By Maureen Barillaro, Somerville Climate Action
Renée Scott, Green and Open Somerville

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

Whether our origins were in the Garden of Eden or on the African veldt, we became human in green space. And we need green space for ourselves and our world to remain healthy.

Green space cleans and cools the air. It grows food and soaks up storm water while preventing runoff and flooding. It provides habitat for birds, butterflies and other species. It gives humans a place to experience nature, play and exercise.

It is essential to maintaining our physical health. For over three decades, we’ve known that patients recover more quickly from surgery if their windows afford a view of green space. More recently, a Harvard School of Public Health study found that “women who lived in the greenest surroundings had a twelve percent lower overall mortality rate.” And green spaces increase birth weight.

A team of American, Canadian, and Australian researchers found that adding ten trees to a city block increases neighbors’ health equivalently to making them seven years younger or giving each household $10,000. This corroborates county-by-county findings that the loss of 100 million trees to pest infestation resulted in 21,000 excess cardiovascular and respiratory disease deaths.

Green space is important to our psychological health as well. University of Rochester psychiatric researchers showed that access to nature gives people a stronger sense of community and makes them more generous. And the National Institutes of Health cites findings that, “green outdoor settings appear to reduce ADHD symptoms in children across a wide range of individual, residential, and case characteristics.”

Green space is also essential to combating climate change. Greenhouse gases produced by fossil fuel combustion trap atmospheric heat. Arctic ice is melting and sea levels rising much more rapidly than even the alarming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts predicted. The feedback loop of melting ice reflecting less sunlight, and resulting temperature increases melting more ice, is increasing the incidence and severity of droughts and extreme weather events.

Staving off climate disaster requires fixing atmospheric carbon. Soil naturally stores carbon. On land, 75% of the carbon pool is sequestered in the soil—three times more than the amount stored in living plants and animals. We need to build healthy soil by increasing biodiversity, keeping in place the plant-life that is already here and restoring what has been removed or damaged.

Recognizing its importance to people and the planet, “green space” is a term of art among urban and regional planners. The Environmental Protection Agency defines it as “land that is partly or completely covered with grass, trees, shrubs, or other vegetation.”

While individual perceptions of what constitutes green space vary, the evidence is unequivocal:  the more the space is like a natural green environment, the more effectively it promotes human and environmental health.

Many municipalities enjoy development patterns sufficient to allow distinct areas of green space. Their playing fields, wooded areas, community gardens and parks can all be separate and single-use. Somerville’s density and dearth of open space obligate us to be more creative.

We must ask ourselves: How can we maximize the benefits of green space while also providing for recreation and passive use? Some types of green space will not work here. We’ll never have tree-filled woods. And a large central park is a long shot. So we must work even harder to make sure that what green space we do have is as beneficial and plentiful as possible.

This month the city released a draft Open Space and Recreation Plan. It notes that 77% of Somerville is covered by impervious surfaces. But that doesn’t mean that the other 23% is green space. In fact, Somerville has the lowest proportion of both green and open space of any municipality in the Commonwealth.

SomerVision, the city’s Comprehensive Plan, sets goals of adding 6,000 new housing units, 30,000 new jobs, and 125 new acres of publicly-accessible open space by 2030. Achieving those goals requires incorporating them into every stage of the land-use planning process. Open space cannot continue to be an afterthought left to the final phase of development planning. It must be integral.

The greener that open space is, the more it will benefit all of us. That means maximizing vegetation. We need to preserve and maintain our grass playing fields. We need to plant thousands more trees. We need to tear up pavement and free the soil. We need to complete the community path, with miles of green and open space. We need large open spaces that aren’t parking lots.

We need development patterns that leave more open and green spaces for people who live here now, and for those who will come. This means increasing height limits.

As a city, we’ve already made a commitment to expanding the green space that benefits everyone’s quality of life. Now we must effectively follow through on that commitment for the good of our city and our planet.