A nationwide project from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab’s Poetic Justice will see 40,000 trees planted on public and private land primarily in urban centres across the United States. Planted by a vast, growing network of volunteers and local urban forestry organisations, Black Forest is intended to uplift Black communities and stories while also honouring the lives lost to Covid-19 and racial inequities. Accompanying the tree-planting project will be an evolving, participatory phone- and web-based archive where users can contribute stories and access films and publications centred on themes ranging from Black joy and resilience to mourning and remembrance.
“Poetic Justice aims to create art at the scale of the issues we are addressing,” says Ekene Ijeoma, an artist and the founder of Poetic Justice, which uses art, public engagement and computational systems to research and amplify social, environmental and political issues. “Our work is multi-sited, public, networked and community-driven to try to address these issues at scale.”
Ijeoma conceived of Black Forest after seeing a tree that had been chopped down and left for days, which reminded him of the murder of Michael Brown, a Black teenager who was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, his body left in the street for several hours. Black Forest addresses the ongoing issue of violence against Black people, as well as the inequalities pervasive in the US healthcare and political systems, issues brought to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic. The project’s nationwide scope reflects the level and reach of the disproportionate effects of these issues. “Covid-19 affected all 50 states,” Ijeoma explains. “It didn’t have any boundaries, so it didn’t make sense for the project to have them.”
Ekene Ijeoma, Black Forest: Providence (West End), 2023 Photo by: Anthony Eggert. Courtesy of the artist.
The Poetic Justice team quietly began planting trees in California, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Rhode Island and Washington in November 2022. As it grows in scale, Black Forest will continue through partnerships with local organisations, contractors and volunteers to plant the remaining trees over the next eight years. People can also offer up their land for the trees to be planted, and anyone can join by volunteering to plant on the Black Forest website.
Black Forest will also serve a utilitarian purpose: providing shade, reducing temperatures and cleaning the air in urban area that typically suffer from have dangerous heat and poor air quality. “We’re focusing on Black communities and neighbourhoods subjected to policies of redlining, which often are in areas where there are fewer trees and the air and land are polluted,” says Ijeoma. “The project is intersectional and doing a lot of things at the same time, but it all starts from thinking about that tree I saw chopped down and what a tree does for us and our air. With Covid-19, we saw respiratory illnesses. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, we heard George Floyd say, ‘I can’t breathe.’ We need trees in the communities that experienced such unfortunate loss.”
In addition to the tree planting, Black Forest will feature an archive that will be crowd-sourced and continuously evolving as users contribute their stories in response to prompts about friends and loved ones in Black communities, as well as films and publications documenting the project and ideas around it and additional stories of Black experiences of life and loss. Anyone with stories about loved ones in the Black community is welcome to contribute. The trees will include a tag or sticker with QR codes that link to the archive.
Ekene Ijeoma, Black Forest: Melvindale, 2022 Photo by Anthony Eggert. Courtesy of the artist
In addition to functioning as a living monument, the initiative also aims to be inclusive and show a more diverse representation of environmentalism. “There is a rich history of tree planting in the Black community, but Black people are not always seen in images of nature,” says Ijeoma. “When we think about people who are concerned with the environment, it’s rare that Black people appear. I hope people sign up to participate to contribute to this monument and rewrite this narrative.”
By broadening the image of environmentalism and including diverse communities and voices, the hope is that Black Forest might inspire volunteers and people engaging with the archive to consider their own relationships with the environment. “For some people, this will be the first time they’ve planted a tree; that alone is a profound experience,” says Ijeoma. “Having planted a tree, tagged it with the date and information on Black Forest, hopefully people become a caretaker and steward of the tree. Trees care for us, so we can give them care as well.”
