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Kids have an enormous amount of energy. They care deeply about the future. Their creativity is an inspiration. It's contagious. As anyone who has interacted with a toddler knows, they also don’t put up with half-baked ideas or projects and will easily find holes in weakly set intentions, boundaries, or cultural norms. Their unique perspective can be a gift, especially in the world of ecosystem restoration.
I remember one instance in grade school that had a big impact on me as a kid. I remember someone coming to our public school to give a presentation on trees. I can’t remember if this was an individual working on their own or with a group or non-profit, but I remember they gave every kid in the class a tree sapling to plant at home. This presenter told us if we saw someone cut down a tree, to just remember we could be the ones to plant them back. It was a simple enough idea.
Planting Pawpaw seeds: a once abundant, native tree that produces some of the largest fruit in North America.
I planted my tree in our backyard in Pennsylvania. Although I am pretty sure this particular sapling didn’t make it through its first year of life, the idea that I had the agency to plant trees, took root. Growing up, I saw many trees cut down in our neighborhood. I heard stories of great trees like the great American Chestnut that was no longer in our forests, and felt the loss of magnificent forests that had once been commonplace across the country - can you imagine trees 5-6 feet in diameter and towering over 250 feet on the east coast! Yet I also felt this renewed sense of purpose each time I heard one of these stories that I could choose what narrative I was a part of. I could choose to be a tree planter.
Now, I know there is so much more to landscape restoration than simply planting trees at random, and I also know how much observation, care, and follow-through is needed to make replanting successful. Yet the simple narrative that I had agency to plant trees stuck with me. I hardly even recognized it for the gift it was at the time. It was a form of emotional resilience. Any time I heard the news about the rainforests that had been clear-cut or the forests lost to wildfires or coastlines ravaged by the latest oil spills, I felt this ever-greater resolve to set up - to replant landscapes, metaphorically or quite literally.
I believe many of us humans have lost sight of our connection to the natural world. We believe so strongly that we can only cause harm. We can list the myriad ways that humans are a blight on the planet, but somehow we have forgotten we can also be planters, restorers, and gardeners. We forget we have a choice in what narrative we choose to embody, share and pass on to the kids in our lives. The narrative we offer can make all the difference.
Resilience is everywhere: here a young pine tree is sprouting again after a huge fire in the Rincon Mountains in Tucson, Arizona.
This weekend I visited Lehigh Gap Nature Center for the first time in Carbon County, Pennsylvania. It is the first nature center in the country to be established on a superfund site. Smoke laden with heavy metals from an old zinc refinery left the mountainside along the river lifeless and barren. Two feet of soil had eroded from the mountain leaving it rocky and bare. The high levels of heavy metal contamination and the extreme pH of the land prevented new seeds from germinating and killed the last struggling trees. For fifty years the mountainside was barren with high enough levels of zinc, lead, and copper to prevent even the dead wood from breaking down. It was desolate, “like a moonscape”, and a reminder of the externalized costs of industry on a local community that had fueled the growth of major cities nearby like Philadelphia and New York City.
About 20 years ago, local community members came together to try and re-green the mountain. It was a monumental task. After much trial and error, they found compost (especially mushroom compost from local mushroom farms), lime, and native grass seeds spread from a crop duster were able to recover the pH to suitable growing ranges. Then a remarkable thing happened. When the pH stabilized, the grasses began to anchor and build soil, and the soil biology rebounded: it caused the old trees which were long thought to be dead, to resprout! It turns out their roots had been alive deep down under the surface all this time! The succession of life that followed in so short a time floored the individuals who made it possible. The amazing regrowth even got the attention of the Appalachian Trail which was officially re-routed to go through these now-green, semi-forested slopes. The river that runs alongside the mountain is healthier now than it has been in over 200 years! The Lehigh Gap Nature Center was established to welcome people of all ages, especially kids, to share the story, join in the continuing effort, and learn about the plants, bugs, and microbes that made it possible.
It also gives visitors a glimpse into the type of future that is possible: regenerated landscapes brought back to health within Carbon County -long known for the carbon coming from the mines deep underground - being returned back into the soil to heal its rivers, land, and economy. The impact of this restoration ripples downstream to all the major cities further down in the watershed. AND this is just one of the many examples out there! Our cultural narratives can shift. We humans can play an enormous role in restoration, recovery, and rejuvenation.
Restoration and recovery above Lehigh Gap Nature Center.
Some bare rocky slopes still exist that give a glimpse to how the entire mountain looked before restoration began.
A native grass meadow thrumming with life on the once degraded slopes.
As author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about another degraded landscape in the beautifully written book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants:
“Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. Environmental despair is a poison every bit as destructive as the methylated mercury in the bottom of Onondaga Lake. But how can we submit to despair while the land is saying “Help”? Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual.”
The dominant narrative in the news today is too often one of despair. It feels worse today, I believe, than it even was when I was a kid. Yet, there are SO MANY stories of individuals and small groups that have replanted forests and mangrove swamps, reversed desertification, and coaxed springs back to life. These stories seem fantastical, yet there is no shortage of them pouring in from around the globe. For instance, how many of us have even heard that China and India are now GREENER than they were 20 years ago? How is it that many of us - and our kids - have still not heard of some of the most compelling restoration stories of our time, like the Regreening of the Loess Plateau? And sad that our kids don’t know them either! Can you imagine the impact such a narrative could have on kids? And adults, too, for that matter! We need narratives that change despair into agency. And the compounding impact those kids could have on us with every ounce of creativity and determination and energy they bring.
It’s the simple fact that “building soil” which happens too slowly to make the headlines, is within everyone’s power to do. We have agency if we choose it. What if we, as a neighborhood or school community planted tree saplings in our backyards to assist local restoration efforts? All it takes is a 1 x 1 square foot of space, says Akiva Silver of Twisted Tree Farm in New York, who has been trialing innovative propagation and planting methods for years. Imagine if a neighborhood banded together to grow hundreds or even thousands of saplings to jumpstart regrowth and diversity in landscapes near us that have been or are in trouble? We can jumpstart succession, support, and regrow damaged and degraded landscapes surprisingly fast. Imagine what such a simple narrative could do with just a handful of kids? We are tree-planters, restorers, stewards, and caretakers. Together we are the generation of restoration.
Plants like these different types of milkweed are allies in restoration! Common milkweed, for instance, is a powerful plant that supports hundreds of different species of insects.
Two weeks ago, I saw the sunrise on the beach for the summer solstice. The morning was beautiful, full of potential, and we found mole crabs in the sand - my favorite silly little crabs! They have adorable little digging paddles instead of claws and are an important food source for many creatures up the food chain. The ocean breeze also smelled of smoke from a huge fire. We found out later that day that it was Wharton State Forest in New Jersey where nearly 13,500 acres would burn in total that day. The smoke made the sunrise a disarmingly brilliant red.
I felt the sadness of the loss, and yet also a renewed resolve. What if our neighborhoods and schools partnered together to sprout hundreds of strategic, resilient species? It only takes a few square feet to get dozens of seedlings started… What if we stepped up alongside other humans and non-humans alike to be tree planters in areas near us that truly need it like Wharton State Forest or Lehigh Gap Nature Center? What if we could learn to read landscapes, to see leverage points where our small actions would work along natural systems to make big impacts? We could work alongside the individuals and natural systems already doing this work - because there are so many already out there!
I want to see a future where our children can see the epic monarch butterfly migrations get stronger every year. Where bluebirds, meadowlarks, and bobolinks are still singing in our towns, cities, and fields. What if we re-established migration corridors for ancient animals like American bison and worked with farmers and ranchers to regenerate landscapes while building soil and growing more food? What if we brought back endangered species like the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and other pollinators through a series of Homegrown National Parks in our backyard as entomologist Doug Tallamy suggests? What if our rivers became healthier than they have ever been with fish migrating in renewed numbers (like the herring now do in the Mystic River in Boston!) and what if we saw freshwater mussels rebounding to support cleaner water year after year? What if we can use every technique we know already alongside our allies in the underground microbial workforce in the soil to effectively immobilize toxins and remediate landscapes too damaged to recover on their own? It's not just possible. It's happening. It is only limited by our ability to imagine what is truly possible.
Could I suggest this bold, perhaps crazy idea that this could be a truly incredible time to be alive? The magnitude of regeneration that is possible in our lifetimes, that we have a chance to witness, is staggering. The amount of work we need to do is humbling, yet we have the opportunity and the choice to participate in planting a future that we want to see. The legacy of toxic, degraded, and parched landscapes only stays with us if we refuse to embrace a regenerative future. We need our kids in this work with all their passion, creativity, and energy as much as they need us to choose to believe it's possible.
Photos: Celebrating the "Return of the Herring in the Mystic" as well as landscape stabilization further up the watershed to capture and purify water, build soil, and rehydrate our forests.
Resources:
Lehigh Gap Nature Center website: https://lgnc.org/ AND 6-minute video describing their amazing story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7oUPpIQSWI&t=1s
"China and India Lead the Way in Greening" from NASA report: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144540/china-and-india-lead-the-way-in-greening
"Hope in a Changing Climate" by Dr. John Liu on the regreening of the Loess Plateau: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLdNhZ6kAzo
The Amazing Return of the Mystic River Herring: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/be565b61b9d64128852f5ae20749fa82
Homegrown National Park with Doug Tallamy: https://homegrownnationalpark.org/
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Twisted Tree Farm: http://www.twisted-tree.net/
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