This story is part of Hola Cultura’s investigative series“The Shade Gap.” The series is supported with funds from SpotlightDC with reporting by participants in Hola Cultura’s Storytelling Program for Experiential Learning and co-published with the Washington City Paper.

Not long ago, a 25-acre patch of woods on the Catholic University of America’s West Campus offered a rare pocket of shade—one of the few remaining in Ward 5. Today, it’s gone.

Rows of solar panels now stand in its place, part of a project that earned the university the title of D.C.’s “greenest campus.” But in pursuing that title, CUA quietly claimed another. It became the city’s top tree remover, taking a chain saw to more healthy, mature trees than any other landowner in the District, according to tree removal permit re

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