Egyptians Fight to Save Trees amid Cairo’s Transformation

Egyptians Fight to Save Trees amid Cairo’s Transformation

A few months ago, Choucri Asmar decided he wasn’t ready to give up hope. So he led a group of residents in “a peaceful demonstration to protect the trees” of his Cairo neighborhood.

“It was like a war on green,” Asmar said.

Asmar and other residents of Heliopolis — an old neighborhood that boasts some of the city’s most important early 20th-century buildings — numbered the trees lining Nehru Street, labeling each of them after famous Egyptian figures. Five days later, police took the signs down and Asmar got a warning from security officials. The trees have survived, for now, while many others nearby have not, their wood sawed into pieces and towed away in trucks.

Part of the adjoining park was razed to erect a stone monument commemorating Cairo’s road and highways development, while a nearby public garden dating from the early 20th century was demolished to make way for a new street and state-owned gas station, The Associated Press reported.

Asmar said that between August 2019 and January 2020, Heliopolis lost an estimated 396,000 square meters (about 100 acres) of green space.

“And then we stopped counting, but lost much more,” he said. He described feeling disoriented on once-familiar streets.

That’s roughly 73 football