Trees deserve special attention from all segments of our society

From an Article by Cristen Jaynes, EcoWatch News, August 1, 2023

In order to fulfill the ambition of the United States federal government’s REPLANT Act, the U.S. Forest Service has funds available to plant more than a billion trees in the next nine years. The problem is, there aren’t enough trees. Not only that, but U.S. tree nurseries don’t have enough variety of species necessary to meet the goal.

Cities around the world are suffering from urban heat islands made unbearable by record heat waves. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, air temperatures underneath trees can be as much as 25 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than directly above blacktop.

A new study by scientists at the University of Vermont (UVM) has shown that the limited diversity of tree species available has frustrated how much the forest service can do to respond to the climate crisis by planting trees, a press release from UVM said.

“Trees are this amazing natural solution to a lot of our challenges, including climate change. We urgently need to plant many millions of them,” said professor and director of the UVM Forestry Program Tony D’Amato, who co-led the research, in the press release. “But what this paper points out is that we are woefully underserved by any kind of regional or national scale inventory of seedlings to get the job done.”

The study, “A lack of ecological diversity in forest nurseries limits the achievement of tree-planting objectives in response to global change,” was published in the journal BioScience.

In their research, the team of 13 scientists looked at 605 plant nurseries in 20 northern U.S. states. They found that just 14 of them were operated by the government, and only 56 of them grew and sold seedlings in adequate amounts for reforestation and conservation.

Even more disappointing for the researchers was the “overwhelming scarcity of seedlings” from varied species and “seed collection zones,” which refer to local climates and conditions that trees have adapted to, they wrote in the study, according to UVM.

The research team found that forest nurseries have a tendency to keep a limited inventory of a few tree species, such as those used in commercial timber production, rather than species necessary for ecological restoration, climate adaptation or conservation. They also discovered that, in many areas, no locally adapted trees were available.

“The world is thinking about a warming climate — can we plant towards that warming climate? We know we’re losing ecologically important species across North America and around the world. So, the goal is: can we restore these trees or replace them with similar species? It’s a powerful idea,” said Peter Clark, UVM applied forest ecologist and lead author of the study, in the press release. “But — despite the excitement and novelty of that idea in many policy and philanthropy circles — when push comes to shove, it’s very challenging on the ground to actually find either the species or the seed sources needed… [F]inding the diversity we need to restore ecologically complex forests — not just a few industrial workhorse species commonly used for commercial timber operations, like white pine — is an even bigger bottleneck.”

The researchers said a much larger amount of seedlings and diversity within those is needed at regional nurseries in order to achieve a successful tree planting program directed at addressing climate change.

The financial risk and novelty involved in providing increased variety “likely generates uncertainty among forest nurseries, hampering investment,” the authors of the study wrote. Another issue is that the number of nurseries, especially in the northeastern U.S., has gone down in recent years.

Seedlings from a different region might also have trouble succeeding in a new area, the researchers found. For instance, 80 percent of the seedings in the study found in northern states were produced in north central states. “Such concentration of production will hinder tree planting efforts,” the researchers wrote, “because species and seed sources likely originate from similar geographic or bioclimatic zones.”

This is exacerbated by seedlings being sensitive to stress. A mismatch between when they are available, such as earlier in nurseries farther south, and when they need to be planted, like in northern soils after the last frost, could be an issue.

The researchers suggested improvements in financing and policy, as well as expanded research and better training to help alleviate these issues.

Government agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, as well as state governments, rely on seed zones from the 1970s based on climate conditions that are very different from those predicted for the future. Also, forest research and policy has been centered around timber production species rather than those that are more adapted to changing climates and a more diverse array of tree species. Clear policies regarding tree genetics and tree species’ movement are also lacking in many government policies.

The scientists recommended an expansion of state and federal investment in seed collection and public tree nurseries. “This strategy may stimulate production from private nurseries once a stable demand is apparent,” the authors of the study wrote.

This year, the federal government invested $35 million in expanding the capacity of the federal nursery, but the authors of the study said that, due to “the existing (and growing) reforestation backlog, declines in nursery infrastructure, and complex needs for diverse seeds and seedlings, it is likely that substantially more public investment in the form of grants, loans, and cost-share programs will be needed to reinvigorate, diversify, and expand forest nurseries.”

“People want trillions of trees,” Clark said in the press release, “but often, on the ground, it’s one old farmer walking around to collect acorns. There’s a massive disconnect.”

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NOTE: By planting one tree every second, it will take 31.7 years to plant a billion trees. Plant a tree every minute and the time necessary becomes 1902 years. It is very clear that new trees cannot be relied upon to resolve the climate crisis, but can help. DGN

Urgent Attention is Needed to Preserve & Protect Public Lands

From an Article by Carole King, Opinion Editorial, New York Times, August 25, 2022

Ms. King is a singer, songwriter, author and environmental advocate.

My career as a songwriter began in Manhattan, not far from where I was born. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1968, I became part of the singer-songwriter community that coalesced around Laurel Canyon. I thought California would be wild in the sense of nature. It turned out to be wild in the sense of drugs and parties. I wanted to live close to the kind of wild nature that must exist somewhere on a large scale. Somewhere turned out to be Idaho.

In 1977 I moved to a mobile home on Robie Creek, a 40-minute drive from Boise. For the next three years, I lived in the backcountry northeast of McCall in a cabin with no running water or electricity. After that I lived adjacent to the Salmon River for 38 years, with a national forest as my nearest neighbor.

The future of America’s national forests is being shaped now. The Biden administration is developing a system to inventory old-growth and mature forests on federal land that the president wants to be completed by next April. But given the immediate threats facing many of these forests and their importance to slowing climate change, bold action is required immediately to preserve not just old-growth and mature trees but entire national forest ecosystems comprising thousands of interdependent species.

President Biden should issue an executive order immediately directing his secretaries of the interior and agriculture to take all steps available to them to stop commercial logging on public land. We can’t wait a year.

One of the best technologies to store carbon is an unlogged forest with minimal human intrusion. Forests sequester vast amounts of carbon in the trunks, leaves and roots of trees of all ages and sizes and the soil beneath them. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and water from the air and ground and through the process of photosynthesis release oxygen into the air. It costs nothing to leave them as they are. Allowing commercial logging to continue in our national forests would also be a catastrophe for the biodiversity they contain.

The order I propose would bring about a significant reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide. And it will help the United States meet the requirements of the Paris agreement, which Mr. Biden rejoined on the first day of his presidency. Even with the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, he will fall short of his promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 50 to 52 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Cutting more forests isn’t going to help hit that mark.

Last fall, over 200 climate scientists from around the country sent Mr. Biden a letter underscoring the consequences if timber harvesting continues in the national forests. They wrote that “greenhouse gas emissions from logging in U.S. forests are now comparable to the annual” carbon dioxide “emissions from U.S. coal burning.” Protecting federal forestlands from logging, on the other hand, would remove 84 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, they wrote.

My experience in Idaho led me to become involved as a volunteer in the ongoing effort to protect a bioregion of 23 million acres of nationally owned public land in Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon and Wyoming by means of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act.

That legislation would designate corridors for the safe passage of wildlife between existing wilderness and roadless areas on federal forestland. It was proposed by scientists in the late 1980s who understood that protecting and connecting large-scale forest ecosystems is necessary for species to thrive. Despite the legislation receiving some bipartisan support in past years, it has not been enacted in the nearly 30 years since it was introduced.

Forest preservation is a climate solution. That’s why we need action to safeguard the forests on the public lands we all share. Federal law requires that most public lands be managed for multiple uses, such as recreation, gas and oil development, mining and logging. But this longstanding policy is running headlong into efforts to slow the warming of our planet.

Forests on federally owned land are being destroyed at breakneck speed by heavy equipment that can saw through a tree, strip its branches and set that tree on a pile of logs in the time it took me to type this sentence.

The effects of the climate crisis are undeniable. People are suffering, and the scale of the problem sometimes makes us feel helpless. But the public can do something right now by asking Mr. Biden — in numbers too big to ignore — to use all of his powers to stop the logging of the nation’s mature and old-growth forests.

In 1970, my collaborator Toni Stern wrote the lyrics to my most popular song, “It’s Too Late.” That title should not refer to the climate. That’s why, at age 80, I’m using my voice to call on Mr. Biden to stop commercial logging in our national forests. Please add your voice to mine.

>>> A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 26, 2022, Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Leave Forests Alone, Before It’s Too Late.

Marine extinction rebellion to warn and protest

From an Article by Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News, April 28, 2022

A new study suggests that warming, oxygen-starved seas could lead marine species to vanish at a rate matching the planet’s biggest extinction event on record.

If greenhouse gas pollution remains unchecked, global warming could trigger the most catastrophic extinction of ocean species since the end of the Permian age, about 250 million years ago, scientists warned in a new study today. During the end-Permian Extinction, researchers estimate up to 90 percent of marine organisms died out in overheated, acidic and deoxygenated oceans.

The Great Dying, as it’s sometimes called, the worst known mass extinction event in the history of the Earth, wiped out more than half of all biological families, including more than 70 percent of land-dwelling vertebrates, leaving a clear mark in the fossil record.

That cataclysmic change may have resulted from giant volcanic eruptions that went on for 2 million years. But a 2021 study suggested that carbon dioxide emissions from current human activity are twice as high as those that caused the Permian climate to shift.

Ocean temperatures and oxygen levels are already approaching deadly thresholds for some organisms, such as corals and Arctic cod, and potentially threaten thousands more species, said Curtis Deutsch, a Princeton University geoscientist who co-authored the new research published on Thursday in Science.

One of the reasons the researchers chose the Permian extinction as a basis for comparison was that its causes “seemed most clearly related to the kind of climate changes we are seeing now,” he said. “There were enough important similarities, the CO2-driven warming, the loss of oxygen, and the big response in the marine biosphere, that it seemed like the right comparison to start with.”

Additionally, the researchers wanted to measure their results against “the clearest, biggest magnitude of signal in the geologic record,” he said. “When you think about 90 percent of ocean species disappearing, it’s extreme.”

Extinction is Hard to Measure

Human impacts, including global warming, may have already triggered a sixth mass extinction of an as-yet to be determined scope. Just in the last few years, there have been the first documented climate extinctions of species, like a tiny Australian rodent believed to have died out in 2019, and global waves of mass amphibian and insect die-offs. A study published this week in Nature reported that 21 percent of reptiles are threatened with extinction.

But uncertainty about the total number of species on the planet makes it hard to calculate the magnitude of the recent die-offs as compared to past extinctions. If the starting quantity is unknown, it’s hard to measure what’s being lost.

Tracking extinctions in the oceans is even harder. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s top ocean research institutions, states it is impossible to know the exact number of species that live there because more than 80 percent of the oceans are unobserved and unexplored.

To overcome those challenges, Curtis Deutsch and study co-author Justin Penn, a geoscientist at Princeton University, used a decades-long database of marine animals’ tolerance of warming water and decreasing oxygen. With that data, they created 10 groups of simulated marine species types with similar tolerance characteristics to create a global biogeography of marine life, and modeled how different levels of warming will change the distribution of species and potentially wipe some out.

They chose two very different emissions scenarios to show that today’s climate policy choices will make a big difference in the long run, Deutsch said. A high emissions path with up to 4 degrees Celsius warming by 2100 leads toward a mass extinction of ocean species that “would leave a clearly visible mark on the fossil record,” he said. But the path delineated by the Paris Agreement, keeping warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, could avert the devastation of ocean biodiversity. “We can pretty much avoid a mass extinction,” he said. “It’s not going to look like a biotic collapse in the fossil record.”

Some climate scientists have recently questioned whether the high emissions scenario is still a useful metric. Rapid growth of renewable energy and new government and business promises to reduce emissions could hold warming to about 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, but policies to make that happen are still not in place.

Global greenhouse gas concentrations are reaching new record levels each year, and Deutsch said that, given the political and economic uncertainties highlighted by events like the invasion of Ukraine, the possibility that diplomatic efforts to curb warming could fizzle can’t be ruled out.

Malin Pinsky, a Rutgers ecologist and evolutionary biologist who wrote a Perspective article about the new research by Deutsch and Penn, said global policy choices the last few decades have already prompted massive and rapid ocean changes, such as sea level rise, ocean acidification and global shifts of species, which are affecting food security in developing countries. More than half of all human-caused CO2 produced since 1750 have been emitted in just the last 30 years.

“We already know marine life is on the front lines, with species moving faster toward the poles than on land,” he said, citing the black sea bass, a fish species that has moved from offshore Virginia to offshore New Jersey in just a few decades. “It’s part of a massive reorganization of life on earth, and this paper really does a nice job of making clear the stark choices in front of us,” he said.

The findings are important and sobering, said Michael Burrows, a marine ecologist with the Scottish Association for Marine Science, who was not involved in the study. Projecting long-term changes in dynamic and naturally variable ocean ecosystems for which there is very little monitoring is tough to begin with, Burrows said, and “a big problem with such projections, based on the present-day associations between species occurrence and climate (usually temperatures), is that the future climate conditions don’t exist anywhere on Earth right now.”

But biodiversity has responded to climatic changes of similar magnitude in the past, he said. “By showing that their model of projected losses produces changes similar to that seen in past mass extinctions associated with similar climatic changes, the research has resulted in a more credible forecast of the upcoming extinctions due to anthropogenic climate change,” he said.

Has It Already Started?

Oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped on the Earth’s surface by greenhouse gas pollution, building up at a rate equivalent to five atom bomb explosions per second. The average ocean temperature has reached record highs almost yearly, and its surface waters have grown 30 percent more acidic in the past 200 years.

Hot water is already killing marine life, and has perhaps already resulted in extinctions of regionally endemic species, especially during extreme events like marine heat waves. There’s not enough data to know if the sixth great extinction is already underway in the oceans, but there are clear warning signs that global biodiversity is collapsing under the weight of human activities.

Scientists estimate that more than 1 billion sea creatures, including birds, died during last summer’s extreme heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. The 2003 heat wave that killed about 70,000 people in Europe also extended over the Mediterranean Sea, where it triggered a series of mass die-offs of different ocean species, including rare corals. Recent global assessments suggest 40.7 percent of amphibians, 25.4 of mammals and 13.6 of birds are threatened with extinction.

Elsewhere around the planet, warming seas have driven many coral reef ecosystems to the point of functional extinction. Other signs of disruption include increasing jellyfish invasions and rapidly expanded Sargassum seaweed in the Caribbean. Hot water was also implicated in a mass die-off of starfish along the West Coast of North America, diminishing kelp forests and a federally designated “unusual mortality event” for gray whales lasting from 2019 into 2022.

“There is some evidence that extinctions have started ticking up already, but other human impacts are larger threats at the moment,” Pinsky said. But the new paper shows that global warming will soon overshadow other impacts like direct habitat degradation or pollution, he added. “What we do know is that extirpations, local extinctions already happen,” he said. “We do have evidence from a coral reef that even short periods of low oxygen can result in permanent displacement of a species from that reef.”

Sabine Mathesius, with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, worked on a 2015 study showing that long-term plans to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere won’t do much to protect marine organisms from ocean acidification. By the time any large-scale atmospheric CO2 removal happens, some species sensitive to acidification could already be gone, she said. “I think there are many demonstrated impacts of warming and acidification, especially the impacts of warming,” she said. “There have been these huge coral bleaching events, so that’s reason for great concern.”

Bleaching occurs when ocean water temperatures become too warm and cause corals to expel the algae living in their tissues, turning their color white. But reducing emissions, rather than removing them from the atmosphere, can lower the possibility of a mass extinction, Deutsch said. “Species go extinct naturally all the time,” he said. “If we were to take that optimistic scenario and start reducing emissions now, it’s possible that we don’t really see a significant bump in extinction rates.”

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An Interview with the Ocean, Transcript

From the Living On Earth, PRX, April 29, 2022

As we close out Poetry Month, we share the timeless poem “I Go Down to the Shore” read by the late Mary Oliver, and a sound rich performance of a creative piece it inspired. Author Kate Horowitz wrote “An Interview with the Ocean” and joined Living on Earth’s Aynsley O’Neill to bring it to the airwaves.

Planting trees near Wheeling’s Heritage Trail, learn about tree identification & management

Article by Maureen Zambito, West Liberty University, April 21, 2021

WEST LIBERTY, WV — Just in time for Earth Day, West Liberty University (WLU) students in Professor James Wood’s biology and ecology classes are planting trees in Wheeling’s public spaces and on campus.

Last Saturday students planted two types of native flowering trees along a portion of the Heritage Trail along the Ohio River, near WesBanco Arena. The purchase of the trees was made possible thanks to a grant obtained by West Virginia University Agricultural Extension Agent and Wheeling resident Karen Cox.

“These trees will add beauty to this public green space in the city, supporting birds and other pollinators while also providing shade for trail users in the height of summer heat,” said Wood. “Adding trees along the trail make it better for everyone.”

New signs here

But the students’ work wasn’t done just yet. On Sunday these students partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in addition to WVU Extension, to work on the National Wildlife Refuge at the northern tip of Wheeling Island.

PHOTO — New signage at the northern tip of Wheeling Island identifies the space as a National Wildlife Refuge, perfect for bird watchers.

“The Wildlife Refuge is a such a great resource for the public and for wildlife. It offers beautiful views of the river and is a great place to go bird watching close to downtown,” said Wood. “We are pleased to be a part of improving Wheeling’s public spaces.”

The outreach and service projects also provide WLU students with a hands-on look at careers in natural resources. Extension Agent Karen Cox and U.S. Fish and Wildlife representative Elian Barr spoke with students about working to protect and restore natural areas and educating the public about managing for endangered species and invasive exotic plants.

The students took time to clean up trash found in Wheeling Island’s Wildlife Refuge. “Our next project is closer to home, we’ll plant trees on campus near Campbell Hall,” said Wood.

“The goal is to increase educational opportunities on the WLU campus, while making the campus more visually attractive and promoting conservation. This round of tree planting will support the planting event last fall when over 40 native trees were planted by students during a service project.”

Dr. Wood is a faculty member in the biology department in the College of Sciences. Biology majors include Environmental Stewardship and Education; Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology and Zoo Science. Students also have the opportunity to pursue a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology + Master of Science Physician Assistant Studies degree through the 3+2 program.

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See also: The Trillion Trees bill was reintroduced in this Congress

House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Bruce Westerman reintroduced his Trillion Trees legislation in the House yesterday afternoon with over 60 co-sponsors. The bill has provisions related to increasing carbon sequestration through reforestation, improved forest management and market incentives. Among other provisions, the bill removes the cap on the Reforestation Trust Fund to $180 million to help address the reforestation backlog on the NFS. It also has language standing up urban wood and biochar grant programs, as well as integrating carbon storage into FIA and encouraging the Forest Service to utilize advanced geospatial technologies in FIA. The section-by-section summary below is useful.

(a) Westerman Leads Bipartisan Introduction of The Trillion Trees Act | Congressman Bruce Westerman (house.gov)

(b) trillion_trees_act_-_one_pager.pdf (house.gov)

(c) trillion_trees_act_-_section-by-section.pdf (house.gov)

(d) Full Bill Text in US Congress

Trees communicate with other trees through their “mycorrhizal network,” like the Birch (left) and Fir (right), that send nutrients or signals to each other in times of stress

From an Article by Valentina Lagomarsino, Harvard University Graduate School, May 6, 2019

When scientists first studied the structure of nerve cells that comprise the human brain, they noted their strong resemblance to trees. In fact, dendrites, the term to describe projections from a nerve cell, comes from the Greek word Dendron, for “tree.” While the connection in the appearance of nerve cells was made to trees, the comparison may have been more apt than originally realized: scientists are starting to uncover that trees have their own sort of nervous system that is capable of facilitating tree communication, memory and learning.

Forests are complex systems

Forests cover 30% of Earth’s land surface and hold over a billion trees. Forests are known as “carbon sinks” because trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air, store the carbon in their trunks, and exhale oxygen. Scientist have leveraged this property to measure the ratio between two naturally occurring forms of carbon (12carbon and 14carbon) to assign an age to trees, a technique termed carbon dating. Using this technique, scientists found that trees living in forests, like the tree colony called Pando, tend to live longer than trees living in urban environments, often in isolation. Dendrologists, scientists who study wooded plants, thought that perhaps trees that lived together were helping each other by sending resources through their roots. To test this out in North American forests, dendrologists utilized a technique called isotope tracing. In this experiment, scientists injected carbon dioxide gas replaced with radiolabeled 14carbon into the trunk of Birch trees. When nearby Fir trees were covered by shaded cloth, to block their ability to acquire nutrients through photosynthesis, scientists found a higher level of radiolabeled 14carbon in their trunk, meaning they must have received sugars from the Birch. These experiments confirmed that trees are indeed communicating with each other and sharing nutrients through their roots, forming a complex system sometimes referred to as the “wood wide web.”

This complex network connecting trees is dependent on a symbiotic relationship with microbes in the soil like fungi and bacteria. Symbiosis is when two separate organisms form a mutually advantageous relationship with each other. Fungi can cover a large surface area by developing white fungal threads known as mycelium. Mycelium spreads out on top of tree roots by up-taking sugars from the tree and by providing vital minerals back to the tree, such as nitrogen and phosphorus. This symbiotic relationship between tree roots and fungi is known as the mycorrhizal network (from Greek, Myco, “fungi” and Rhiza, “root”).

To identify the species that constitute the mycorrhizal network, scientists have utilized recent technological advances in DNA sequencing and big-data analysis. Microbiologists have identified different species of fungi and bacteria that form symbiotic relationships with different species of trees. Scientists believe all trees have a mycorrhizal network, but trees only communicate with each other if the fungal and bacterial species that constitute their mycorrhizal networks are the same. The most common combination of fungi constitute the arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) network, which has been found to be important for nutrient uptake in 65% of all trees and plant species. The remaining 35% of tree and plant species may have combinations of other fungi varieties that comprise their networks.

By investigating the different interactions between species of trees, scientists found that trees leverage similarities and differences in their microbial “makeup” to recognize other trees of their own species, and they preferentially share nutrients with them through their mycorrhizal network. This behavior, known as “kin recognition,” was recently explored when multiple families of Douglas Fir trees were planted in a plot and carbon tracing experiments indicated that trees of the same family shared more carbon than between trees of different families. Scientists are still investigating why this is happening, but it is hypothesized that all plants evolved to have kin recognition for reproductive purposes. Similarly, there is cross-talk between different species of trees that share the same mycorrhizal network, such as between Birch and Fir trees. Interspecies tree communication has been shown to increase the fitness and resiliency of trees.

Mycorrhizal networks are extremely important for tree health during times of danger. Certain species of fungi can facilitate tree resilience to certain environmental stressors such as predators, toxins, and pathogenic microbes that invade an ecosystem. By using a technique called allelopathy, in which a chemical signal is sent through the mycorrhizal network, trees can warn their neighbors about an invasive predator or to inhibit growth of invasive plant species. Surrounding trees can then defend themselves by releasing volatile hormones or chemicals to deter predators or pathogenic bugs. It was even found that trees can send a stress signal to nearby trees after a major forest disturbance, such as deforestation.

Climate change affects the microbiome of the forest

Trees rely on a healthy forest ecosystem to thrive and protect themselves from danger. Humans rely on a healthy forest ecosystem to be able to inhale clean oxygen. Last year, millions of people around the world experienced the devastating effects of climate change. Not only is climate change impacting human health and wellbeing, but it is also affecting the ecosystem of our oceans and forests. Human-initiated deforestation contributes to climate change by reducing the number of trees that are available to soak up carbon dioxide. Deforestation not only removes the trees that are being cut down, but also impacts trees that are still alive by disrupting the mycorrhizal network that is important for intra-tree communication.

Changes in climate, as seen through increased droughts and extreme temperatures, may further disrupt the biodiversity of the microbes in the forest. This decline in biodiversity is known as human assisted evolution, or “unnatural selection”. The altered microbiota of the forest may then change the nutrients that trees are able to receive and we may start seeing changes in tree morphology, particularly in the shape of leaves. This would change the photosynthetic capacity of the tree; for example, smaller leaves have less surface area for light absorption, which will negatively impact their ability to absorb the sun’s rays and produce sugars through photosynthesis. This could potentially inhibit tree growth and the amount of carbon that trees can share with fungi.

Furthermore, without a biodiverse mycorrhizal network, trees are becoming more susceptible to destruction from invasive, harmful insect species. It is clear that the impact we are making on the environment is self-perpetuating and heading in a dire direction for the health of our forests, but there is still hope. Some scientists are trying to combat climate change by using gene-editing techniques to restore ecosystems that have become extinct and by engineering synthetic microbes that are important for a thriving ecosystem.

Trees are considered to be the oldest living organisms on the planet. Over centuries, they have been resilient to changes in their environment due to their symbiotic relationship to fungi and other microbes. There are so many more discoveries to be made to understand the ancient wisdom of our forests and the invisible microbes that keep our ecosystems in harmony.

>>> Valentina Lagomarsino is a first-year PhD student in the Biological Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard University.

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See also: Discover How Trees Secretly Talk to Each Other, Fino Menezes, Bright Vibes, June 19, 2020

Imagine an information superhighway that speeds up interactions between a large, diverse population of individuals, allowing individuals who may be widely separated to communicate and help each other out. When you walk in the woods, this is all happening beneath your feet. No, we’re not talking about the internet, we’re talking about fungi. As a result of a growing body of evidence, many biologists have started using the term “wood wide web” to describe the communications services that fungi provide to plants and other organisms.

Katharine Hayhoe has examined these issues in great detail

From an Article by Olivia Goldhill, Quartz Newsletter, September 18, 2019

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe says her evangelical religion influences her approach to climate change. She is very concerned.

When evangelical environmentalists talk about climate change, they don’t stick to sea level rise projections and the carbon emissions associated with red meat. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, national organizer and spokesperson at Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA), also points to the psalms, and the Old and New Testaments.

These texts emphasize how God created and loves the Earth, and wants humans to love it too. So for Meyaard-Schaap, choosing to care for the planet—and fight climate change—is simply following his God’s wishes.

In the United States, evangelical Christians are not known for their environmental engagement. The group is “synonymous with resistance, if we’re honest,” says Meyaard-Schaap. Evangelicals are the religious group least likely to believe the Earth is warming due to human activity: 28%, compared to 50% of all US adults, according to a 2015 survey from Pew Research Center.

But in recent years, a few leaders have started connecting environmentalism with religion. They’re starting to find a receptive audience among evangelicals.

Katharine Hayhoe, a prominent climate change scientist and evangelical Christian, says her religion motivates her interest in climate change. She finds the concept of protecting God’s planet to be an effective framing when talking to religious groups. “As Christians, we believe that we have been given responsibility over every little thing on this planet,” she says, “and we believe we’re to care for people who are less fortunate than ourselves.”

Hayhoe first started talking about the importance of combating climate change from a religious perspective in 2008. That’s when she realized that audiences thought she cared about the environment simply because she was a scientist—and disengaged as a result. Since she shifted her approach, she says, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. “I can count on the fingers of my hands and maybe just a few extra toes the letters and emails and even nasty tweets I’ve gotten from atheists over the last decade,” she says. “On the other hand, I can count on my fingers and toes how many I get from people who call themselves Christians every week.”

Of course, not every evangelical Christian applies the loving-protection maxim to climate change. There are two types of evangelicals in the United States, says Hayhoe: political and theological. “For political evangelicals,” she says, “their statement of faith is written first by their political ideology and only a distant second by what the Bible says.” Evangelicals are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats, and their religious beliefs can be interpreted to support conservative views on climate change. “As a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us,” Republican congressman Tim Walberg said in 2017. “And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”

But there are ways to communicate the importance of addressing climate change across the political spectrum, says Meyaard-Schaap. He says that, when talking to conservatives, YECA emphasizes the economic freedom that comes from not accessing energy through a regulated monopoly. Also a plus: the national security benefits of not being dependent on hostile foreign powers for oil. YECA members also highlight how climate action is a pro life issue, as burning fossil fuels contributes to low birth weight and preterm babies, and heavy metals emitted through the burning of coal cross the placenta and impede fetal development.

Amidst these messages, there are signs that evangelical engagement on climate change is shifting: A recent poll found that 40% of evangelical Christians support the Green New Deal. In July, YECA released a statement highlighting the “biblical principles” in the proposed legislation. “The Green New Deal shows clear concern for making sure that we have tangible ways of protecting the natural environment, caring for God’s creation,” says Meyaard-Schaap.

Hayhoe would like to see even more support from the evangelical community, though she doesn’t expect evangelicals to embrace environmental action en masse, as long as “political ideology continues to drive the belief system of those who identify as Christian.”

Meyaard-Schaap, meanwhile, sees a distinct generational divide. Millennials and Generation Z often already care about climate change, he says, and YECA focuses on training these young leaders to talk with their parents and pastors.

Although politics is a strong indication of belief in climate change, Meyaard-Schaap says YECA activists are motivated by religion rather than politics. “We come at this work not because we’re environmentalist, even though some of us identify that way, and not because we’re Democrats or Republican,” he says. “We come at this because we’re Christians and we believe that acting on climate change and calling the church to action and it’s just part of what it means to follow Jesus in the 21st century.”

>>> This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

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Denominational Religious Statements on Climate Change

>>> Inter-Faith Power & Light Campaign Compilation

Most religious communities have released statements on “climate change” and the need to care for the earth and living things. The compiled list (organized alphabetically first by religion, then by denomination) demonstrates the unity within the religious community on these important issues.

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VIDEO: Burke Lecture: An Ecological Inquiry – Jesus and the Cosmos with Elizabeth Johnson – UCSD-TV – University of California Television, July 6, 2010

Prof. Elizabeth A. Johnson, a former president of both the Catholic Theological Society of America and the ecumenical American Theological Society, argues that interfaith dialogue has made clear that each religious tradition has its own distinctive contribution to make. In this Burke lecture, she explores one line of thinking peculiar to the Christian tradition, namely, the meaning of Jesus Christ. Her question is whether the central, organizing figure in Christian faith also has anything intrinsic to do with the natural world.

https://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=18746

United Nations reports on risks to living species

By The Editorial Board, New York Times, May 11, 2019
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Our planet has suffered five mass extinctions, the last of which occurred about 66 million years ago, when a giant asteroid believed to have landed near the Yucatán Peninsula set off a chain reaction that wiped out the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the other species on earth. A few years ago, in a book called “The Sixth Extinction,” the writer Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a devastating sequel, with plant and animal species on land and sea already disappearing at a ferocious clip, their habitats destroyed or diminished by human activities.

This time, she made clear, the asteroid is us — and we will pay heavily for our folly.

Humanity’s culpability in what many scientists believe to be a planetary emergency has now been reaffirmed by a detailed and depressing report compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies. A summary was released last Monday in Paris, and the full 1,500-page report will be available later in the year. Its findings are grim. “Biodiversity” — a word encompassing all living flora and fauna — “is declining faster than at any time in human history,” it says, estimating that “around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades,” unless the world takes transformative action to save natural systems. The at-risk population includes a half-million land-based species and one-third of marine mammals and corals.

Most of the causes of this carnage seem familiar: logging, poaching, overfishing by large industrial fleets, pollution, invasive species, the spread of roads and cities to accommodate an exploding global population, now seven billion and rising. If there is one alpha culprit, it is the clearing of forests and wetlands for farms to feed all those people (and, perversely, to help them get to work: The destruction of Indonesia’s valuable rain forests, and their replacement with palm oil plantations, has been driven in part by Europe’s boundless appetite for biodiesel fuels.)

Add to all this a relatively new threat: Global warming, driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels, is expected to compound the damage. “While climate change has not been the dominant driver of biodiversity loss to date in most parts of the world, it is projected to become as or more important,” said Sir Robert Watson, chairman of the biodiversity panel and former chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose most recent alarming report on global warming has given that issue new currency in American politics. Rising seas and increased extreme weather events propelled in part by climate change — fire, floods, droughts — have already harmed many species. The most obvious victim is the world’s coral reefs, which have suffered grievously from ocean waters that have grown warmer and more acidic as a result of all the carbon dioxide they’ve been asked to absorb.

As The Times’s Brad Plumer recently noted, many ecologists insist that species are worth saving on their own, that it’s simply morally wrong to drive any living creature to extinction. The new report deliberately adds a powerful practical motive to the spiritual one: Biodiversity loss, it says, is an urgent issue for human well-being, providing billions and billions of dollars in what experts call “ecosystem services.” Wetlands clean and purify water. Coral reefs nourish vast fish populations that feed the world. Organic matter in the soil nourishes crops. Bees and other threatened insects pollinate fruits and vegetables. Mangroves protect us from floods made worse by rising seas.

“Most of nature’s contributions are not fully replaceable,” the report says. But humans can stop or at least limit the damage. One critical task is to protect (and if possible to enlarge) the world’s natural forests, which, according to a recent paper by eminent ecologists in Science Advance, are home to fully two-thirds of the world’s species. Intact forests also absorb and store enormous amounts of carbon, so preserving them assists not only the species that live there but also the struggle against climate change. Conversely, cutting trees to make way for farming and other purposes — as Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is determined to do in the Amazon — is a disaster for both the species and the climate; recent estimates suggest that deforestation accounts for slightly over 10 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, much smaller than the emissions from vehicles and power plants, but significant (and avoidable) nonetheless.

To Professor Watson and many other scientists, there are two important parallel approaches to the interconnected climate and species crises. One is to transform agricultural practices, the other is to enlarge the world’s supply of legally protected landscapes that cannot be touched for any commercial purpose. As to the first, farmers could figure out how to produce more food on fewer acres, and in ways that help the soil retain carbon; consumers could help by making smarter food choices, like eating more locally sourced food, and cutting back on meat and dairy products that require immense amounts of land for livestock.

Second, governments should mandate a significant increase in protected areas, both on land and at sea. Partly as a result of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a treaty agreed upon in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro along with a landmark agreement on climate change, nations have set aside about 15 percent of the world’s land and 7 percent of its oceans by setting up wilderness areas and nature preserves. Because this is only a fraction of the areas needed to protect biodiversity, the authors of the paper in Science Advance recommend a twofold increase in the protected land area and a fourfold increase in marine reserves over the next decade. If rigorously policed (which many parks are not today), that would effectively quarantine about 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans.

This proposal, which its authors call a Global Deal for Nature (echoing the Democrats’ Green New Deal on climate), will be further refined before the next meeting of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2020 in China. Though it always sends a delegation to these meetings, the United States has never ratified the treaty; President Bill Clinton signed it in 1993, but the Republican Senate failed to ratify it for various reasons, including unfounded fears that the treaty threatened American patent and intellectual property rights.

It is hard to believe that the Trump administration and the current Senate will be any more enthusiastic about preserving biodiversity than the Senate was then. This is an administration, after all, that has proposed to shrink national monuments and reduce protections for the imperiled sage grouse in order to accommodate the oil, gas and coal industries; that is moving to open up the species-rich coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling; that plans to make available now-protected waters along America’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts for the same purpose; that proposes to sacrifice parts of

Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging; that, most tellingly, aims to weaken the Endangered Species Act, approved in 1973 with Richard Nixon’s signature in what seems a distant era when there was fairly deep bipartisan support for environmental values.

Few of the Democratic presidential hopefuls who have spoken about climate change and jumped with varying degrees of enthusiasm on the Green New Deal bandwagon have commented on the biodiversity report, despite biodiversity’s obvious connections to climate. They should read it, and make it part of their post-2020 agenda.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/opinion/sunday/extinction-endangered-species-biodiversity.html

Access roads & land disturbances are real problems

From the WV Rivers Coalition, January 16, 2018

A bill to allow commercial logging in West Virginia’s State Parks, Senate Bill 270, was introduced in the WV Legislature at the request of Governor Justice. This bill would end an 80-year ban on logging in West Virginia’s State Parks. Contact the Governor now, tell him you oppose lifting the logging ban!

Send a Letter

The bill is an ill-conceived plan to log our parks, presented as a way to pay for park maintenance — but it risks destroying the Wild & Wonderful places we love.

Take action now! ASAP send the Governor a letter. After you’ve sent your letter, amplify your voice by calling the Governor’s Office at 304-558-2000 and share your concerns about logging our state parks.

For more information, check out the Save Our State Parks webpage, and email info@wvpubliclands.org.

Can we protect our trees?

Scientists dig to unearth answers to an age-old question—why are people healthier (and happier) when surrounded by nature?

From an Article by Lindsey Konkel, Environmental Health News, April 12, 2017

The connection between trees, human health and well-being dates back millennia. The ancient Celts worshipped in sacred groves, believing the trees would protect them from physical and spiritual harm. In Hebrew and Christian scriptures a tree of life in the Garden of Eden imparted immortality. Potted conifers helped to cleanse the air inside tuberculosis sanatoriums of nineteenth century Europe.

In recent years, scientists studying urban forests have turned up links between exposure to green space and health benefits, including fewer deaths from heart disease and respiratory diseases, fewer hospitalizations, better infant birth weights and even less crime.

“We’ve had this intuitive understanding that nature is good for us. Now we’re backing it up on an empirical level,” said Geoffrey Donovan, a resource economist with the U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, in Oregon.

Donovan and others are digging into the underlying science to understand the relationship between nature and health, a step they say will help guide the design of healthier cities and suburbs.

In 1984, University of Delaware researcher Roger Ulrich made the observation that gall bladder surgery patients stayed in the hospital for less time and took fewer painkillers when they could see trees out their hospital window than when their window faced a brick wall. Ulrich’s study was small—just 46 patients—and raised more questions than it answered. Yet it suggested for the first time scientifically that our perception of nature could potentially influence health outcomes.

That same year, American clinical psychologist Craig Brod coined the term “technostress” to describe the increasingly artificial elements of our built environment that appeared to be raising stress levels. Chronic stress can weaken the immune system. Some experts hypothesized that this kind of constant stress—exacerbated by the urban environment—was making people sick.

In Japan, Yoshifumi Miyazaki wondered whether the antidote could be as simple as a long walk in the woods. Miyazaki, a physiological anthropologist at Chiba University, is widely regarded in Japan as the father of forest therapy—a preventive medicine approach aimed at preventing disease by exposing people to nature.

Over the last three decades, Miyazaki has led more than 60 studies investigating the physiological effects of being in a forested environment. His team has taken measurements including blood pressure readings and changes in heart rate. They’ve tested saliva samples for cortisol, a hormonal marker of stress. Overwhelmingly, they’ve found that when people spend time in a forest, their bodies act less stressed out.

Miyazaki hypothesizes that exposure to natural stimuli—the sound of a woodpecker drumming away on a tree trunk or the smell of damp pine needles, for instance—promotes physiological relaxation. He’s shown it may help to lower blood pressure, stress hormone levels, sympathetic nervous system activity (think fight-or-flight response) and relieve depression and anxiety.

But how much time in the forest is enough? A group of Stanford researchers in 2015 showed that just a 50-minute walk in a park or forest could decrease anxiety and rumination (a psychology term that basically means dwelling on the negative thoughts caused by upsetting situations) compared to a 50-minute walk through an urban environment.

A new environmental exposure—greenness

What do those nature exposures mean when they add up over a lifetime?

Peter James, an environmental epidemiologist at Harvard University, studies how environmental exposures, such as air pollution, might be related to health outcomes. “When we thought about what aspects of neighborhood structure could influence health, one unmeasured variable that kept coming up was nature or greenness,” James said.

Previous research suggested that neighborhood vegetation might reduce obesity, promote physical activity, and improve mental health and heart health. Yet most of these studies looked only at one point in time—making it tricky to tease out whether living on a green block actually made people healthier or whether healthier people just chose to live in greener neighborhoods.

Adding to the problem, urban dwellers often pay a premium for access to green space. If wealthier people are more likely to live in greener areas and wealthier people also are more likely to have better health outcomes, maybe it’s their wealth—and not exposure to nature—that’s making them healthier.

James and his colleagues at Harvard set out to examine the association between greenness and mortality in a large, ongoing study of nurses living in mostly urban areas around the country. In gathering data repeatedly on the nurses over time (and the terminal nature of the chosen endpoint—death) it was more likely that any association between greenness and mortality was actually due to the greenness and not some other factor. And the fact that all study participants shared the same occupation—nursing—made it less likely that socioeconomics would confound their results.

In a 2016 study, the researchers reported that nurses with high levels of greenness surrounding their homes over the course of the eight-year study were about 12 percent less likely to die during that period than nurses living in the least green areas. The associations were strongest for respiratory, cancer, and kidney disease-related deaths.

They found that the association between greenness and mortality appeared to be explained by women living in greener neighborhoods experiencing less depression, higher levels of social engagement, more physical activity and lower exposures to air pollutants than their peers living in less green neighborhoods.

A natural experiment

“If nature can make us feel better in the general sense, then we should be able to see measurable differences in human health,” said Donovan, who studies the social and health benefits provided by urban trees.

Under normal circumstances, he said, studying how large-scale changes in foliage over time impact the health of communities would take ages. It could take a generation or more before newly planted trees form a mature urban tree canopy.

Yet nature set up the experimental conditions Donovan needed to study the relationship between trees and health outcomes. The loss of more than 100 million ash trees over the last decade and a half has drastically changed the landscape in many U.S. cities—making them a perfect laboratory to study the relationship between tree cover and health.

“Exposure to vegetation can be very restorative, but design does matter.”-William Sullivan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The culprit? A shiny green beetle named the emerald ash borer. The ash borer, native to Asia, first turned up in Detroit in 2002. It’s been spreading across the Northeastern U.S. since, leaving behind a trail of dead ash trees.

Using the presence of the ash borer as an indicator for tree loss, Donovan and his colleagues showed an increase in deaths associated with the presence of the beetle. In counties across a 15-state area, Donovan attributed about 15,000 additional heart disease-related deaths and about 6,000 respiratory disease-related deaths to a loss of trees caused by the emerald ash borer. They published their results in 2013.

“The magnitude of the effect was really eye-opening,” Donovan said.

New tools to quantify effects

Studies such as Donavan’s natural experiment with the emerald ash borer give experts confidence that nature really is affecting health — that researchers haven’t just stumbled upon a giant set of coincidences.

Yet more science is needed “to tell us the conditions under which nature will and will not improve health, and how to use nature to improve health,” said Ming Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“Exposure to vegetation can be very restorative, but design does matter,” said William Sullivan, a landscape architect also at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hacking your way through an overgrown lot, for instance, may not have the same calming or restorative effect as a casual stroll through a grove of trees or an urban park.

As landscape architects move toward creating more ecologically healthy landscapes that foster ecosystem services—for instance flood mitigation or temperature regulation—it’s important to understand the human health implications too, Sullivan said. For instance, are you creating a reservoir for mosquitoes, ticks or other insects that could be carrying disease?

“We need information on how exposure to different forms of green space impact health, how much exposure people need, and what kind of designs—arrangements of plants, types of plants—are healthy for the environment and for people,” he said.

“Planting trees can literally save the lives of people.”-Satoshi Hirabayashi, The Davey Tree Expert Company and the  US Forest Service

Researchers now are developing tools that may soon answer some of these questions. Satoshi Hirabayashi, an environmental engineer at The Davey Tree Expert Company and the U.S. Forest Service in Syracuse, New York, studies how much air pollution is removed by different types of trees and then estimates how those reductions in air pollution benefit human health. Previous studies suggest as many as 135,000 U.S. deaths annually can be attributed to ground level ozone and fine particulate matter. Trees absorb some of those airborne particles by trapping them on their leaves and bark while gaseous pollutants are taken in through the leaf stomata.

Hirabayashi and colleagues are developing a national database that will allow users to quantify the air quality and related human health benefits associated with any forested area anywhere in the U.S. “We will be able to show people what kind of air pollution removal is going on in their own backyard,” he said.

So far, they’ve shown that tree type matters and that urban trees give more bang for the buck when it comes to health benefits. Evergreens do a better job of removing pollutants year-round than deciduous trees, which drop their leaves in the fall, Hirabayashi found. And while rural areas experience more total air pollution removal from trees than urban areas (due to more tree cover in rural areas), the effects of that air pollution removal on human health appear greatest in urban areas where the most people are concentrated.

Urban forest managers and city planners around the country have begun using this technology to better understand the health savings associated with city trees on both a community and backyard level using tools such as i-Tree Eco and i-Tree Design, according to Hirabayashi. These programs can estimate air quality and associated human health benefits anywhere in the U.S.

“Planting trees can literally save the lives of people,” he said. [The clear-cutting of trees in West Virginia for pipelines and other activities cannot be justified. DGN]

$65 million Project over 180 miles

The goal is to plant one tree for each soldier who died in the line of duty.

From an Article by Greg Toppo, USA Today, December 21, 2013 

LEESBURG, Va. — On a busy stretch of suburban highway an hour’s drive south of the Mason-Dixon Line, workers are digging holes in a grass median, then carefully planting thin, delicate trees: oak, maple, cedar and dogwood — 108 in all — before winter sets in.

The planting looks like a typical highway beautification, but it’s part of a quiet effort that seeks to answer a very big question: 150 years after the end of the Civil War, can trees heal the nation’s soul?

An estimated 620,000 soldiers died fighting from 1861 to 1865, far more than in any war Americans have fought since. Yet for all the intensity surrounding the war’s 150th anniversary, almost no one — including most historians — can say for sure exactly how many died, or who nearly half of the dead were. Many soldiers, especially those who fought for the South, never received a proper burial.

When completed, the $65 million project will be the largest man-made pathway of trees on the globe, stretching 180 miles north to south over three states.Along the historic highway that stretches from Thomas Jefferson’s home, near Charlottesville, Va., to the national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pa., a small group has spent the past two years literally laying the groundwork to plant a tree for every one of the dead.

Its scale brings home the war’s grim reality: So many men died in those four years that if workers simply planted along both sides of the route, each tree would stand just three feet from the next.

So organizers are asking communities along the route to devote small swaths of land to creating groves. They’ve already planted 248 trees at Bliss Orchard at Gettysburg, part of a larger effort by the National Park Service to restore the battlefield site to what it looked like in 1863.

Cate Magennis Wyatt, a former Virginia secretary of commerce who heads the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership, a well-funded public-private effort that has already turned the route into a “scenic byway,” says the idea for trees was not a hard sell for communities along the route. They had been asked by state officials to come up with a way to commemorate the war’s 150th anniversary.

“They called me and said, ‘Cate, we don’t want another flagpole. We don’t need another monument. What can we do together that’s bigger than what any one of us could do individually?’ ”

Wyatt suggested planting an allée, or alley, of trees — she knew that Australians had created one after World War I — and soon people all along the route were asking how they could help.

“Tree people love this,” says Virginia arborist Peter Hart, who has championed the project.

At an arborists’ conference recently, Hart manned a table publicizing the effort and says it was “constantly crowded” with tree experts wanting to know more and many forking over the $100 it costs to donate a tree. As he explained the effort, he says, a few even teared up as they absorbed its magnitude.

“They’re excited about this,” says Hart, who laid out $200 to plant trees for two great-grandfathers who fought in the war and survived.

After 150 years, the Civil War remains unprecedented in the USA in its carnage. Historians estimate that one in three households in the South lost a family member and that overall about 2% of the USA population died in the line of duty. Today that would be the equivalent of more than 6 million dead, or 4,100 per day, every day, for four years.

Some estimates put the war’s death toll as high as 740,000, but poorly kept records, especially for Confederate soldiers, mean that historians likely will never know its full extent. Should historians confirm the higher count, Wyatt says, “We’re prepared to go there if we need to.”

Using GPS technology, the group is working with the National Park Service and other partners, including the online sites ancestry.com and fold3.com, to create an interactive map that will allow anyone traveling the route to find a tree planted for an individual soldier. Wyatt foresees that travelers someday will be able to pinpoint individual trees using a smartphone, then use an app to call up each soldier’s information.

Within just a few years, she predicts, the stands of trees — red sunset maples, chestnut and willow oaks, red-twigged dogwoods, red cedars and eastern redbuds, among others — will soon be “impossible not to recognize.”

As workers finished digging holes along the highway one cold morning this week, Leesburg Mayor Kristen Umstattd said the city plans to contribute at least 500 trees. The effort, she says, has become “part of the lexicon of planting” in Leesburg.

“It’s ongoing,” Umstattd says. “I expect it to last for a generation or more.”

Those looking to donate a tree can do so online at the the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership’s website.

>  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >

The Journey to 620,000 Trees in Honor of Civil War Participants

From an Article by Sandy Hausman, NPR – WVTF, Charlottesville, VA, November 21, 2016

While most of this state’s gardening gets done in the spring and summer, Virginia’s tree lovers have been busy this fall.  Sandy Hausman reports on an effort to plant 620,000 – one for each man who died in the Civil War.

Chris Gensic is a tree commissioner and coordinator of parks and trails in Charlottesville.  This month, he says, volunteers planted 64 Jefferson elms, white swamp oaks, tulip poplars and Kentucky Coffee trees between the city and Monticello.

“There’s this huge wide median, and we decided to put an alley of large trees in it, so 40 to 50 years from now you’ll have this beautiful cathedral of trees on the way to Monticello.”

They got help from members of the National Guard and from a four-state partnership called the The Journey through Hallowed Ground.  To mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, Gensik says that group intends to plant 620,000 trees.

“And every tree will be tagged  to an individual’s story, where they came from, where they served.  They came and helped us plant our gateway.  When they come back to plant their redbuds and understory trees we will help them plant those trees and together we’ll have not only the Jefferson gateway, but the beginning of the Journey through Hallowed Ground.”

That journey begins at Monticello and stretches 180 miles north to Gettysburg, passing through nine presidential homes and sites, 18 national and state parks,  hundreds of Civil War battlefields and more than a thousand historic houses and towns.

See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net