There's some sort of weird anti-tree conspiracy happening in Rio, and apparently at least part of it is to do with giving more visibility to advertising billboards. Although I swear I've seen trees removed in places without billboards...but then again, it's hard to tell, because sometimes street trees do have to be removed for legitimate reasons
I just need y'all to understand how upset this makes me, not just for the obvious reason that it's fucked to unnecessarily cut down trees in general, but specifically because of the geography of this city. So, there's an extremely unequal distribution of street trees between the North and South zones, which leads to horrendous heat islands in the ZN. So far all these reports about trees being removed are coming from the ZS, but it's probably safe to assume it's happening everywhere. +
+ Rio desperately needs more street trees in the ZN, but replacing trees in the ZS is going to suck up all the money/attention (because ZS is where the rich people live) and now there's a risk that if they do actually invest in greening ZN some fucking militia is just going to rip the trees out? Meanwhile summers keep getting hotter and people can't live like this! 😡