From Rouge to Green

Baton Rouge is a city known for its strong sense of community. But it’s also a city that’s becoming more aware of the need to protect and enhance its natural environment. In a region where development has often meant the loss of green spaces, there’s a growing movement to restore and care for what’s left—especially its trees.

Sage Roberts Foley is Executive Director of Baton Rouge Green, an organization she’s been involved with since 2010. Baton Rouge Green is a nonprofit dedicated to planting trees, maintaining green spaces, and improving the urban landscape.

Sage Roberts Foley, Executive Director of Baton Rouge Green. Planting thousands of trees is one thing, maintaining them involves more than just irrigation, they have to survive everything from high wind, to being run down by cars and stolen by people

Sage is passionate about making a tangible impact, and under her leadership Baton Rouge Green has taken on some ambitious projects that are already transforming the region.

Trees are great to plant, but they’re not something that gives you an immediate return on your investment. Trees are, more than anything, an investment in our future. But a beautiful tree-canopy future for Baton Rouge isn’t going to be worth much if the future citizens of the city don’t have roots here.

And that’s where the Baton Roots Community Farm comes in. Baton Roots is an urban farm. And a collection of agricultural projects that provide an opportunity for community members to learn best practices in sustainable agriculture. It’s an initiative that falls under the umbrella of a Baton Rouge organization we’ve talked about before on this show, The Walls Project.

The Associate Director of Baton Roots Community Farm is S.K. Groll.

S K Groll, Associate Director of Baton Roots Community Farm. The difference between farming and gardening is scale and the ability to offer a career springboard into agriculture

Every year when June 1st rolls around we start talking about hurricanes. If this does anything – besides inducing a community-wide sense of anxiety – it makes us confront the fact that we’re living in a precarious place.

Whether you believe climate change is man-made or simply the result of a natural cycle, we have to do whatever we can to make Baton Rouge resilient enough to withstand whatever nature and the future throws at us.

While most of us do what we can by thinking positive thoughts and staying upbeat about life here, folks like Sage and SK are getting up every day and actually doing something to help ensure city life is not just sustainable, but better for future generations.