Since January, 2022, I have been documenting the removal of 991 trees from East River Park on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The trees are being removed as part of New York City’s East Side Coastal Resiliency project, designed to protect the Lower East Side from climate-change-related flooding. The ESCR project, now nearing completion in the southern half of the 50-acre park and quietly beginning in the northern part, replaced a previous plan that would have accomplished the same thing without removing most of the trees. Why the city chose a plan to remove so many trees over one to keep them is a question that troubles many in the neighborhood and many outside of it. The flooding that the project was designed to prevent was a product of global warming, yet removing so many trees (most of them of a substantial size, original to the 82-year-old park) would, without doubt, contribute to more global warming. The Lower East Side is one of Manhattan’s poorer neighborhoods with one of its older, less healthy populations, yet in choosing a plan to remove so many large trees and replace them with saplings years later, the city pretty much guaranteed that the neighborhood would become hotter, more polluted, and less healthy for a considerable time into the future. Given the choice between two plans that would accomplish the same thing, why the city chose the one that, in effect, went against the recommendations of scientists, doctors, and psychologists is a fascinating, if chilling, anomaly at a time when it is pretty generally agreed, even among the politicians who made the decision in the first place, that to remain livable in a warming world cities must strengthen rather than diminish their tree canopy and keep large trees standing.
Benjamin Swett 