This pandemic has left me thinking of transformative leadership — what it can do and what we miss in its absence. I’m thinking of how we’ll get through this, what it will look like, and, someday, what will be left.
Picture this: it’s 2030. A young girl and her mother walk along a sidewalk. It is a wide boulevard; it is a narrow one-way. It is any street in our city — no, every street in our city. The girl was born the year of the virus and now she is taller than her mother’s waist. She ducks under the boxelder maple her neighbor planted the year she entered our world. With her knees on the grass, she examines an orange and black insect. To adults, this bug is a nuisance. To her, it’s a marvel.
There are little plots of land lining this city; we know them as “that spot between the sidewalk and the road.” The city calls them “park strips.” A rectangle of recreation, a kind of public square. What if recovery meant lining these parks with trees?
What if, instead of the stated 1,000 trees the city aims to plant each year, we doubled, tripled the number? A recent study showed 10 more trees per city block improves your perception of your health in the same way that being seven years younger would. Make it 11 more trees per block and your measurable, not just perceived, cardio-metabolic health improves to the tune of being 1.4 years younger or earning $20,000 more per year. On average, trees reduce the particulate matter in the air, pollution that would otherwise be trapped in our lungs, by seven to 24 percent.
In the time of coronavirus, planting trees is just one way we can start hiring people, just one way volunteers could start helping now, just one way we can invest in our public health infrastructure. It’s a way to lay roots even as we stand six feet apart.
Perhaps individual workers, not unlike the Prius drivers who precede trash pick-up trucks, mark Xs on park strips where trees will go. Perhaps city workers size up the plots, dig the hole, and offer citizens their pick of small, medium, or large trees. Salt Lake City’s Division of Urban Forestry already has much of this infrastructure.
In 1933, speaking to the nation about governmental measures to restore the U.S. financial system, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for hope paired with action. “It is up to you to support and make it work,” he said.
Imagine a line of cars picking up trees, one-by one — arboreal take-out. Imagine neighbors outside, separate but together, planting.
“Together we cannot fail,” FDR said.
Tenants and landlords, homeowners and public housing: what if this is one way we respond? Korean Sun. Prairie Gem. The city’s tree options are full of namesakes for light, shining and breaking across the horizon. Trees, Richard Powers reminds us in “The Overstory,” communicate via roots and air. They care for one another. Their “seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly.” They “sense the presence of nearby life.”
If coronavirus reminds our species of one thing, it is, I hope, of a deep memory — a memory older than us, engrained into the synapses of our brains — a memory that we are connected.
The girl leaning toward the bark asks about the bugs. Then she asks about the boxelder, then about the trees she sees down the way.
“Those?” her mother says, looking out at a thin-trunked aspen or flowering plum tree, “Those were the trees we planted during the virus.”
Allison Coffelt
Allison Coffelt is the author of “Maps Are Lines We Draw: A Road Trip through Haiti,” winner of the book prize from the Society of American Travel Writers. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brevity magazine, and elsewhere.
