By: Dana R. Fisher, Erika S. Svendsen, and James Connolly.
This is a careful and highly informative study of participants in tree planting and stewardship during New York City’s One Million Trees Campaign, which was part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlanNYC efforts to make the city more sustainable. It presents a nuanced understanding of how stewards became involved in deeply place-based work and how they mixed and sequenced other forms of civic and political engagement in complex ways. For many, stewardship is not segmented off as an innocuous civic activity, but is part of a mix of other forms of engagement in neighborhood associations, community boards, environmental organizations, school boards, religious congregations, unions, protest, and politics (voting, petitioning, public forums). This is especially true for the most committed stewards who have engaged in repeated plantings through the campaign, as well as other stewardship organizations.