'Guerilla Gardening'
Are Regenerative Urban Food Forests Boston's Key to A Climate-Resilient Future?
An expansive sprawl of industrial buildings resides along a rocky inlet of Boston’s Island End River. Obscured by interstate highways and commercial shopping districts, few Bostonians are aware of (or even acknowledge) its existence. The New England Produce Center (NEPC) — straddling the working-class neighborhoods of Chelsea and Everett — is a primary food distribution outpost that provides most of the food filling metro residents’ plates, whether it be a home-cooked meal or at a fine-dining establishment.
However, it’s now on the verge of total inundation. According to Executive Director Marc Draisen of Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), the low-lying land serving as the Produce Center’s foundation is growing progressively more susceptible to flooding as a result of climate change, prompting the agency to question the resiliency of Boston’s food systems.
Since 1900, the waterways surrounding Greater Boston, which feed into the North Atlantic Ocean, have risen a total of nine inches — about one inch every eight years. Although this rate of change may appear trivial given the data’s expansive timeline, human-induced mainland warming has pushed both our atmosphere and oceans’ envelopes to a state of non-repair. We cannot merely “reverse” Boston’s dire consequences of climate change and, as global carbon emissions continue to proliferate despite scientists’ warnings, so does the area’s extreme flood risk. Climate Ready Boston, a climate change research initiative commissioned by former Mayor Marty Walsh, anticipates Boston’s sea-level rise to triple over the next decade, making it one of the top-five most vulnerable cities to acute coastal flooding in the United States.
If another extreme weather event like Hurricane Sandy were to strike Boston’s coastline, the NEPC facility would be devastated — along with the city’s food supply. Without any product to distribute or employees to transport food to local grocers, necessary nutrients like fruits and vegetables would not only be difficult to come by but also considerably more costly. This prospective mass food shortage, more importantly, poses an imminent threat to the public health and safety of Suffolk County’s most socially vulnerable neighborhoods — Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester — which already possess minimal to non-existent access to fresh, healthy foods.
Map depicts number of grocery stores (blue) and farmers markets (green) within Boston's "affluent" neighborhoods (left) and low-to-no income neighborhoods (right). Note the discrepancy in access.
“The produce center is a regional resource,” Draisen said. “So, we need to start thinking about regional solutions.”
Seeking Solutions: Urban Food Forests
Orion Kriegman, an Egleston Square local and graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Politics, has been working to rectify the fragility of Boston’s food systems for the past twelve years. Formerly employed as an urban planning consultant at the Tellus Institute in Cambridge, which “strives to advance a planetary civilization rooted in justice, well-being, and sustainability”, Kriegman is astutely aware of the power disparities that plague civic life. Especially, those that lie at the intersection of the environment, economic inequality, and food access.
“Climate change in Boston is clearly an issue environmental racism,” Kriegman said in a recent Zoom interview. “The majority of low-income neighborhoods of color lack equitable green space and tree cover, which increases the heat burden residents’ face as well as extreme flood risk.”
Photo courtesy of Boston's Food Forest Coalition
Now, at 46, he is the founder and full-time executive director of the Boston Food Forest Coalition (BFFC), a non-profit community land trust organization that transforms polluted, city-owned lots into urban “food forests”. What began as a collaborative, grassroots clean-up project with his wife, Hannah Thomas, and nearby neighbors in 2009 is, now, a powerful city-wide network of over a dozen flourishing plots and hundreds of local volunteer stewards.
Take a Virtual Tour of the Egleston Community Food Forest!
Photo by Kaitlyn Mettetal
Photo by Kaitlyn Mettetal
Photo by Kaitlyn Mettetal
Photo by Kaitlyn Mettetal
In addition to providing neglected neighborhoods with essential public green spaces and recreational parklands, the Coalition’s “food forest” approach to urban farming is perhaps one of the most viable solutions for Boston’s climate-hunger crisis.
Amongst the oldest forms of agricultural land use, food forests are a low-maintenance, sustainable modality of plant-based agriculture that prioritizes encompassing environments and community needs. A subset of permaculture farming, diverse selections of edible vegetation — such as vegetables, berries, fruit trees, and herbs — are pragmatically planted in a way that mimics natural ecosystems. Unlike conventional farming which, according to the Rodale Institute for agricultural research, catalyzes ground erosion by over-working already-damaged soils and increases greenhouse gas emissions through the consistent use of fossil fuel-intensive pesticides, food forests’ perennial “companion planting” methods ensure entirely organic and regenerative food systems with maximized ecological benefits.
Photo courtesy of Farmers' Almanac
By grouping together symbiotic vegetation — plants that biologically and environmentally “support” one another — in a plot that reproduces a native ecosystem, tall fruit and nut trees naturally provide a temperature-regulating "green canopy" for smaller shrubs, herbs, and root vegetables that reside closer to the food forest’s floor, sequestering carbon (heat) during sweltering summer droughts and retaining warmth throughout the bitter winters. This form of biotic temperature control, in turn, permits all food forest vegetation to thrive year-round by stabilizing moisture levels (the total amount of rainwater absorbed over a given period) of the ground soil without human or chemical intervention.
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Fixing the Faucet &
Lowering the Thermostat
The advantages of these climate-moderating green canopies — especially, in densely-populated urban areas — transcend far beyond adapting food systems, too. According to the City of Boston’s 2021 Preparing for Heat Report, local communities with an excess of buildings, sidewalks, and roads (over-development) and minimal public green space (trees, grass, etc.) endure the brunt of the heat burden year-round in comparison to suburban areas — a phenomenon scientists call the “urban heat island effect”.
Click the map to interact with Boston's Heat Intensity. Visualization courtesy of the Museum of Science, Northeastern University.
“We have now come to find that Boston neighborhoods that were historically redlined due to racist mortgage-lending practices, like Roxbury and Dorchester, now possess 16-percent less green space than the city’s more affluent communities and, subsequently, experience temperatures 3.3-degrees warmer than Boston’s summer-daytime averages,” Associate Director Alex Alvanos of Boston’s Food Forest Coalition said during a recent Zoom interview.
Large trees, which constitute food forests’ canopies, profoundly affect our climate and, therefore, the weather we experience on a daily basis. Through a process known as evapotranspiration, trees (and other plants) uptake excess groundwater, which is the primary cause of stormwater flooding, and release clean water vapor into the atmosphere. Not only does this organic process remove harmful pollutants and particles from the air in which we breathe, but a plethora of recent studies conducted by the University of Washington and National Institutes of Health (NIH) on curbing urban heat island effects found that developing large, urban greenspaces can reduce both surface and air temperatures up to nine-degrees Fahrenheit.
When integrated on a macroscopic scale, the cooling effects of urban forests and large parklands have been observed to stretch as far as a half-mile from these greenspaces’ boundaries. According to Trust for Public Land’s 2016 study on the benefits of green infrastructure for heat mitigation and emissions reductions in cities, the extensive planting of trees throughout Los Angeles, Calif. reduced late-afternoon temperatures by three-degrees Fahrenheit across the area as a whole — offsetting much of the city’s average summer heat island. And in Atlanta, Georgia, which recently endured the hottest summer since the 1936 Dust Bowl, a theoretical simulation found that doubling the tree canopy — both inside and around the urban center — would decrease average summer daytime temperatures by nearly 12-degrees Fahrenheit.
“A lot of folks forget how important trees are,” Alvanos said. “But, if you just take a walk on a hot day near any piece of woods like Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain, it’s noticeably cooler.”
Closely assessing the City’s Climate Ready Boston Map Explorer, which tracks average daytime surface temperatures by neighborhood on a “mild” (yellow) to “very high” (red) spectrum, the daily heat burden on areas with large greenspaces is far less significant and concentrated than that faced by highly-urbanized areas. For instance, the communities surrounding Franklin Park (the location of BFFC’s flagship food forest) and the Arthur Arboretum — Boston’s two largest public greenspaces — tend to experience only dispersed, mild urban heating effects, if any at all.
Click the map to experiment with climate change in Boston. Visualization courtesy of the City of Boston, Climate Ready Boston.
If we take into account stormwater flood risk (blue) alongside surface temperatures, the Climate Ready Boston Map Explorer also projects that these same neighborhoods are less susceptible to climate-change-induced flooding, too. Compared to Roxbury and North Dorchester, for example, which both possess few vegetated areas and, subsequently, a greater likelihood of severe stormwater flooding in the near-term, middle-term, and long-term (blue), severe stormwater flooding around Franklin Park and the Arboretum appears — like surface temperature — localized around Washington Street, which is a heavily-developed piece of land.
Click the map to experiment with climate change in Boston. Visualization courtesy of the City of Boston, Climate Ready Boston.
A city’s climate and overall flood risk are two inextricably linked phenomena. Beyond the mutual relationship between rising air temperatures and increased rainfall intensity, investing in green infrastructure — or failing to do so — could determine the difference between a mere rainstorm and a total inundation event for a low-lying and highly-urbanized area like Boston.
High-tide flooding along Boston's coastline during October 2016. Photo courtesy of Boston Harbor Now.
There are, as it currently stands, few buffers protecting local communities from the raging (and, lately, rather unpredictable) weather systems of the Atlantic. Because most of the area’s valuable coastal wetlands have been eroded by sea-level rise or filled for urban development projects, floodwater mitigation relies on Boston’s 79.4-percent impervious surface cover — which altogether prevents evapotranspiration — and outdated sewer system that, according to Boston Water and Sewer Commission’s most recent Inundation Model, can only retain five-inches of rainfall over a 24-hour period before reaching maximum capacity. Not only does this avert the removal of heat from the city’s surfaces — leading to rising air temperatures and, with it, increased flood risks — but, in the instance of a severe weather event, Boston’s excess of concrete and lack of tenable sewer systems means that floodwaters have little way of draining. Hence, the growing danger to the facilities and services most vital to residents’ health and well-being, such as the NEPC.
“As we know, stormwater flooding is part of what climate change brings to us in a coastal city like Boston,” Alvanos said. “A lot of the land work we do focuses on repairing the soil so that it can retain a significantly higher portion of water, which benefits our food production too.”
In addition to aiding the stabilization of rainfall accumulation through cooling, food forests — as with other forms of green infrastructure — function as considerably efficient organic water retention systems. Whereas impervious surfaces like paved areas or buildings force precipitation to “run-off”, soil essentially acts like a bottomless sponge that makes lands better apt for flood mitigation. Permaculture farms are designed around a specific piece of land’s precipitation patterns and how that land responds to rainfall accumulation, so food forests ensure maximum water infiltration and retention within the soil. And, because permaculture also strictly abides by no-till planting practices, which allows for the build-up of organic matter, food forest soil is not only healthier (benefiting the vegetation) but far more absorbent — soaking in moisture whenever and wherever it falls. Working in concert with the tree layers, which slow rainfall through leafy canopies, this biodiverse soil decelerates run-off by dispersing accumulation over a large, highly-permeable surface area, thus, reducing the land’s overall flood risk.
Despite the extensive literature regarding urban forests’ long-term ecological impacts, the integration of green infrastructure in climate-vulnerable areas has yet to be adopted as a popular mitigation approach. Aside from the general ambivalence that seems to define American culture’s relationship with the changing climate, the local governments and city developers responsible for enacting these transformations on a macroscopic scale historically opt for revenue-maximizing solutions — even if those solutions have proven to be fruitless or contradictory to the overall goal of climate change resiliency. Solutions such as gray infrastructure (sewers, retention walls, manholes, etc.) or pipe-to-pond methods, which are often assumed to be more economical in the short term.
But, what purposes do these short-term “solutions” bear when the long term remains exceptionally bleak?
“The objective is to course-correct the current trend,” according to Distinguished Professor Rattan Lal, who has taught Soil Sciences at Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Sciences since 1987. “With climate change, there is no one solution, but agriculture is certainly the most low-hanging fruit.”
Of course, like all configurations of newly-emerging solutions to climate change, urban food forests have some limitations. Especially, when applying the model as a countermeasure to Boston’s potential climate-hunger crisis in light of NECP’s growing inundation risk. Most effective and fool-proof when planting crops native to southern New England such as berries, beans, pumpkin, and squash, food forests’ yields certainly wouldn’t be enough to provide for the eight-million people currently serviced by NECP nor would our customary array of produce options be readily available, regardless of growing seasons. However, as Prof. Lal mentions, agriculture is the most viable and accessible first-step towards adapting our communities to a climate-precarious future.
The New England Produce Center is certainly not Boston’s only critical infrastructure threatened by rising temperatures and sea levels, nor are food forests the sole means of rectifying these issues. But, if the city truly desires to change our current trajectory of the urbanization-climate change-social vulnerability nexus, urban agriculture’s multivalent benefits — from stifling immediate climate change impacts, like extreme heat and severe flooding, to improving whole food access and public health — prove food forests to be a feasible jumping-off point. Although far from being a mainstream mitigation strategy, food forests are an ultimately effervescent, zero-sum approach to building a climate-resilient Boston. One that not only builds the resiliency of the food systems sustaining our existence but, above all, one that builds the resiliency of our bonds with one another in the face of a fragile and fraying socio-environmental fabric.
“The stronger our social bonds are, the more likely we are to respond to difficulty,” Alvanos said. “And the more we develop bonds to nature, observing it and understanding how it works, the more our communities will be able to adapt to and change with a future of ambiguity.”