D.C.’s poorest neighborhood has a massive urban forest, and yet it’s plagued by a lack of maintenance, illegal dumping, and deforestation.
[Photos: courtesy Ward 8 Woods]
On a 95-degree day in one of Washington, D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods, Montia Austin makes her way into a wooded area near a busy intersection. Wearing work gloves and a yellow safety vest, she’s on the side of a six-lane road that feels like a highway as cars and trucks speed past her to catch a green light ahead.
She’s there to pick up strewn trash: glass and plastic bottles, some full, some empty; fast food containers; beer cans and candy wrappers; canisters filled with flammable liquids; shirts, socks, and even shoes. In just 10 minutes, Austin has filled up a gallon-sized garbage bag with detritus littering one of the District’s urban forests.
Two hours later, Austin and more than 15 other volunteers have picked up about 3,000 pounds of trash in Ward 8’s woods. They’ve also made piles of tires and household items, including TVs and couches, to be hauled away. Others have disentangled dozens of trees from choking vines.
Austin, 34, has been volunteering with the Ward 8 Woods Conservancy for a year in the neighborhood in which she was raised. “I’ve always cared about the environment. I want to see all the acres of unusable forest here live up to its potential. I want to see hiking and biking trails and gathering spots where people can take refuge on hot days,” she says.
There are three main issues that plague the ward’s urban forests, says Nathan Harrington, founder of Ward 8 Woods: destruction of trees by invasive vines and lack of maintenance, illegal dumping, and deforestation by developers. It’s work, Harrington says, that the National Parks Service and the D.C. government should be doing.
The benefit of urban forests
On this steamy Saturday in early August, it might be even hotter where Austin is. “Ward 8 has experienced surface temperature extremes up to 12 degrees warmer than the D.C. metro area average,” says Benita Hussain, chief program officer for Tree Equity at American Forests, citing studies the nonprofit has done measuring variances in severe heat nationwide. “The difference between 90 and 100 and then 110 and 112—that is life or death.”
Research shows that trees and access to green space reduce stress, promote a healthy lifestyle, result in better school performance, and help with faster recovery from illness. Violent crime goes down when the tree canopy goes up, says Earl Eutsler, associate director of the Urban Forestry Division of the District Department of Transportation (DDOT). Trees clean the air, filter water, and offer flood mitigation; they’re “lifesaving infrastructure,” says Hussain.
One of Ward 8’s greatest assets is its urban forests, says Harrington. It has more than 500 acres of trees, including a magnolia bog. But the majority of the woods are neglected, he says. “They’re not maintaining it and they’re not doing anything to make it accessible or welcoming. It’s open to the public, in theory,” he says. “If you want to experience it, you have to bushwhack.”
Some of D.C.’s wooded areas fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government, overseen by the National Park Service (NPS); others fall under the care of various District agencies, including DDOT, the Department of Public Works, and the DC Housing Authority; still other wooded areas are privately owned.
Harrington was so worried about the trees in Ward 8 that in 2012 he founded the Committee to Restore Shepherd Park, a reference to the largest of Ward 8’s four wooded swaths, Shepherd Parkway. Its 200 acres sit on a bluff overlooking the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers; it’s been under the care of NPS since 1933 but remains inaccessible for recreation, with no trailheads or trails.
In 2015, an eight-mile section was carved out to make room for a roadway to and from Homeland Security; thousands of trees were felled. “I can’t imagine them ever doing something like that west of the [Anacostia] river in Rock Creek Park,” says Harrington, referencing the river that has, for generations, divided D.C.’s poorest wards from its wealthiest; Rock Creek in northwest D.C. is often touted as the crown jewel of D.C. greenery. A year before the new roadway’s completion, in 2018, Harrington realized he needed to fight harder for access, protection, and preservation of the woods. He left his job as a social studies teacher to work full time for Ward 8’s urban forests and renamed his group Ward 8 Woods Conservancy.
“It’s an equity and environmental justice issue,” says Harrington, “one that’s baked into the existing racial divide between D.C.’s wards east and west of the Anacostia River.” East of the river, and specifically in Ward 8 where Harrington has lived since 2009, 96% of the population is Black with a median income of $32,000. (Harrington is white.) West of the river, 25% of the neighborhood’s residents are white and the median income is $115,000. There, NPS maintains 32 miles of trails inside Rock Creek Park alone; in Ward 8, there are only 1.5 miles of trails despite all the wooded acreage.
“The woods have simply not been promoted or recognized as places that have value,” says Harrington. Along with six full-time park stewards employed by Ward 8 Woods and dozens of volunteers, Harrington tries to maintain the health of the woods removing invasive vines, removing dumped trash, and fighting deforestation by developers.
Maintaining existing forests
Over the last six years, Harrington says Ward 8 Woods has saved 7,000 trees by stripping off invasive vines. “Sometimes it only takes five minutes per tree. But you are saving a tree that might be 100 years old,” says Harrington. The vines are killing trees all over the ward, including inside Shepherd Parkway, where two historic Civil War structures, Fort Carroll and Fort Greble, have been so consumed by vines, they’re nearly invisible.
Harrington believes that the woods and its history should be accessible to visitors. Almost a decade ago, he submitted a plan to create 3.8 miles of trails in the Shepherd Parkway forest; four years ago, the park service finally drew up their own plan, which Harrington calls “vague.”
“NPS is committed to developing a trail system,” NPS chief of staff for National Capital Parks-East, Michael Donato, wrote in an email in response to our request for an interview. “[We are] proposing two options: a city trail experience closer to the road [which would be 3.1 miles] or a natural trail meandering through the woods as recommended in the 2020 Shepherd Parkway Development Concept Plan [which would be 3.3 miles].”
ILLEGAL DUMPING
When law students volunteering with Ward 8 Woods examined D.C. Superior Court records, they found virtually no criminal or civil enforcement of dumping laws in the ward. Dumped items have festered in the woods for decades, contaminating the soil and posing fire hazards. “No one really accepts responsibility for this neglected mess,” says Harrington. The hazardous waste not only kills trees but prevents the next generation of trees from propagating. “We’ve got to [clean up] before it’s too late, while we still have trees,” says Harrington.
Part of the problem is the proximity of the urban forests to major highways. Built in the first half of the 20th century, the roadways that sliced Black neighborhoods in half now provide quick and direct access for illegal dumpers. “I think a lot of these outside entities, the auto shops and the construction people who are dumping materials, have discovered that this is simply a place where they can do it and not get caught,” says Harrington.
In an email, Donato said the NPS will continue “installing ‘no dumping’ signs to discourage illegal dumping.”
DC Forests’s Eutsler says he finds the dumping, “as appalling as anybody else” but that dumping doesn’t fall within his agency’s responsibilities. “That is not a bureaucratic answer, it’s just a factual answer,” he says. Who is responsible, “depends,” he says. “I don’t know of any land where we don’t know who is the assigned responsible agent or agency for it. Now, that is not to say that however it’s being maintained or cared for meets with every advocate’s preference.”
In the last six years, Ward 8 Woods says it has picked up and removed 1.4 million pounds of dumped junk. “We are the de facto caretakers” of the ward’s urban forests, says Harrington.
DEFORESTATION BY DEVELOPERS
Deforestation of Ward 8’s forests by developers is one of the most troubling issues for Harrington. He points to the east campus of D.C.’s now-shuttered St. Elizabeth’s Hospital as a prime example. The mental hospital was built in the 1850s and famously housed John Hinkley after his attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981. While only one of the 30 historic buildings on the District-owned land has been renovated and converted into apartments and the rest remain boarded up, a nearly three-acre ravine of trees on the campus was felled to make way for new housing. Not yet developed, Harrington says it’s the largest deforestation in Ward 8 in at least the last five years. “Restoring and renovating the old buildings should be the first thing that you do, but instead it’s the last thing. . . . It’s backwards, in my opinion.”
According to an email from Casey Trees, a nonprofit that works to restore and protect D.C.’s tree canopy, the St. Elizabeth’s project was undertaken before D.C.’s Urban Forest Preservation Act of 2002 extended tree protections to city-owned lands. But it notes that land owned by a federal agency is still exempt from D.C.’s tree laws.
And then there’s the development happening on privately owned land. According to Eutsler, more than anywhere else in D.C., Ward 8 is dotted with privately owned, undeveloped wooded lots. Despite D.C.’s Tree Canopy Protection Law, passed in 2016 and touted as one of the strongest in the nation, Harrington says privately owned land is being deforested at an alarming rate. He blames a “loophole” in the law, which has rules about felling trees based on circumference size, species, and whether they’re a hazard. If a landowner (including a developer) proclaims a tree hazardous, the law requires immediate removal.
While Eustler calls Harrington’s allegations of a loophole “outrageous,” Harrington believes that “developers have a huge financial incentive to want to cut down and develop, and I think the city also has financial incentive to the degree that it’s going to generate tax revenue, because otherwise the trees falling in the woods are not making them any money.”
When asked about possible loopholes, Casey Trees’s director of policy and land conservation Kelly Collins Choi wrote that the organization believes that while there may be “bad actors,” the Urban Forestry Division “does a good job of enforcing and encouraging compliance.” But Ward 8 resident CJ Brandmeier agrees with Harrington that the law, “could allow property owners to legally remove any tree at any time with impunity under the suspicion of hazard.”
Harrington recently walked the woods of a development in Southeast D.C. where trees have been declared hazardous by the developer. While he agrees that some trees are partly damaged, he says they’re deep in the woods and not a threat to the public. “The only reason [the city] became aware of these trees is . . . because [a] developer wants to fell all the trees.” Both Harrington and Brandmeier say there needs to be a distinction in the statute for trees that are a “present hazard” or a “future hazard.” A tree in the middle of an urban forest the public doesn’t use should not lead to wholesale destruction of the canopy, says Brandmeier. “It just seems to be against the intent of the statute.”