Duke students have made a tradition of signing up to plant trees in the suburbs just off East Campus. This initiative, spearheaded by Keep Durham Beautiful, is just one part of a larger commitment on the part of the City of Durham to preserve its canopy cover.
For almost three years now, the city of Durham has committed to planting 1,500 trees a year, nearly all of them in low-income communities.
The city’s initiative to add more street trees is an effort to maintain Durham’s canopy and address historic discrimination that extended even to the ground between streets and sidewalks.
But this ambitious program faces questions about how it will be funded, and whether the rapid development in Durham’s booming real estate market will uproot trees as quickly as new ones are planted.
Read more from the 9th Street Journal HERE.
