Dead Wood: Growing, Wasting, and Harvesting Baltimore's Urban Forest

Abstract

US cities are ?going green,? evoking utopian images of tree lined streets, lush parks, and swimmable waterways. But as a practice, ?going green? is messy. When sustainability advocates attempt to green cities they inevitably build upon histories and politics of land use in ways that can perpetuate injustices. Yet greening and sustainability continue to serve as buzzwords for city planners with the assumption that these conceptual approaches will guide better urban futures. In this dissertations I critically address these claims by exploring how greening initiatives are transforming Baltimore, MD, USA. I study greening initiatives from an unlikely perspective: death and loss. I investigate the emergence of a new urban forestry that promotes planting trees and harvesting houses in Baltimore'sBlack majority neighborhoods. I specifically focus on a pilot project being implemented by the United States Forest Service (USFS) in Baltimore to bring USFS expertise of timber harvest and land restoration into the city. Through interviews with forestry and sustainability professionals, neighborhood residents, artists, and housing activists, I investigate the uneven geographies and ecologies of dead and decaying trees and neighborhoods and the current and historical processes of care, disinvestment, representation, and governance that lead to these conditions. By focusing on federal interventions in tree death in the context of community abandonment, this dissertations explores the uneven power dynamics and slow violence that can underpin sustainability programs that are portrayed as always already having overcome inequality.