Planting More Than Trees

After spending five days planting trees in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward during a spring break service-learning trip, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign student Ariel Russell recapped how the experience gave her a firsthand look at the neighborhood’s ongoing recovery from Hurricane Katrina, along with the power of efforts driven to improve the quality of life for the neighborhood residents.

Russell traveled to New Orleans in 2024 as part of an honors college course centered on environmentalism and Hurricane Katrina. The class combined studies with volunteer work. During her time in New Orleans, one of the groups the class partnered with was Sustaining Our Urban Landscape (SOUL), a nonprofit dedicated to increasing tree canopy throughout the entire city of New Orleans.

To prepare students for the trip, the class required them to watch documentaries and read articles about Hurricane Katrina and recovery efforts within the city of New Orleans.

When the class traveled to New Orleans, they had the opportunity to do volunteer work with several organizations, but SOUL was the one Russell was involved with the most.

“We took this whole class about Hurricane Katrina, and then for a week, which was spring break, we went there, and we spent every day volunteering,” Russell said. “So, it was like a service trip, and then we volunteered with different organizations, but we did SOUL the most. They were the most welcoming to volunteers, probably because it’s difficult to plant trees.”

From roughly 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., Russell and her classmates would plant trees, specifically in the Lower Ninth Ward.

“It was really hard work,” Russell said.

The students were split into groups of three and would plant four to five trees per day. The work was not easy. The students had to load their own tools, equipment and trees into vans before departing to the planting sites, according to Russell.

At the planting sites, students dug holes about two feet deep and would lift the trees into the holes, covering the roots to secure them.

“None of it was light,” Russell said, “all of it was very strenuous.”

Russell and her classmates planted trees along the sidewalks of the Lower Ninth Ward, never on private property. SOUL provided the tools, trees and planting locations, but the volunteers primarily worked independently.

“They basically had us park in a neighborhood and then we would get in the back of their truck with shovels and tools that we would pick out that they would give to us,” Russell said, “and then they would drop us off and we had a map with an ‘x’ on it and then we would go to that site, dig the hole, plant the tree, totally unsupervised, they just trusted us to plant the tree which we did.”

Along with planting the trees, Russell and her classmate had the opportunity to learn about the importance of trees in New Orleans. Russell summarized that her and her classmates learned about how trees provide shade to the city, reducing the overall temperature, along with helping to absorb stormwater, reducing flood risks. Additionally, the students learned about why the organization focuses on noninvasive tree species.

The Lower Ninth Ward may have been the only neighborhood in which Russell planted trees with SOUL, but it wasn’t the only place she did volunteer work. According to Russell, her volunteer work around the entire city opened her eyes to the stark differences between the Lower Ninth Ward and other neighborhoods.

“The poverty that the people there are experiencing is so much worse than any other neighborhood in New Orleans that we went to,” Russell said. “It’s very apparent the second that you get there.”

Russell continued explaining how the lack of grocery stores, restaurants and even houses was shocking. She compared it to the rest of the city, noting that the neighborhood was so close to downtown, where empty plots of land are nonexistent, yet they dominate the Lower Ninth Ward.

“We learned about this in class. There are plots of houses that are completely empty because the houses were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, and it was never rebuilt,” Russell said. “It was like every couple of plots, it was just empty. People’s neighbors were just gone, and their house was destroyed, and after so many years, it was never rebuilt. If you go to any other neighborhood in New Orleans near downtown, none of those plots are open. There’s a house on every single one because it was rebuilt.”

Additionally, after spending so much time learning about the importance of tree canopy coverage, she noticed how much hotter the neighborhood was due to the lack of trees.

“It’s crazy how barren it actually was and how there was no tree cover,” Russell said. “I was shocked to see a whole neighborhood that literally did not have any trees at all. Then you get to a different neighborhood in New Orleans, and it’s covered in trees.”

Not only did Russell get to know the community, but she also met some of its members. She recalled being met with different reactions from Lower Ninth Ward Residents.

“Sometimes people would come out in the neighborhood, and they would be really curious as to what we were doing,” Russell said. “Some of them were like ‘oh, thanks so much, and some of them were like ‘what are these college kids doing near my yard?’ So, we would just have to be mindful of people because they did tell us that the community can sometimes be wary of people who are not from there, and we were visiting from Illinois.”

Russell said the strongest lesson from her time in the Lower Ninth Ward was seeing how residents continue to support one another through community-led initiatives despite decades of challenges following Hurricane Katrina.

“My biggest takeaway from volunteering I think it would just be honestly like the power of community and working together, which sounds really basic, but we met with a lot of community people who were planting gardens, planting trees, a tool bank that loans out free tools to people in the community,” Russell said. “None of this would have existed if people didn’t work together and care and put in effort for their community. So, going in as somebody who is not a part of the community, but doing what we can to help them, you could tell that they’re close-knit, they work together, they look out for each other, and I think that that is the most important thing.”

---

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.