Talking Trash

There are many things I love about the community I live in. I live just around the corner from the Ghirardelli factory and my neighborhood often smells like chocolate, and if you’ve never lived near a chocolate factory, I assure you, it adds magic to just about any environment. Just every once in a while, when I walk past the big lavender bushes near the local hospital at just the moment when Ghirardelli is pumping out the chocolate, I get a delightful chocolate lavender experience I have to just stop and savor. I have access to, within about a mile on foot, multiple Latin grocers, taquerias, a pupuseria, and panederias, Asian markets, a Sri Lankan market, an Ethiopian spice shop, and a little African goods merchant. If I want to venture just a mile or two further, there’s a fantastic South Asian market and lots more of what’s in my immediate vicinity. Tons of great little restaurants and cafes, and a thriving brewery scene, home to regional favorites like Drake’s, 21st Amendment, Fieldwork, Sons of Liberty, and recently opened Blindwood Cider, and The Cooler is a super chill, downright classy place to sample a huge variety of local and regional brews, ciders, sours, and more, with heavy rotation ensuring there’s something new to try every time you go. San Leandro is also home to awesome coffee roasters and award-winning bakeries. My neighborhood is one where lots of people are grilling all year long, and having been raised in the heart of Santa Maria Style Tri-Tip BBQ territory, inhaling big lungfuls of the grill smell wafting through my neighborhood is a comforting feeling that makes me really happy.

Yet I keep finding myself saying, “I don’t want to die here.” For all the cool stuff I love about my neighborhood, it also has all the trappings of Decline of Empire, lots of petty vandalism and crime, an alarming amount of violent crime, homelessness, crumbling infrastructure, manifestations of unaddressed mental health issues, and a heavy police presence that frankly doesn’t feel comforting, it feels unnerving. I suppose living a few miles from a psychiatric facility and using the same transit line as many of their patrons puts me at a disproportionate level of proximety, and most, though not all, encounters, are relatively neutral. While we have reasonable access to green spaces, I yearn for improvements here. Vacant lots that have been vacant at least as long as the nearly seven years we’ve lived here blight the neighborhood and simply sit fallow when they could be a community garden, a play space, a community space, a green space, or even a small business that provides jobs, livelihoods, and some useful service or product to the community. Of all of these, the most depressing and heartbreaking, and the thing that has finally been a deal breaker for me is the litter. It’s everywhere in great quantities. I even encounter abandoned furniture and other household items on the sidewalks with regularity. It was the day I stepped on a bucket of rotting fried chicken in the middle of the sidewalk that I broke up with this city and decided I want to live somewhere else. My SO and I will soon be in a privileged position to uplevel our housing, and we’d really love to trade our moderately cramped Bay Area townhouse with no outdoor space for something with a little bigger footprint, a lot more of it outdoors. In the meantime, we are happy to do what we can to improve the situation. I always said I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life, I just wanted to leave the world a better place than I found it, I just didn’t know it would look like this.

I believe very strongly that the answer to most of the world’s challenges is more love, feeding people, and planting trees, and I’m so happy to find most of my activities these days pointed toward at least one of those things. I’ve aspired to participate in tree plantings for many years, and until recently, translating thoughts into action was difficult. Over the last couple of years, I’ve started to show up for various tree-planting events around my community. Yesterday, we showed up for a presentation from the city to give a status update on their Tree Master Plan. It was a very enlightening presentation that, for me, highlighted the heartbreak of bureaucratic red tape that can complicate and stonewall the best laid of plans. My other significant take-away is that there is a serious marketing and education gap, not to mention inadequate support for the 5 staff responsible for some 17,000 trees in my city. I walked away with confirmation that people generally don’t know or don’t care about how vital trees are to the health and well-being of a community. Trees provide vital habitat for microbes that keep the soil healthy, bugs and the pollinators that eat them. We need pollinators to eat, y’all. Trees play a vital role in providing cooling microclimates in the midst of ever-increasing temperatures. Aren’t you cranky when it’s excessively hot? For vulnerable populations, it’s not a matter of discomfort, it’s a matter of survival, rising temperatures are literally killing people at historically higher rates. Trees and the leaves they drop are also important to air quality and locking carbon in the soil where it nourishes soil and makes it more receptive to retaining much needed water and carbon isn’t then released into the atmosphere where it contributes to those rising temperatures. We need air to simply breathe, and the cleaner it is, the healthier we all are. Guess where the tree deficits are? Low-income communities, yes. Where are crime rates higher, and health complications more prevalent? Low-income communities, that’s right. Who has less access to health care and resources for sustaining health and well-being? You got it. This isn’t a coincidence. We all need trees, we all need to channel our inner Lorax, we must speak for the trees.

One passionate participant at yesterday’s presentation shared her documentation of 50 trees that have been taken down in her neighborhood in the last decade, many of them healthy and simply deemed a nuisance by homeowners and landlords, and she was very clear about her anger and frustration of showing up to voice her concern over and over and not feeling heard. She is a Lorax. Another called for accountability about recent tree-planting activities surrounded by mismanagement and how this was going to be corrected moving forward. He is a Lorax. Sadly, the Lorax was a lonely voice that no one heeded until it was too late, and folks, we are there, it is very nearly too late. That is why we need many Loraxes. More trees is really a very simple solution to a lot of really complicated social challenges, a keystone solution that will at least relieve some of those complications if not wholly resolve them.

On the walk home, the trash seemed extra abundant and we did what we’ve started doing a lot of late, we pulled a plastic bag we carry around a supply of just for this purpose and started just picking it up along our route home. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: if I live in a community that is collectively so unconcerned about litter, how will we ever convince people that their health and well-being is inextricably tied to trees? My heart sank as I continued to pick up trash, processed food wrappers, empty cups,, lids, and straws, alcohol containers carelessly discarded by those who clearly sat right there, consumed them, and walked away, and all kinds of other debris. I’m not just looking at individual members of the public, there are long stretches of public spaces without trash cans and the city can do better here. Individuals are not off the hook, though. It looks like my community is a Tragedy of the Commons where it’s perfectly acceptable to release trash wherever they happen to be when they are done with it, just like a toddler who hasn’t learned better yet that there’s personal responsibility for putting away or otherwise disposing of unwanted or unnecessary items, and this is simply unacceptable. Y’all, that trash is flushed out into the bay, contaminating our water supply. Think about drinking garbage the next time there’s an impulse to simply chuck it out your car window or drop it in the nearest gutter because anything else is an inconvenience. Yuck.

Usually we just carry and fill a standard grocery bag, and for whatever reason, we had a tall kitchen bag yesterday. It was stuffed full in the space of less than one block, just the one side we walked on our way home, so much more garbage left to lie where it was for the rest of our route. Gross.

Anyway, rant over. Please love more, feed people, and plant trees, and if you can’t be a part of the solution, start with making sure you’re not part of the problem, and because I don’t want to just leave you with a picture of a bag full of garbage, here’s a native propagation of hummingbird sage we got recently at an event hosted by Homegrown Habitats San Leandro we put in a little pot on the limited container gardening space we have on our stoop, and the little guy keeping it company is a tiny Mexican sunflower. Collectively, small changes make a difference, and I’ll bet there’s a little change you’d be proud to share, too. It’s cliche, I know, and I just want to go hug trees now.