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Urban tree cover provides benefits to human health and well-being, but previous studies suggest that tree cover is often inequitably distributed. Here, we use National Agriculture Imagery Program digital ortho photographs to survey the tree cover inequality for Census blocks in US large urbanized areas, home to 167 million people across 5,723 municipalities and other Census-designated places. We compared tree cover to summer land surface temperature, as measured using Landsat imagery. In 92% of the urbanized areas surveyed, low-income blocks have less tree cover than high-income blocks. On average, low-income blocks have 15.2% less tree cover and are 1.5⁰C hotter than high-income blocks. The greatest difference between low- and high-income blocks was found in urbanized areas in the Northeast of the United States, where low-income blocks in some urbanized areas have 30% less tree cover and are 4.0⁰C hotter. Even after controlling for population density and built-up intensity, the positive association between income and tree cover is significant, as is the positive association between proportion non-Hispanic white and tree cover. We estimate, after controlling for population density, that low-income blocks have 62 million fewer trees than high-income blocks, equal to a compensatory value of $56 billion ($1,349/person). An investment in tree planting and natural regeneration of $17.6 billion would be needed to close the tree cover disparity, benefitting 42 million people in low-income blocks.

In this piece, we reflect upon a recent article published in Fennia by Ansell and colleagues. We identify and discuss aspects of learning that educational research, policies and institutions can consider, addressing the needs and subjectivities of learners and activating a politics around rights in education. Rights in education foreground the intrinsic value of learning,inviting us to realign the purpose of education with the overall purpose of life on this planet. It pursues a ‘bottom-up’ strategy for rethinking education as community formation to incorporate complex sources of knowledge and modes of knowing and becoming for children. In order to think about rights in education, we uphold an analytical distinction between schooling and education. The distinction enables us to raise some questions, reflect on them and suggest preliminary ideas for decolonial, childist strategies to envisage education, highlighting how education and the ‘future’ areintimately woven and exploring what they mean for each other and for childhood. We do so particularly by critiquing ‘western schooling’ as a mode of learning which is a conspirator of capitalism deeply rooted in philosophical racism and contributing to a global epistemological loss. Finally, we outline four strategies of moving forward with a decolonial,childist lens of reimagining education as community formation and welcome further discussions on rights in education.

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Customarily, reflections on the need to educate sensory and bodily enactments with the world, take for granted that it is the child who must be educated. However, the educational passage of becoming 'rational' and 'grown up' often leaves the adult divorced from her own embodied self. As part of my engagement with childism (conf. Wall in Ethics in light of childhood, Georgetown University Press, Washington, 2010; The child as natural phenomenologist. Primal and primary experience in Merleau-Ponty’s psychology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2013; Child Geogr, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1668912) in this article, I ask: Who needs sensory education? In response, I propose that it is adults who need sensory education more than their temporal others (Beauvais, in: Spyrou S, Rosen R, Cook DT (eds) Reimagining childhood studies, Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp 57–74 2018) i.e. children. As Merleau-Ponty has shown, the richness of embodied perception that children experience, is relatively distant for adults (Bahler in Child Philos 11:203–221, 2015; Welsh in The child as natural phenomenologist. Primal and primary experience in Merleau-Ponty’s psychology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2013). The particular lived-experience I reflect on is the sense of temporality. Accompanied by two distinct, yet interconnected examples of encounters with Baby Ole and Captain Duke, I suggest that being-with-children can enable philosophical clearings for adults to re-cognise plural temporalities, as opposed to a singular clock-time perception of Time. (The preposition with is used in the sense of the Norwegian hos or German bei, whereby an adult intentionally positions herself as a guest in a child's world.)