An Urban Food Forest Takes to the Waterways

Green space is vital to cities: it beautifies, reduces crime rates, and provides a necessary space where harried urban dwellers can sit, look up at the trees, and breathe.

In some places, it also feeds people. Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest sprawls out across seven acres in the southern portion of the Pacific Northewestern city. Volunteers cultivate its rows of trees and shrubs, from which anyone in the community can harvest at will. Since its establishment in 2012, it’s grown “wildly prosperous,” Grist reported. It’s local, sustainable, and charitable: an example of the sharing economy at its peak. Similar plots of edible urban forestry have cropped up in places like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Los Angeles.