Volunteers buzz around the front lawn of a Baptist church in Louisville on a bright October morning. Sporting navy T-shirts with the words Citizen Forester emblazoned across the back, they divvy up spades and shovels, grab buckets and hoses. Behind them looms the church’s imposing white-columned entrance and a sign that declares, “Prayer Works.” Across the street, a row of small clapboard-sided homes stretches down the block. A pair of dogs bark furiously behind a chain-link fence. Then everyone turns to the man in leather loafers and a linen suit coat. His ambitious idea — one that may or may not work — is the reason they’re here.
“We all intuitively believe trees are good for you. But we don’t know if it will help the health of the population to be living among trees,” Aruni Bhatnagar says to the volunteers. “Come back in a year to see if it’s working.”
Bhatnagar, director of the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute at the University of Louisville, is overseeing an effort called the Green Heart Project. The team behind the initiative is betting $14.5 million on the idea that trees could prevent heart disease in humans. The big test involves injecting a massive amount of vegetation — up to 10,000 trees over the past three years — into neighborhoods throughout Louisville.
“It’s a clinical drug trial,” the scientists based at the Envirome Institute like to say. “But trees are the pill.” Oak trees were once plentiful here in the Oakdale neighborhood, along with the ashes, maples and elms, that once lined many of the city’s streets. But in recent decades, worsening heat, storms, diseases and attacks from invasive beetles have ravaged the trees. The city government, facing plummeting funding for such projects, failed to replant, leaving neighborhoods like this one with a rapidly diminishing canopy. Each day, about 150 trees perish in this city.
