A living memorial: King Boulevard, twenty years later, a model
for climate resilience action Pictured at left is a treeless and
stark Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. in Los Angeles, twenty years
ago last week. This photo was taken just before TreePeople
helped organize a huge tree-planting event in honor of the great
civil rights leader. The result is perhaps the largest living
monument to Dr. King...but even more important, the fact that
the trees are alive, thriving and beautiful today is a monument
to one of Dr. King's key tenets: sustained community engagement
and action. Trees and urban forests are essential for mitigating
and adapting to climate change, yet so many urban trees die in
less than seven years that this story provides a pathway for
successfully scaling up nationwide --so trees live to protect
and enhance the communities in which they are planted. On
January 15, 1990 thousands of people, from the neighborhood, and
from all over Southern California, came out to honor King by
planting hundreds of