Rooted in relationships: Brittany Gadbury on canopies, community and activism

We spoke to a few incredible activists in the community about their work and what they’d recommend checking out at this moment in time. Don’t miss the powerful picks from community connector Brittany Gadbury.

Making changes for the better

Growing up in Vancouver, WA, Brittany Gadbury developed a relationship with trees young. A phrase she enjoyed long before her role at Urban Forestry describes Portland as a “city inside of a forest.” As Gadbury grew older, she found a growing connection to Africanist ecological perspectives and Indigenous ways of relating to the natural world — approaches that are “not necessarily science-based first.” Bringing that framework into her role is “a tremendous pleasure and honor.”

Gadbury works on the Community Stewardship team at Urban Forestry, where she helps support communities who don’t get to experience a healthy tree canopy. She works in partnership development and connects different teams with community groups for programs like the annual Arbor Day celebration and Portland’s Yard Tree Giveaway. Sometimes her work includes direct engagement like tabling, presenting or storytimes at the library. She also does marketing work sharing stories around what it means for communities to be in relationship to trees and the natural world.

For Gadbury, activism means “moving within our sphere of influence to make changes for the better.” Any person, of any age or identity, can engage in activism. “The cool thing,” she adds, “is that our sphere of influence is actually much more interconnected and vast than we think.”

Want to take part in your local community? Gadbury recommends you “find your elders and start asking for their stories.” In the U.S., she says, “we have a real tendency to throw away our elders.” Like the oldest trees in a neighborhood, they hold history that’s foundational to understanding place and memory. Gadbury adds, “Our elders have so much knowledge. It might take more time to look for it, acquire it, hear it through, and then figure out what we're missing. Where those stories live in our present. And if we can't find them, we have to investigate that.”

For example, Urban Forestry’s hub is in East Delta Park, in the last remaining home of a Vanport resident, a family of dairy farmers. The Urban Forestry barn was the family’s dairy barn, and it uses preserved wood from the original building. Gadbury feels responsible to “name that and acknowledge that.” She adds, “What an honor it is to work and operate in a space that's living history, and then find out what that history means to us. And, in our work, to contextualize our presence and our work there. That’s elder knowledge.”

“If you’re curious about trees in your neighborhood, or how to learn, or how to get involved — our doors of communication are open,” she shares. Urban Forestry offers workshops, presentations, data about tree canopies by neighborhood and an annual Tree Summit. The team welcomes questions and collaboration. She recommends reaching out to their volunteer team if you want to learn more.

Brittany Gadbury’s recommendations: 

Gadbury believes imagination is the first step toward freedom. “You can’t work toward a thing you can’t describe or identify,” she shares, and fiction — especially science fiction — can help expand our capacity to imagine outside the status quo.  

• The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak: “[Shafak] has the most lyrical, human way of creating stories that are terribly complex in a way without judgement but that still kind of works out justice and does it over these really cool time arcs ... you see time and reconciliation happen over these crazy species transcending arcs that bind us all together, and the fantastical part of me just eats that up.” 
• Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa: This novel struck Gadbury “from the first page to the last.” She was taken by “the stunning, completely visceral way that this is a story about many things, but especially about the women. And I learned so much. I am still kind of learning from what I learned. That book blew my mind and reshaped what a love story could be for me.” 
• Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum: “About nine real individuals in New Orleans ... These nine stranger’s lives are connected, woven together and part of the deep and rich story and history of that city over time around the devastating tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. I am very proud of the way that somebody trying to write nonfiction acknowledges their position and perspective as somebody who is not from that space. And the work of how do you write a biography? How do you create an interview that honors and centers the narrative, perspective and truth of the interviewee instead of being a colonizer and imposing your judgment or your analysis on it?”
• The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk: “I feel like it is very important, especially in agency work, to understand where we are working and how things came to be that way. Self-educating, I think, is also a big part of activism. ... [this book] does very thorough work of bringing you through what we call American history, but centering the work and action and experiences of Native communities who have always been fundamental to the identity, stewardship and legacies of this space that we live in.”
• Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence by Kellie Carter Jackson: “[This] really, really shook me as an African American who grew up in the Pacific Northwest. ... [Jackson] does the very impressive and challenging work of asking us to scrutinize the more dominant narratives around African American civil rights and liberation work based on good things. But she really starts to give a more complex history of that work beyond the central pillars we look to, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. We have lots of narratives around nonviolent resistance. She brings to the fore narratives I had never heard about the work of revolution and fighting for rights using resistance that includes violent resistance. It offers a more complete history of how we got here that, for me, was very important so that this kind of history and foundations aren't flattened into convenience. We can sit with complexity and see how that kind of truth might empower us to imagine more freedom and more possibilities.”

These excellent recommendations are a fantastic place to get started. Make sure to check out the full series!

Feeling inspired? Want to dive into activism yourself? In February, you can learn how to make change happen in a civics for adults course.

If you’re itching for even more books to read, check out our community care and activism reading list.