Kayla Stewart is a Tennessee-based urban forester who leads the organization TreeCPR to create

healthier, stronger communities as climate change escalates.

She shares her brief but spectacular take on the power of trees.

My fondest memories outdoors were with my grandparents in the Great Smoky Mountains National

Park. We would look for

crawledads and salamanders and birds. My grandfather was an ecologist, so we had a walking

encyclopedia with us who fed us all this information that I didn't realize would have such a huge

impact of my life. I unfortunately lost him to cancer.

And ever since then, I have been looking for ways to continue his legacy and really make him

proud of the person that I'm becoming in our natural world. Memphis sits along the Mississippi River in the Delta region and it's got some of the most beautiful big trees I've ever seen in my entire life.

Trees provide protection for us and sometimes we forget that. They can cool cities up to 20 degrees sometimes in times of extreme

heat. There's a lot of inequities in neighborhood to neighborhood across Memphis. You can tell

which neighborhood is more vulnerable just by looking at how their vegetation is managed. If there are any trees that have

been planted recently, and a lot of times those communities that are more vulnerable and have

historically faced discrimination tend to have lesser quality tree canopy. I created tree CPR.

Tree CPR is a workforce-based program that teaches individuals

primarily from underserved communities, the technical skills, as well as the soft skills,

they need to get jobs and natural resources. I want the students in my class to understand how important it is for us to be stewards

of the vegetation in and around our communities. It's important from people from these like

historically disadvantaged communities to have a seat at the table so they can make decisions for

their own neighborhoods to say, hey, we need more shade here.

We need higher quality tree canopy here.

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