Opinion

Don’t mock ‘tree equity.’ It has health benefits.

Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako is a resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Eugenia C. South is a physician-scientist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is the faculty director of the Urban Health Lab.

As physician-scientists who conduct research on the impact of urban environments on health and safety, we are troubled by the casual disparagement of the Biden administration’s proposal to plant trees in communities that lack them. The overall mocking tone of some criticisms of “tree equity” would be easy to ignore if our surroundings, generally, and trees, specifically, did not have a profound influence on our physical, mental and social health. But they indisputably do.