You may download the map as a PDF (recommended), or else view a full-size image.
Then zoom in to see the details.
This map strives to highlight our neighborhood’s evolving green infrastructure (water harvesting and rain-irrigated native food forestry) and other amenities borrowing graphics/symbols from the National Forest Service and National Parks in hopes that readers look at our community in a different way, focusing more on its myriad life and what enables it.
We can all help grow and steward national neighborhood parks and neighborhood forests right outside our doors where we live, work, and play; and do so in a way that once established, they are irrigated solely by free on-site waters such as rain, stormwater, greywater, etc. in a way that reduces flooding while helping recharge (or give back to) our groundwater, streams, and rivers, rather than extract from them, so that our individual, community, and planetary health all improve together. See here for a number of the ways we do so.
As of summer 2022, our neighborhood has 180 street-side street-runoff-harvesting rain gardens. We’ve planted over 1,700 native food-bearing trees, thousands of multi-use native understory plants, and our street-side and in-street rain gardens annually harvest over one million gallons of stromwater, which previously wastefully drained away. But we can, and need to, do 30 times more of this.
The map also highlights what may need to be changed or evolved. The crazy amount of sun-baked parking lots in our neighborhood is such an example, as their exposed asphalt is contributing to the heat-island effect raising temperatures in our community, and dehydrating it. The stormwater runoff from those parking lots could be redirected from stormdrains to water-harvesting rain gardens within and around the parking lots to freely irrigate native shade trees that would grow to shade and cool the asphalt, while controlling flooding and generating many other amenities. See here for examples.
What do you think?
This map is a first draft. Let us know what you think.
What works for you? What doesn’t? and Why?
How might we improve this map and what it strives to convey and inspire?
You can email your responses to NeighborhoodForesters@gmail.com.
For more photos, projects, history, and information on the Dunbar Spring Neighborhood Foresters
See here.
Thanks to the map’s creators
This map was created though a collaboration with Bill Mackey of Worker Inc., the Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood Foresters, and Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond.
Help us help others
If you’d like to support the Neighborhood Foresters in the creation of such educational graphics, its on-the-ground planting and stewarding of rain and native food forests in the public rights-of-ways, and the generation of tools/events/policy to help others please consider making a donation here.