What is an urban forest worth?

Asheville, western North Carolina’s trendy urban center, is home to exactly three major green spaces: a cemetery, a golf course, and the UNC Asheville’s 45-acre urban forest. Now, UNCA wants to cut it down for a soccer stadium.

You’d be forgiven for not recognizing the name of Asheville City Soccer Club and their cruelly ironic mascot, Bender the endangered eastern hellbender, but UNCA administration certainly does. You see, Asheville City SC needs a bigger stadium to move into Division I, and UNCA has a forest that needs clearcutting. 

The urban forest is an island of refuge for wildlife between the city’s eateries, retail, and arts studios. This small pocket of undisturbed habitat is home to families of great horned owls, turkeys, and the endangered tricolored bat–as well as countless predators like black bears and coyotes that wider Asheville residents would, quite frankly, rather live in the forest than in their back yards. The habitat is so high in quality that the forest is able to serve as an experimental site for research and a field site for 18 environmental science and biology courses, from botany and ornithology to invasive species management. It even hosts the university’s Lookout Observatory, which invites students and members of the public to learn more about astronomy.

Contrary to UNCA Chancellor Kimberly van Noort’s comment that “students don’t even know where it is,” students and community members alike have turned out to oppose the proposed development of the forest, which would include a 5,000 seat soccer stadium, housing, and, of course, retail and other amenities. Since nearby Five Points residents first noticed the excavators plowing through the forest with no warning last January, students and community members alike have organized to protect the forest under the Save the Woods coalition, holding nature walks, benefit nights, and even a 100+ student walkout.

In December, local artist Spencer Beals organized an eco-art exhibition throughout the forest known as Batland. For almost a month, community members were invited to explore the forest’s trails and discover handmade bat portraits by more than two dozen artists. On Jan. 6, the exhibit was removed under the orders of the university, which cited safety and liability concerns.

Van Noort’s response to this outcry? To call the opposition “performative.”

I would argue that closing off Asheville’s largest natural green space to the public with a sign expressing concern for “hazards” such as uneven terrain and unstable and fallen trees in a forest (scary!) after being caught silently bulldozing it is performative. I would argue that boasting about sustainability and “campus as an urban forest” while clearcutting 45 acres of mature forested land is performative. 

Then again, flattening your environmental science students’ on-campus training ground for a soccer stadium is as good a lesson on their field as any. 

Of course, this isn’t entirely van Noort’s fault. The UNC System Board of Governors originally signed off on UNCA’s plan to designate several university-owned parcels as a Millennial Campus in 2021, before van Noort was chancellor. The true culprit is a system which prioritizes growth over students, communities, and sustainability.

Like many universities, UNC Chapel Hill included, UNCA is looking for places to grow to support an increasing student population and develop new revenue streams, but that growth doesn’t have to come at the cost of a priceless island of habitat. The university already owns several other sites that could be developed to provide greater academic and housing opportunities for its students, including a 22-acre parcel formerly home to the defunct Health Adventure children’s museum and 9 acres of already cleared land purchased in 2014. 

Even if the university absolutely had to develop this piece of land, there are better ways to go about it than bulldozing the entire mature forest to build a soccer stadium and some more retail. 

Local architect Scott Burroughs hosted a community presentation in October to show alternatives to the university’s plan, including building a soccer stadium in the school’s existing sports complex and maintaining the woods as a public green space. The university’s own M.S. in environmental resilience students have also drawn up a plan for the site, which would preserve its ecosystem services, including floodwater mitigation and carbon sequestration to aid in the university’s 2050 carbon neutrality goal. Their low-development plan includes a childcare center, student housing, a sculpture forest, and an outdoor classroom, while their medium-development alternative adds coffee shops, outdoor gear rentals for recreation, and a community center.

When the university finally decided to create an advisory committee to “support a thoughtful, transparent evaluation of options that can help ensure UNC Asheville’s long-term sustainability and future,” no one involved in the Save the Woods effort was included. Instead, the board is populated by real estate developers, the former head of Duke Energy in North Carolina, and–you can’t make this up–the CEO of a bulldozing company. 

“Nobody on that Board gives a rats [sic] ass about the woods, the neighboring communities, the wildlife, the local families,” Steve Atkins, a wildlife photographer who’s been trying to raise awareness of the woods’ plight through his work, said in an Instagram post after the board was announced. 

Atkins’ poignant photos of the forest’s inhabitants, particularly a family of great-horned owls, stand to show exactly what Asheville stands to lose: not just a recreational and research space, but homes for thousands of priceless animals nestled within Asheville’s vibrant urban scene. 

But in the end, the one thing this forest doesn’t have to offer is the one thing institutions like UNCA want: money. 

If this development goes through, it won’t be because the forest is useless, or because nobody cares about it. It won’t even be because UNC Asheville or van Noort are uniquely evil. The bulldozing of Asheville’s last urban forest would only be a symptom of a system of value that does not–cannot–care about anything that isn’t measured in dollars. Even universities, institutions that are meant to value knowledge and richness of experience, have started to find academics to be a waste of money. 

As we’ve seen with the area center cuts here in Chapel Hill, it’s never sports or other non-academic programs that are cut to clear space in the budget; instead, it’s the very programs and spaces that make our universities unique. At the same moment that UNC Asheville cuts drama, philosophy, and languages, it finds over $200 million to build a stadium in the ruins of its community’s last urban forests. At the same moment that UNC-CH cuts its area studies, it seeks to build a new basketball stadium out of reach of students in another forest. At this point, the unfortunate reality is that education is only a formality for the UNC system.  Anything that isn’t generating enough revenue for the Board of Governors’ taste is on the chopping block.

The real fight our generation is facing isn’t over each individual forest, over UNCA’s woods, or Carolina North, or Cop City. It’s against an era of capitalism so bloodthirsty that even universities are blind to the value of the world around them, with no ability to see past their bottom line. But in order for anything to be left standing, the fight has to start there.