Like many U.S. states and cities, New Jersey is racing to electrify cars, buses and bikes as part of its climate resiliency plan. Taxpayers in the Garden State are spending $215 million to subsidize personal EVs and home chargers.

But as a feminist urbanist driven by the mission of building accessible cities for everyone, I have to ask: In a climate emergency, why fund private luxury when we desperately need public infrastructure?

We all want to have our cake and eat it too — to keep driving personal cars while saving the planet. But this delusion is costly. For that same investment, we could expand bike lanes, grow our light rail system, and increase our state’s “blue” and “green” infrastructure – developing water management and ecological systems that integrate nature into our built environment.

All around New Jersey, grassroots groups are cultivating a radical blue-green infrastructure solution to the climate crisis: microforests. These tiny ecosystems deliver greater climate returns per dollar than subsidizing personal electric vehicles — and they’re quietly taking root across America’s densest state.

If we want to meet our climate and social justice goals, New Jersey should consider redirecting part of its EV subsidy funding to plant microforests in heat-vulnerable neighborhoods.

Microforests, also called Miyawaki forests, aren’t what you might picture. Pioneered in 1970s Japan by ecologist Akira Miyawaki, these dense, native groves occupy spaces as small as a parking lot. Once established, they require minimal irrigation or maintenance.

These microforests act as biodiversity engines, absorbing stormwater and cooling neighborhoods by up to 4°C (7.2°F), thereby mitigating urban heat islands. A 100-square-meter microforest can absorb up to 30,000 liters of rainwater per year, reducing flood risk and easing pressure on stormwater systems — all while sequestering carbon at unmatched rates.

While we often hear about the bio-physical benefits of microforests and other blue-green infrastructure, they also come with a range of social-ecological co-benefits: mental and physical wellbeing at individual and collective scales, enhanced cultural capital, social cohesion and sense of place. These benefits all challenge patriarchy’s roots in city design.

Urban historian Dolores Hayden discussed in her 2003 book “Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000” how suburban development required clearing land, imposing rigid grids and replacing complex ecosystems with manicured lawns and ornamental plants — all of which symbolized control over unruly nature. This drive to tame nature contradicts deep ecology poet Gary Snyder, who argued that the wild is invaluable precisely because it is part of us.

Microforests exemplify how blue-green infrastructure can reject the conquest mentality at the heart of conventional planning. Traditional urbanism served privileged classes, often subjugating nature, women, children and the working class. Feminist urbanism is not about creating “women-centric” spaces; instead, its objective is building accessible cities for people of all genders, classes, cultures, ages and abilities, alongside the natural world.

We foster urbanism that is inclusive when we integrate nature into our built environment. We foster the power of urbanism that is inclusive where everyone belongs. Microforests are a radical act of reclamation, designing cities that nurture rather than exclude.

And microforests are already taking root across New Jersey as part of a broader effort to increase tree canopy in historically disinvested neighborhoods and combat the climate crisis.

The City of Elizabeth has become a nucleus for microforest innovation, owing to the advocacy of Groundwork Elizabeth, a nonprofit focused on greening urban areas. Its Elmora Library Microforest, funded by the Kellogg Family, features a rich mix of native trees and shrubs and demonstrates the community impact possible. Groundwork Elizabeth also teams with government agencies, partnering with the Housing Authority of Elizabeth to plant a microforest at the HACE John F. Kennedy Arms Apartments.

“Everybody in the community loves them,” John Evangelista, executive director of Groundwork Elizabeth, said in January of a microforest planted in Elizabeth four years ago.

In 2022, the City of Summit planted an 11,000-square-foot microforest behind its community center, supported by an NJ American Water grant and contributions from the Summit Conservancy. Meanwhile, Bloomfield plans to start a microforest in late 2025 through a collaboration with Greener Bloomfield, the town, and the PSEG Institute for Sustainability Studies Green Team at Montclair State University.

Foundation funding has allowed a test of the Miyawaki method’s efficacy, and these first planted microforests in New Jersey have lived up to their promises. It’s time we focus on climate crisis solutions rooted in science and the future, not solely driven by the market of the present.

Critics will insist EVs are essential for decarbonizing transport. They’re half-right: Transportation must change. But in hyper-dense New Jersey, blanketing the state with EVs ignores reality.

More EVs mean more grid strain, more incentive for sprawl (as “cheap” electricity enables longer commutes), and more demand for destructive lithium/cobalt mining. Manufacturing one EV battery can emit up to 80% more greenhouse gases than manufacturing a gas-powered car engine. Mining one ton of lithium requires 500,000 gallons of water.

This isn’t zero-sum. Both EVs and forests have roles. But climate dollars must prioritize maximum impact and harm repair. Pouring subsidies into personal EVs perpetuates a broken system, one where every household “needs” a two-ton metal carriage and a lawn.

The climate crisis demands collective action — not individual indulgences.

This post was originally published on Next City.