More trees means better health!
Lakewood is a city that has been unable to plant enough trees to meet or even come close to their own 2025 goal that was established in 2015 for a 30% urban tree canopy. Reaching that goal would require planting half a million trees!
In 2023, the city held its first tree sale, providing $25 trees to residents willing to plant them on their own. In 15 minutes, they sold out of 200 trees. So in 2024 they doubled that order.
There are roughly 700,000 trees in Lakewood today, but there could always be more.
“The more trees we can get in the ground the better,” Luke Killoran, forestry supervisor for the city of Lakewood said. According to Killoran, an assessment of the area showed Lakewood’s total urban tree canopy sits at around 16%.
Lakewood is also a city that has not taken any action on the Audubon Society’s recommendation that the city’s habitat and environment damaging tree replacement formula based on caliper inches should be revised to use the science-based basal area formula.
Evidence now shows that Lakewood’s apparent intransigence to implement proactive and science-based tree planting policies may actually be impairing the physical health of residents based on blood testing of a key biomarker of inflammation in a group of test subjects. Lower income residents may be especially impacted since lower income neighborhoods tend to have fewer trees based on tree equity scores.
Living in a tree-filled neighborhood may be as beneficial to the heart as regular exercise, new research shows.
Results from the Green Heart Louisville Project’s HEAL Study, released in August 2024, showed that people living in neighborhoods with twice as many trees and shrubs had lower levels of a blood marker associated with heart disease, diabetes and some types of cancer compared with those who lived in more tree-bare neighborhoods.
Most previous studies showing the effects of nature on mental and physical health are observational and can’t answer whether people who live in green communities are healthier because they’re wealthier and have access to better health care.
The HEAL study was set up with a control group and an intervention, meaning something measurable that some of the participants were exposed to during the study but not before.
Then, from 2019 to 2022, they planted nearly 8,500 evergreen trees, 630 deciduous trees — the type that lose leaves in the fall — and 45 different types of shrubs in parts of the 4-mile study area, leaving others untouched.
People living in the intervention areas had 13% lower levels of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, a blood marker associated with heart disease, including stroke, coronary artery disease and heart attack. The drop was similar to starting a regular exercise routine.
Lakewood’s approach of allowing developer’s to pay fees to avoid planting more trees and even paving over part of a park instead of planting trees are not health-promoting strategies compared to simply planting more trees!
Nor is the strategy of selling 200 hundred trees to homeowners a serious effort at making up the missing 500,000 trees that need to be planted as per Lakewood’s own policy.
But Lakewood does sport the Tree City USA moniker and does have more trees than many cities. However, even more trees is better. And Lakewood does have room to improve.
Get it done, Lakewood!
More details at: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/rcna168214
