.O.U.L works in a neighborhood, the goal is to get it up to 10% tree cover; in New Orleans’ leafiest (and almost exclusively whiter and wealthier) areas there is about a 30% tree cover. But in many parts of the city, especially around where there is public housing, there is only around 1% canopy.
While even 30% is paltry compared to some other Southern cities, including Atlanta, where there is 50% cover in some neighborhoods, it’s incredible just how much trees can do.
Consider flooding: a single bald cypress, the water-loving native tree that was one of the dominant species in the swamps that existed in the Mississippi Delta long before New Orleans was built, can drink up to 880 gallons of water in a day. “That doesn’t do anything to mitigate flooding of a whole neighborhood,” Burley says, “but when you can plan the entire neighborhood with water-loving trees, then you’re gonna mitigate millions of gallons of stormwater from going into our drainage system that is already overtaxed.”
The positive effect can be seen on an incredibly small scale: in one neighborhood, S.O.U.L. planted an entire block with trees a number of years ago, and has heard since from a resident that the street no longer floods during heavy rainfall.
Even with all the work S.O.U.L. has done, and as easily and quickly residents can often see the benefits of trees, the organization still faces an uphill battle in a number of ways. Burley noted that, despite all the trees that S.O.U.L. has planted, New Orleans is at a net loss for trees since 2016 because, as she put it, the city doesn’t do enough to protect the trees that it does have.
And because of the organization’s environmental justice framework, S.O.U.L. has lost a significant amount of federal funding this year, both money that was supposed to be paid to it directly from the Environmental Protection Agency and other government grants that were being passed through the Arbor Foundation. All told, the nonprofit is taking an $800,000 hit.
But S.O.U.L. will continue to plant more trees nonetheless, and will continue to show New Orleans how much urban trees can help to address many urban problems, including not only flooding but extreme heat as well — not to mention the help that trees can have with reducing pollution and improving overall air quality.
“Trees are a really easy way to mitigate these problems,” Burley says. “There’s two ways to mitigate these issues: stop polluting or plant trees.”
Still, a lot of people saw a lot of damage done by trees during Katrina. Many of those 200,000 trees that were lost fell on houses and cars — in some cases giving some people in the city a negative association with trees. For whatever reason, about 10% of people turn down free trees when they’re being offered by S.O.U.L.
But oftentimes, that’s not the end of the story, Burley says: “Usually what happens is people will opt out and then they see how amazing the trees look and how a few years later that neighbor has a cheaper energy bills than you do, and they’re like — I want a tree.”