Where Recovery Takes Root

In 2016, Susannah Burley founded Sustaining Our Urban Landscape (SOUL) from her dining room table.

SOUL is a non-profit organization dedicated to restoring the urban landscape of New Orleans.

“We are strategically reforesting the city,” Burley said. “There are other tree planting groups, but we created the New Orleans Reforestation Plan, which was the first organized plan around replanting the city at scale.”

Burley gained inspiration to start SOUL after completing her graduate studies in landscape architecture. She was serving as the program director at Parkway Partners, where she managed several different programs, including one centered around tree planting.

During this time, she learned about how many trees were lost throughout the city of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. She also learned that there were no plans to replant or grow the canopy to a bigger number.

According to Burley, prior to Hurricane Katrina, canopy coverage was at about 33%, which is not high. After the hurricane, it was reduced to 24%.

“That means only 24% of our city was covered by tree canopy, whereas Charleston, which is very similar, has over 60%,” Burley said. “That’s really bad.”

Burley continued to hear the canopy coverage number being thrown around, and it didn’t sit right with her.

“Eventually, I decided to just branch out on my own, and start my own organization that was just focused around trees,” Burley said. “I launched SOUL by myself at my dining room table.”

At SOUL, the planting season runs from October to March. In the first season, SOUL planted about 200 trees, with the help of volunteers, many of whom brought their own tools.

In this past season, SOUL planted about 2,200 trees. Additionally, the non-profit now has its own office, trucks, trailers and tools, along with a staff of 7 people.

SOUL has positively impacted neighborhoods throughout all of New Orleans, including the Lower Ninth Ward.

Planting within the Lower Ninth Ward is not without its challenges. Since many people never returned following Hurricane Katrina, there are tons of empty lots, some of which have become overgrown with invasive tree species.

“That’s not necessarily doing good for the community because people throw trash in there, all that kind of stuff,” Burley said. “It’s not really serving the purpose of an urban forest, which is a planned forest.”

Over the years, there have been 2,169 trees planted in the Lower Ninth Ward. The increased canopy coverage is important not only in the Lower Ninth Ward but for the entire city, as it has several positive impacts.

“It will mitigate flooding by absorbing storm water, and it’ll clean the air. It will lower energy bills by creating shade and lower air temperatures,” Burley said. “Also, it just makes the streets more walkable because they’re shaded. Our summers are getting really, really hot here.”

Burley explained how the trees can lower the temperatures of neighborhoods by 10 degrees, as the canopy continues to grow.

According to Burley, it has become more frequent for people to die from heat-related illnesses in New Orleans due to the increasing temperatures throughout the city. She shared that some days in the summer reach highs of 120 degrees.

“Our problem used to be the flooding,” Burley said. “Now, it’s flooding, heat and drought, which is weird, but we do get them.”

The approach being used by SOUL in the Lower Ninth Ward is to replant the entire neighborhood, block by block, according to Burley.

“That’s really been successful, and so, that’s how we’re working moving forward,” Burley said. “We just bite off chunks of about 100 trees at a time, on Saturday with volunteers.”

As of now, a lot of the trees are still small in the Lower Ninth Ward, according to Burley. But, as they grow, that’s when the change in the neighborhood will be much more significant.

“Once the trees get a little bigger and a little fluffier, that’s when they start to do the environmental work,” Burley said, “and it’s very rewarding to see them doing their job.”

Throughout all of New Orleans, SOUL offers trees to every house, on every street, according to Burley.

“We plant really at scale, so we’re making a bigger impact,” Burley said. “One tree is not going to do that much work. Even if it drinks 1,000 gallons of storm water a day, one tree cannot change if a neighborhood floods or not, but when we plant on every street, it does change.”

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward nearly 21 years after Hurricane Katrina. It was created by an immersion journalism student in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on The Storm That Never Left: Inside New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward Nearly 21 Years After Katrina.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.