WHAT WOULD YOU DO if you knew that climbing trees could lower pain sensitivity and stress in people with disabilities? If you knew that it could increase the experience of positive emotions while decreasing negative ones?

For Dr. John Gathright, founder of Tree Climbing Japan, the answer to those questions is simple: Get more people into trees!

Gathright had already been leading tree-climbing expeditions for children with disabilities for close to a decade when he began pursuing a self-designed doctorate in the physiological, psychological and societal benefits of purpose-specific tree climbing programs. After searching in vain for an expert who could help explain and quantify the amazing benefits he’d observed in the course of his work, he realized he’d have to do it himself. By the time his story was presented at the 2013 Partners in Community Forestry Conference in Pittsburgh, it was a story that could bring tears to the eyes of American Forests’ staff, already well aware of the emotional and psychological benefits of trees.

It had all begun in 1997 when 57-year old Toshiko Hikosaka set out to climb a giant sequoia tree in California. In 2001, with Gathright and Tree Climbing Japan’s help, she became the first paraplegic person to do so. The expedition to the top of the 243-foot Stagg tree — the fifth largest giant sequoia — culminated in triumph, wonder … and exhaustion. With Hikosaka too tired to climb down safely, the group spent the night in the boughs under the stars.

But the finish line of Hikosaka’s climb up the Stagg tree was just the beginning of another dream. Her strength and resilience is inspiring and uplifting, but not, as Gathright would discover, unique. Later, after they had returned to Japan, he found that a documentary of Hikosaka’s climb had left people all over Japan hankering to follow in her footsteps. In particular, he met many children who wanted to experience “treehab” — rehabilitation therapy through tree climbing — the adaptive tree climbing techniques that Gathright had developed with Hikosaka. So Gathright led the founding of the nonprofit Treehab, specializing in tree-climbing rehabilitation and therapy. Soon, Gathright and the others at Treehab were seeing tremendous changes in the children’s moods and outlooks. As Gathright puts it, “Little miracles were happening all over Japan up in the trees” as the little climbers felt less pain, as their depression eased and as more smiles and laughter rang through the treetops.

And so Gathright soon found himself working with other researchers at Nagoya University, asking the question, “How do people change when they climb trees?” They measured pulse and stress hormone levels on the ground and again in the trees. They studied pain sensitivity. Time and again, their research showed the positive effects tree climbing was having on the kids. Even more interesting, they collected the same data while climbing concrete towers and discovered the effects were not as strong — not even when the tower was in the same forest. It wasn’t just the climbing. It was the trees.

Today, Treehab has helped thousands of children with physical disabilities and emotional trauma discover their inner tree climber and boost their confidence. Gathright found that the more you learn about how trees can help people — he calls trees our friends, teachers and doctors — the more you’re compelled to harness their power. American Forests continues to protect and restore forests so that future generations can also experience their healing presence.

Learn more about John Gathright and Treehab in the TED Talk “Out on a Limb — The Healing Power of Trees,” available on www.youtube.com. 

The post Treehab: The Healing Power of Tree Climbing appeared first on American Forests.

A NEW SMOKEY

Seventy years ago this summer, Smokey Bear’s first public service ads appeared. Since then, his main message has stayed basically the same: “Only YOU can prevent wildfires.”

Yet Smokey is no stodgy septuagenarian. Smokey has “evolved with the times,” stresses Ellyn Fisher, a vice president at the Ad Council, which creates Smokey’s ads. Early images of Smokey seemed somewhat stern. In one 1944 ad, he looks at us out of the side of his eye as he douses an unattended campfire. His grim looks seems to ask, “Did you leave this fire unattended?”

Newer Smokey Bear Hugs ads show Smokey’s softer side as he rewards people with bear hugs for practicing fire safety. In one recent ad, a young couple stares awe-struck after Smokey after receiving a hug for properly extinguishing their campfire.

Smokey’s not the only thing that has changed with the times. The ways we manage — and think about — the wildfires he urges us to prevent have changed too.

NEW CHALLENGES

“Natural climate variability always gives us a wild ride,” notes Bill Patzert, a climate scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. For example, much of the West is currently in a drought linked to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a climate pattern that causes climate swings every 20 to 30 years.

Today, though, longer-term worries come from climate change linked to greenhouse gas emissions. “The real concern is that we’re going to have more extremes,” notes climate researcher David Peterson at the Forest Service’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory in Seattle. “We anticipate by the middle of the century, we’ll be burning two to three times as much area in the West as we do now,” he says. So expect to see Smokey warning of red alerts at parks and forests more often.

Meanwhile, about 70,000 American communities now abut natural areas. “More people are building in the wildland-urban interface than ever before,” says Loren Walker, acting national fire prevention manager for the U.S. Forest Service. Residential spread increases risks for accidental wildfires. As Patzert puts it, “People equal fire.”

NEW UNDERSTANDING

Smokey urges us to prevent wildfires, and that’s because people are still the No. 1 cause of wildfires in the United States. Generally speaking, the less often accidental fires occur, the better.

The smaller percentage of fires that start naturally by lightning are another story. “Fire isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” says Alex Gavrisheff at the Forest Service’s Missoula Technology and Development Center in Montana. Instead of preventing all fires, he says, “we try to manage fire.” Thus, agencies can now let naturally caused fires burn as long as lives aren’t at risk.

Historically, fire has been a regulating agent for forests, explains Brandon Collins at the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station in California. “It kept tree densities fairly low and it also kept a lot of fuel from accumulating on the forest floor.” More fuel means hotter burning fires, which are harder to contain.

Now, prescribed burns help remove excess fuel. Other projects clear brush or thin trees in dense areas that haven’t burned in a while.

NEW MANAGEMENT

Meanwhile, Smokey’s prevention message still matters, and accidental human-caused fires require a response. In 2012, fire-related activities ate up more than 40 percent of the Forest Service budget, leaving funds for other important conservation programs diminished.

But there is hope on that front. A group of 160 conservation, recreation, forestry and other groups, including American Forests, continue to fight for the successful passage of the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act. This act ensures funding for both wildfire first responders and for land managers, creating an emergency funding process for fire response that mirrors the funding process FEMA depends on to respond to other natural disasters. This process works to reduce the amount of emergency firefighting funds being borrowed from other important Forest Service programs. As fires continue to burn more frequently and with greater intensity, it is increasingly important to have a funding strategy to meet the challenges.

Of course, fighting wildfire cannot be done in Washington alone. Things have changed for the boots on the ground as well.

Agencies use updated helicopters and aircraft. The Forest Service has also invented a new descent device that lets firefighters slide down safely from helicopters, even in the ever-changing conditions of a wildfire.

As workers build fire lines, other crews slow the fire’s spread with foams, gels and retardants. Recent developments include more effective and environmentally safer products.

Foam chemicals decrease water’s surface tension. That process “allows water to penetrate into real dense fuel, like a smoldering log or thick dust layers,” says Shirley Zylstra at the Forest Service’s Missoula Technology & Development Center.

Gels make water thicker. “They’re the same types of chemicals that they use in baby diapers,” says Zylstra, so they hold lots of water to protect nesting trees, cabins, or other sensitive areas. With consistencies like mayonnaise or Vaseline, gels get applied from the air or ground very shortly before a fire arrives. In a pinch, they can go on active flames too.

A NEW AGE

In 2012, Smokey Bear went to the International Space Station in the form of a plush toy, as a symbol for wildfire prevention, to help draw awareness to the research related to plant growth and combustion and materials sciences being conducted on the space station.

“Satellites are the first to detect some of these fires as they’re started,” says Doug Morton at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He describes the satellite as “the tallest fire tower around.”

Satellites also help with planning. “Areas that have not burned during the satellite era might be at greater risk,” adds Morton. That’s because the longer it’s been since a fire, the more fuel is likely to be built up. Agencies can use that information to position firefighting resources. The information also helps with fuel reduction programs, such as tree thinning or prescribed burns, by indicating areas in need of such measures.

Space is not the only frontier Smokey has explored. He now has a huge digital presence too. Smokey Bear tweets. He is on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. He’s even on LinkedIn. “We have him out there,” says Walker.

Smokey’s not alone in going digital. More and more, computer modeling plays a role in fire management. Weather forecasts from local radio or TV stations might cover a whole county or more. When wildfire breaks out, forecasts on that large scale aren’t good enough. “For fighting fire, what we really need is a very small scale,” says Shyh-Chin Chen at the Forest Service’s Southwest Pacific Research Station. Crews need to know precisely where fire will go and how fast it will spread. For example, says Chen, “wind is one of the most important factors that affects the fire spread.” But in hilly areas like southern California, terrain can cause very local shifts in wind and other factors.

The winds of wildfire management have certainly shifted over the last 70 years, and 2014 will be a befitting year to look back and learn from our mistakes and successes, as Smokey Bear himself turns 70. Smokey will make lots of appearances this summer as he celebrates his anniversary. Watch for him on TV, at parks, around county fairs and elsewhere. “Smokey is communicating that personal responsibility message — that everyone can do something to prevent wildfires,” says Fisher.

Meanwhile, government agencies and groups like American Forests are doing their part. Greater success in restoring forests and removing excess fuel can lower the risks of devastating fires and habitat loss. That’s something Smokey and all of us can celebrate.

Kathiann M. Kowalski has written 25 books and more than 600 articles, including many features on science and technology. She lives and writes near Cleveland in northeast Ohio.

The post Smokey Turns 70 appeared first on American Forests.

BREATHING HARD IN THE THIN MOUNTAIN AIR, we reached the trail’s end at the top of Sierra Chincua, a 10,000-foot-high biosphere reserve and world heritage site in central Mexico. Stepping into a sunny clearing, we looked about in wonder. Hundreds — no, thousands — of monarchs warmed by the noonday sun were swooping and swirling around us in lazy circles.

A few steps further took us back into the shade where even more butterflies could be seen, like orange sparks rising and falling against dark green fir needles and even darker tree trunks. The Vigilante Ecologico, rangers who monitor these woods, have roped off the most concentrated areas and keep a watchful eye on the scattering of tourists who come in mid-February to witness the annual overwintering of millions of the monarchs, which have traveled as far as 3,500 miles to this spot. With binoculars we could see deeper into the forest where huge clusters of monarchs huddled together for warmth, bending the boughs of trees or lined up in rows on trunks, the patterned brown undersides of their wings blending perfectly with the bark.

“It’s magical,” whispered someone behind me. And mysterious, too. No one knows why these fragile-looking insects travel so far in a migration pattern that stretches from the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada to the Mexican highlands. But we do know that things are changing. Monarch numbers have been dropping steadily for the last 10 years.

That’s one reason American Forests has organized this trip for 26 members. We’ve come to learn more about what’s happening to these creatures and to witness what some call the most complex animal migration in the world. And if the numbers continue to drop, it’s an opportunity that may not arise again in the future.

Sound like fun? Join us for the next trip — to the Big Island of Hawai‘i

THE FLIGHT IN PLIGHT

Two days later, we found ourselves on a higher mountain, the 12,000-foot El Rosario, where the monarchs gather at the end of a path that includes nearly 800 steps. It was Sunday, and though a dozen of us had joined the crowds of Mexican tourists enjoying a weekend excursion, the rest of our group were riding up the steep hillside on horseback. The monarchs in this reserve are even more populous, and along a quiet fork of the main trail where they had gathered to sip water from a rivulet, we could actually hear their wings fluttering like a soft rainfall.

Mexican Indians have long known where the monarchs overwintered, but it wasn’t until 1975 that the wider world learned the stunning details of their thousands-of-miles migration. The monarchs arrive in late autumn and spend the next five months or so resting and eventually mating. By mid-March, the females begin flying north, scouting out milkweed patches in Texas and the southern states where they will lay eggs that hatch into caterpillars.

But here’s where the story gets weird. The migration of the monarchs happens in generational waves. The first-generation caterpillars change into butterflies, mate and advance north. Some make it all the way to Canada while others reach the lower Midwest, again searching out milkweed — the only plant their caterpillars can eat. Again, they lay eggs, hatch, metamorphose, mate and some continue north. After three to five short-lived generations, the last wave of pregnant females lays eggs. Then, the strangest part of all: The caterpillars from this last group become a long-lived “super generation” of butterflies that head south and migrate all the way back to central Mexico in the fall, in one long swoop. How they know to return to the same overwintering spots over a gap of several generations is still a mystery.

“There’s nothing else like this on the planet,” says Chip Taylor, an insect ecologist at the University of Kansas and director of Monarch Watch, a conservation and outreach program that promotes growing milkweed. “Lots of other butterflies migrate, but none of them cluster like this and have such an intriguing life story.” It was that life story that first surprised and captivated the world.

The public was shocked again in the 1980s when images of logging trucks filled with butterflies still clinging to freshly cut trees were televised. In 1986, the government established the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a 139,000-acre area that spans the states of Michoacán and Mexico. That designation and reforestation efforts have helped, but logging — both legal and illegal — remains the primary commercial activity in these remote highlands where ancient volcanic mountaintops rim the landscape.

In addition to concerns about forest loss in Mexico, a sharp decrease in milkweed in the United States is another huge problem. This decline is largely attributed to an increase in the use of the herbicide glyphosate, used widely in sprays for controlling roadside vegetation and in a variety of genetically modified crops like corn, soybeans and cotton.

“I keep getting asked, what happens if the monarchs disappear?” Taylor says. “That’s not the point. They’re one of those really conspicuous natural phenomena. We have to keep the pollinators healthy. When their numbers go down, it’s an indication of some serious things going wrong.”

Numbers of monarchs are hard to calculate, but the average number is thought to be 350 million. This year’s number is estimated at 60 million — an 80 percent decline. Their overwintering colony sizes are easier to measure. In 1996, the monarchs occupied a peak of 52 acres; in recent years their clusters take up barely three acres. We’re lucky to be here to witness them while we still can.

WITNESSING THE WONDER WITH AMERICAN FORESTS

Each day of our trip, after our outings, we returned to the small town of Tlalpujahua, one of several former mining communities in the region. The mines here produced gold and silver until 1937 when a major landslide occurred. Now much smaller, the town has come to rely on tourism and blown-glass Christmas tree ornaments for much of its economy.

Our hotel, the five-year-old Mansion de San Antonio, is built into the hillside, and when our full-sized coach bus pulled up each afternoon, we would hold our breath as the driver expertly maneuvered between the entrance and a vertical rock wall. Greeting us in the lobby, the hotel owner offered rounds of cocktails: margaritas, mojitos, wine, shots of tequila and bottles of Corona and Victoria beer. A visiting chef cooked delicious native dishes for breakfast and dinner. We started each morning with fresh papaya, pineapple and cantaloupe, followed by eggs scrambled with chorizo, salsa-topped Mexican cheese or pancakes and mangoes. Nearly every evening, we climbed the steps to the hotel’s open-air rooftop event space to be entertained by musicians and dance groups.

American Forests used to organize trips for members, usually in the form of overnight horseback rides in the American West. From 1933 through the 1980s, the Trail Riders of the Wilderness program gave members the opportunity to learn about our forests first-hand. When Matthew Boyer, vice president of individual giving, joined the organization in 2012, he decided to renew the tradition. Our trip to see the monarchs is the first recent venture, or “Forestscape”; other trips to Hawai‘i and Yellowstone National Park are being planned for this fall and next winter.

“I’m a huge fan of the outdoors and I think there’s no better way to engage members than to get them into the woods to see the impact of our forest restoration work,” Boyer says. He arranged the monarch trip with the help of Rebeca Quiñonez- Piñón, a former university professor who grew up in Mexico and now directs Forests for Monarchs, based in Austin, Texas.

A project of the nonprofit La Cruz Habitat Protection Project, Forests for Monarchs has partnered with American Forests Global ReLeaf program for almost a decade to restore crucial butterfly habitat as well as provide local jobs, protect watersheds and encourage responsible lumber industry practices. Since the partnership began in 2006, American Forests and Forests for Monarchs have planted 1 million trees together, bringing Forests for Monarchs’ total to 7 million trees.

One morning, we visit a nursery and Quiñonez- Piñón explains how seeds gathered by local residents from two species of native pines are planted in the fall and cared for until the rainy season in late summer. When transplanted during this wet period, the seedlings have an extremely high success rate.

“It’s understandable that there’s a conflict between the monarchs and the logging industry because they need the same habitat,” Quiñonez- Piñón says. “We’re hoping to open more nurseries in the area and expand the number of seedlings being produced. We need more people to know about this problem.”

Along the route our bus travels to the monarch reserves, it’s easy to see there are not many other jobs available. Clusters of small houses painted yellow, orange, blue and green dot the landscape between plots of iron-rich red volcanic dirt and rolling hills covered with cactus, agave and grasses. Occasionally we see a small herd of sheep or goats, or men with tractors or horse-drawn plows cultivating fields for spring plantings of corn, alfalfa, oats and fava beans. In higher elevations, agriculture is less common on the steep terrain. When traveling through Angangueo, another former mining town that welcomes butterfly tourists, we encounter homes and stores stacked nearly vertically in a mountain canyon. We clap and yell “bravo!” as our driver twice backs down a narrow road for a quarter mile before finding passage for our 40-foot-long bus through the twisty streets.

Our trips to the two monarch reserves were bookended around a “cultural heritage day.” First, we visited Estanzuela Ceramics Studio where we browsed hand-painted dishware and ate a sack lunch in a sunny courtyard amid pink and red geranium flowers. Later, we toured Tlalpujahua, named by the Mazahua people and established as a formal Spanish settlement in 1603. We explored the slanting stone streets and admired the Sanctuary of the Virgen del Carmen, an eclectic half-Baroque, half-Neoclassical church that combines Catholic symbolism in its papal hat-shaped rooftop with indigenous images like the native jaguar.

A GREATER CAUSE

During our trip, it was announced that President Obama would meet with the president of Mexico and prime minister of Canada in Toluca to discuss, among other things, the monarchs. Later, the leaders agreed to create a working group to study ways to protect the butterfly.

Scott Steen, president and CEO of American Forests, was part of our tour group. He also emphasized the need to get governments working together with biologists, foresters, entomologists and general citizens — not just on the monarch situation, but on all types of environmental problems. “We can’t be satisfied with winning small battles, while we are losing the war,” he says. “The monarchs, like nearly 80 percent of the animal species in North America, are dependent on healthy forests. But if we want to have diverse wildlife populations for future generations, we also have to stop destroying their food sources with our chemicals and carving their habitat into smaller and smaller disconnected pieces.”

On one of our last nights in the mountains, we gathered on the hotel rooftop to witness the ceremony of El Palo Volador, “the pole flyer.” One by one, to the sound of a pan flute and a slow drumbeat, four young men dressed as eagles climbed a tall cedar pole to a small platform and wound loops of rope around their waists. A narrator below explained how this prayer-like tradition originated with the Mazhaua people, later incorporating a tribute to a local saint, San Pedro Tarimbaro.

“We hear an ancient call that brings hope to the modern earth,” the narrator said. “A call to places where the earth ends, to places where nothing is impossible. All of this enriches and renews the earth, as the cycle of life continues.”

Suddenly, the men launched themselves backwards and dangled upside down, spinning around the pole in wider and wider circles until just before reaching the ground, they flipped upright again.

We were mere bystanders for this centuries-old event, but as American Forests supporters, we echo the sentiments expressed: Let us bring hope to the modern earth by advancing causes that enrich and renew it. And let us protect places like the deep fir and pine forests, thick with orange and black butterflies, where maybe still, nothing is impossible.

Jill Draper is a freelance writer at jilldraperfreelance.wordpress.com. Harold Draper blogs about ecoregions at enviroramble.net. They live in Kansas City, Mo.

To learn more about American Forests Forestscapes, including our upcoming trip to Hawai‘i, visit www.americanforests.org/events.

The post Flight to Plight: Witnessing the Imperiled Migration of the Monarchs appeared first on American Forests.

IN THE 1820S, AMERICA’S CITIES HAD A PROBLEM: People kept dying, and church burial grounds were filling up. Fortunately, a group of horticulturists in Massachusetts had a solution and, in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge became the first modern cemetery. Other cities began to follow suit, dedicating rolling, scenic tracts of land on the outskirts of town to honor the deceased. This “rural cemetery,” or “garden cemetery,” movement not only temporarily solved the problem of where to put the dead, but it also gave us the nation’s very first parks.

Over the decades, cemeteries fell out of vogue as cultural centers, but their fall from favor was not to be permanent. Today, the practice of using cemeteries for outdoor recreation is bubbling up once more, as urban dwellers seek out nature in the city.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GARDEN OF GRAVES

In the early 19th century, as cities like Boston grew, inner-city burials were no longer cutting it. Land prices were rising and the small church burial grounds were overcrowding. Storms would flood the grounds with gruesome results. Outbreaks of diseases like cholera and typhoid fever had communities fearing urban burials.

In response, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society presented a vision that would solve the city planning problem, while carving out a piece of land they would turn into a horticultural wonder to rival the gardens popular in Europe at the time. It was dubbed a “garden of graves” or a serene “city of the dead.” Mount Auburn Cemetery grew into a feat of landscape design, sculpture and meticulously manicured Victorian-style gardens. The rural cemetery movement spread as other cities established their own garden cemeteries, from Green-Wood in Brooklyn to Laurel Hill in Philadelphia. They were extremely popular among locals and visitors alike, becoming regular gathering places for strolling and picnicing. “In a country sorely lacking in public green spaces, these cemeteries provided these graceful, elegant places,” says Keith Eggener, architectural historian and author of the book “Cemeteries.” “They were allaround recreational and artistic centers for people. They became seen as major urban amenities.”

But it was the cemeteries’ success that inspired the competition that edged them out — city parks. The popularity of the rural cemeteries, especially Green-Wood in Brooklyn, was an inspiration to landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, an early proponent for a central park. Early cemetery topography, with its rolling hills and gently curving paths, also highly influenced the first large city parks designed in the mid-19th century. As urban destinations like Central Park and Prospect Park became more popular, they edged their forerunners out.
The time was ripe for these parks’ rise over the cemeteries: Attitudes toward death were shifting. In the Victorian Era, high mortality rates, especially among children, had meant that mourning and death were very much a common presence in peoples’ lives. That culture, with its romanticized poems, songs and rituals surrounding death and mourning, had contributed to the elaborate rural cemeteries and their popularity.

Over time, as burial became more sterile and efficient, cemeteries followed suit. Eggener writes: “Increasingly, they became places of the dead almost exclusively, as the living preferred to avoid them except when absolutely necessary.”

Of course, the cemeteries themselves didn’t go anywhere. As our cities continued to grow, they engulfed these plots of land until the cemeteries — once on the edges of town — were massive chunks of green space often smack in the hearts of our major metropolitan areas. Thanks to perpetual care agreements and historic preservationists, many of these historic cemeteries remain today, protected from development. The result is a generation of gated, astonishing landscapes lying comfortably in the hearts of major American cities, ready for their comeback.

REOPENING THE GATES

If you had walked up to the entrance of Green- Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn as recently as the 1990s, unless you were there to leave flowers with a loved one, you were more or less turned away, says cemetery president Richard Moylan.

“We realized that that could be the end of us,” says Moylan, in light of the increasing number of people opting for alternative arrangements like cremation. “Because as we bury less, people will visit their loved ones less. They might visit their parents a few times year, but are they going to visit their grandparents or their great grandparents?” he asks. “So, that’s when we started welcoming people in.”

This summer, you’re not only invited to tour the grounds, you can also sign up for yoga classes or gather in the historic chapel to watch old movies and drink a hot toddy.
Green-Wood is one of many cemeteries embracing more public use. While a lot of the old cemeteries are still selling plots and burying the deceased, even those with healthy endowments are increasingly aware that their days as just a cemetery are numbered. Not only are cremation and other arrangements increasing in popularity, but cemeteries eventually begin to run out of space. Public use can mean the difference between succumbing to degradation and becoming a thriving part of the community.

The results of embracing more and varied uses of these spaces can be memorable. Last October, for example, parts of Prospect Park were temporarily closed to public traffic when President Obama helicoptered into the park to visit a local school in Brooklyn. The president’s stop was just before the New York City Marathon, so for the day, Green-Wood suspended its no jogging rule. The New York Post criticized the move, but Moylan says it was a hit, with no complaints from plot owners.

“I walked out of my office at 10 to six and I looked up on the hill, and there was a runner with her phone in her hand taking photos,” Moylan says. “And it was just a great day. I’m hoping we can do more of that — using the space for different things at different times, while still showing respect for our permanent residents.”

Green-Wood is now seeking arboretum status, considering how to draw more birders and building up the cemetery as a historic attraction. Trolley tours are selling out, says Moylan.

Even so, Green-Wood is relatively conservative when it comes to public use. Some cemeteries — often the publicly owned, the less active or those lacking a perpetual care fund — are more forward. One striking example is Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. Oakland’s story is similar to that of many historic cemeteries: Founded in 1850 on farmland, it now neighbors two of Atlanta’s upand- coming neighborhoods, just five blocks from the state capitol.

In the 1970s, the neighborhood and the cemetery fell into disrepair, but in the last five to 10 years, largely thanks to the Historic Oakland Foundation, the cemetery has stepped up its public use and restoration efforts. Oakland is explicitly trying to revive the Victorian garden cemetery experience. Along with regular tours, major annual events draw about a third of Oakland’s operating revenue, says Mary Woodlan, director of special events and volunteers.

“We feel that it’s important to bring the public in; otherwise how are they going to know about this place?” Woodlan says. “We say, once we get them through the gates, they’re hooked.”
Oakland is planning the fourth annual “Tunes From the Tombs” event, a music festival that draws around 4,000 people. They hold an annual 5k run, “Run Like Hell,” and a Halloween tour, a practice that has become popular in many cemeteries.

The question of dogs is a tough one for cemeteries, with many prohibiting man’s best friend from the grounds. But in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, dogs are welcome and quite common. They have even offered “Dogwalk” tours of the cemetery’s animal sculpture for guests and their dogs. At Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., they go so far as to sell memberships specifically to permit dog walking. There’s a waitlist for membership, and income from that covers groundskeeping contracts.

The decisions are not always cut and dry, and most cemetery staff interviewed say they have fielded complaints, either in response to existing activities or requesting to do more. Occasionally, people are offended by a screening of “Dracula,” a rock concert or a Halloween tour. Cemeteries feel their way toward what the community finds appropriate.

But people who find it odd to hang out in a cemetery usually understand once they’re through the gates, says David Barnett, president and CEO at Mount Auburn Cemetery. He recalls one family that tragically lost a son telling him a number of times how much they appreciate their time at Mount Auburn, specifically because it’s such a vibrant place.

“If there’s only one reason to come, and that’s to bury someone — that seems like the wrong way to go,” Barnett says.

MEETING THE NEED FOR GREEN

In a landlocked city, management of open space is a delicate balance. That balance becomes even more pronounced when it comes to cemeteries, where the land in question also happens to be hallowed. But if done right, cemeteries have tremendous potential to meet the demand for open space.

“Today, some cities have hundreds or thousands of acres of public cemetery lands, both with and without gravestones, which could theoretically help with parkland shortage,” writes Peter Harnik, director of the Center for City Park Excellence with the Trust for Public Land, in his book, “Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities.”

He describes the pendulum swinging from mass migration to the suburbs post-World War II, back toward a growing desire to live in city centers. Many cities are experiencing a resurgence of central city neighborhoods as active residential communities and the trend is expected to continue. As Harnik points out, when people migrate back from the suburbs to cities, they continue to crave the open space.

It’s not just a matter of recreation, either. Research has shown the profound effect that the presence of urban green space has on city dwellers’ health and well-bring. People with regular access to urban green spaces experience less stress, lower levels of fear and aggression and a lower incidence of childhood asthma than those who lack such access. Given these benefits, access to cemeteries can be as important for the living as for the deceased.

In the 1990s, Mount Auburn Cemetery made a decision to prioritize the natural landscape, focusing on some native restoration, sustainable groundskeeping and more discreet burials to increase their longevity as a functioning cemetery with space for new plots, but also to keep the environment pleasant for visitors and customers alike. The 175-acre arboretum boasts nearly 5,000 catalogued trees, an enviable collection of maple, pine and flowering dogwood, with a stand of restored native woodland as the natural centerpiece. Other historic cemeteries are even wilder. Publicly owned Evergreen Cemetery is the largest open space in Portland, Maine, by a good margin. About 100 of its 239 acres are undeveloped woods, complete with hiking paths. In 2007, the city hired a forester to inventory the wooded area, which he noted had “one of the better stands of red oak that I have seen in Maine in a 35-year career.”

In Brooklyn, Green-Wood Cemetery is almost the size of nearby Prospect Park, boasting 478 acres of hilly land in the heart of the city, with views of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Even larger than Green- Wood is Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum in Cincinnati. More than 300 of its 733 acres are undeveloped, including a wooded preserve. The cemetery boasts 23 state champion trees. In Utah, publicly owned Salt Lake City Cemetery spans 250 acres with a 300-foot elevation change. Snug in the foothills of the city, it’s home to owls, birds of prey, foxes, deer and amazing views of the city, says Sexton Mark Smith.

Read how American Forests founder J. A. Warder helped establish Spring Grove Cemetery.

LIMINAL SPACE

While it’s important to discuss how a cemetery is like a park, it’s just as important to highlight what sets it apart from your typical urban green space.

Central Park on a sunny day will be bustling with sporting events, skateboarders, rows of sunbathers. Even as cemeteries become more popular, on their busiest days they retain a certain tranquility. Eggener, author of “Cemeteries,” discusses the value of cemeteries as liminal space — space at the joining together of different states. They’re places where life meets death, nature meets city, present meets past. They offer a unique experience.

At Mount Auburn, even on a cold winter day after a snowstorm, visitors strolled the grounds quietly, leaving winding trails in the snow. Steve Pinkerton and Vicki Slavin were one of a few couples perched at Washington Tower — the observation tower that is perhaps Mount Auburn’s best known feature — overlooking Boston. They’ve been coming here since the 90s, when they first came for a funeral. Pinkerton now volunteers as a docent. But on this day, they were just visiting.

“It’s a nice place to walk,” he says. “It’s a peaceful place.”

Tate Williams writes from Boston on a variety of subjects related to science, art and culture. Read more of his work at www.tatewilliams.org.

The post In the Garden Cemetery: The Revival of America’s First Urban Parks appeared first on American Forests.

By Chuck Graham

PEERING ACROSS THE SANTA CRUZ CHANNEL, the day was clear enough to see my destination — the grove of Torrey pines overlooking Bechers Bay on Santa Rosa Island, eight miles west of where I stood on a deserted beach on Santa Cruz Island. To get there, I was going to have to kayak across one of the most treacherous channel crossings in the world, where currents from as far away as Alaska and Mexico collide, creating the roiling underwater eddies that force open ocean waves upward. The crossing is known as the Potato Patch, though the potatoes for which it’s named are just one of many cargoes the waves have capsized over the years. Unfortunately, northwest winds were gaining steam and whitecaps swept the Pacific as I set off on my circumnavigation of Channel Islands National Park.

I look at the Channel Islands every day from my home in Carpinteria, Calif., and have been kayaking there for the past 20 years. I’ve made several circumnavigations around the islands, but never tire of exploring this unique archipelago. Each trip is unique. As I stood on the beach on Santa Cruz Island, steeling myself for the Potato Patch, I wondered what this next trip around the volcanic chain, with its diversity of flora and fauna found nowhere else in the world, would have in store.

Known as “the Galapagos Islands of the north,” the chain is best explored from the seat of a kayak. Hidden coves holding freshwater springs, more toothy sea grottos than anywhere else in the world and perfectly groomed golden sand beaches are just a few of the natural wonders found throughout the Channel Islands. Sometimes, it’s difficult to imagine the windswept archipelago is only 90 miles west of the megalopolis of Los Angeles. In fact, paddling the approximately 200 miles of coastlines and channel crossings is like experiencing California before Europeans arrived. During one blustery five-day stretch, I didn’t see or speak to anyone.

Of the eight California Channel Islands, five comprise the national park that was ratified by Congress in 1980. Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel Islands make up the northern chain. The southern chain consists of tiny Santa Barbara Island — the fifth and final island in the national park system — as well as San Nicholas, Santa Catalina and San Clemente Island. My circumnavigation this time would consist of the northern chain and take nine days to complete. I was particularly interested in exploring the islands’ forests.

Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa Islands possess the chain’s only forests, some of the most unique in North America, while San Miguel Island’s petrified forest attests to the windswept isle’s distant past as home to a grove of trees.

These forests are important habitat for the archipelago’s wildlife, several species of which, like the bald eagle, have been restored following local extinction or, like the endemic island fox, have been listed as endangered. Santa Cruz Island is the only place in the world to see the island scrub jay foraging for acorns amongst dense groves of island oak trees. Along my pelagic journey, I had many memorable encounters with these creatures and others while kayaking along wave-battered cliffs and teeming reefs and hiking up boulder-choked canyons on this Galapagos of the north.

WHERE EAGLES DARE

From my salt-encrusted kayak, I could hear a majestic bald eagle’s high-pitched whistles carrying down Pelican Canyon on the north shore of Santa Cruz Island. The canyon, shaped like an open book, is shaded by a forest of bishop pines. One tree stood out like no other, though. Its top was flat, browning and shaped like a giant mushroom. An eight-footwide bald eagle nest — successful for the past five years — was once again active with a rambunctious eaglet hopping around the periphery of the nest, its protective parents watching over it.

Santa Cruz Island is the southernmost region for bishop pine forests and important nesting habitat for bald eagles, which were returned to the islands in 2002, following a 50-year local extinction due to DDT pesticides polluting the pelagic food web.

The Montrose Chemical Corp. in Los Angeles was responsible for dumping millions of tons of the pesticides into the ocean along the Southern Californian coast after the substance was banned in 1972. The dump resulted in bald eagles, California brown pelicans and peregrine falcons laying thin-shelled eggs that were crushed before they could hatch. After 25 years of litigation, Montrose was court-ordered to pay $140 million in restitution, with $40 million going toward restoring natural resources like the bald eagle population on the Channel Islands. From 2002 to 2006, Channel Islands National Park partnered with conservation nonprofits to release bald eaglets on the islands. Today, there are approximately 60 bald eagles reestablishing old territories across the islands, successfully breeding, nesting and rearing their chicks without human intervention.

During one memorable encounter, I was paddling along the south shore of Santa Rosa Island in challenging northwest winds. To avoid the biting winds, I paddled inside of Cluster Point, a deep cove that provided shelter from the northwest, ducking out of the winds to eat and drink. There was a colony of northern elephant seals wallowing on a windblown beach. An opportunistic bald eagle approached the periphery of the group looking to scavenge on what it thought to be a marine mammal carcass. Just as it went to taste test a 3,000-pound bull elephant seal, the massive animal reared upward. Wings outstretched, the bewildered raptor was instantly blown away by the whistling winds all the way to the next secluded cove eastward. This natural moment caught by a lone kayaker was one that, just a decade ago, had not been seen for 50 years.

The Channel Islands are not the only place where bald eagles have had a rocky history. What is their story in the rest of the U.S.?

OUT FOXED

After negotiating heaving surf and powerful currents in the Potato Patch, I finished crossing the Santa Cruz Channel to Santa Rosa Island. I landed my kayak below the steep sand dunes at Water Canyon, tucked inside Bechers Bay. After pitching my tent, I went for a hike into the Torrey pine forest. There are only two Torrey pine forests in the world. The other is located in San Diego, Calif. These slow-growing pines require sandy soil in coastal sage scrub communities. Due to the conditions they live in and low genetic diversity, they are rare — the rarest pine in North America. Torrey pine numbers on Santa Rosa Island have been further reduced by cattle grazing. In the early 20th century, there were only about 100 trees in the wild, but through conservation efforts, there are roughly 3,000 Torrey pines today. These amazing pines have broad, open crowns and can grow anywhere from 25 to 50 feet tall. Their cones are heavy and stout but the pine nuts are edible.

I began my hike along an old ranch road, making the steep ascent into the forest from there. About halfway up the grove, I came upon three playful island foxes clambering and jostling on the lowest limbs and chasing each other up and down the thick trunk of a Torrey pine tree.

Native island foxes inhabit three islands in the national park. Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel are the only islands with year-round water sources, and the tiny, 3-to-4-pound island fox is the apex land predator on each of them. However, 14 years ago, the house cat-sized fox was nearly extinct — a casualty of 150 years of ranching across the chain from the early 1830s through the late 1980s. Toward the end of the ranching era, the feral pig population exploded to approximately 5,000 animals on Santa Cruz Island, eventually becoming a reliable food source that lured non-native golden eagles from the California mainland. Unfortunately, the raptors soon learned the island fox was a much easier catch: The smallest Canis in the world had never been preyed upon and could not have anticipated the aerial assault.

Santa Cruz Island is the largest island off the California coast and has historically possessed 1,500 island foxes. Golden eagles eventually colonized the island in the late 1990s and quickly brought that number down to just 50. Populations on Santa Rosa and San Miguel Islands were at critical lows as well, with only 15 individuals on each islet.

In 1999, Channel Islands National Park began captive breeding of island foxes. In 2002, the diurnal island fox was placed on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Endangered Species List. During captive breeding, the national park began trapping and removing 43 golden eagles, returning them to northeastern California with GPS tags. They also hired a company from New Zealand that specialized in eradicating non-native animals from islands to help with the feral pigs, who were uprooting native groves of island oak and ironwood trees and destroying other island flora.

By 2008, the tide had turned. Golden eagles had been removed and were kept at bay by the return of the bald eagles — who eat fish, not foxes — and by the eradication of the feral pig population. Captive breeding on each island helped to solidify the island fox population. Today, those populations are at or near historical counts, with much of the island flora healing on its own, returning more of a natural balance to the volcanic archipelago.

GHOSTLY TREES

Hunkered down near Sandy Point on the western tip of Santa Rosa Island, I was contemplating when to paddle across the San Miguel Passage to San Miguel Island and continue my journey to its westernmost point. San Miguel, with its natural history, 12 types of seabirds and massive seals and sea lions crowding quiet beaches, is my favorite isle. I scanned the channel with my binoculars, hoping to gauge the difficulty of my crossing. Northwest winds were on the rise, but it was only a three-mile paddle across the passage to San Miguel. I chose to go for it, hoping to reach the inside of scenic Cuyler Harbor before darkness fell.

I reached the island in less than an hour, but the winds increased as I approached the breathtaking cove, and it became an arduous struggle to beach my kayak where the sweeping sand dunes at Cuyler Harbor awaited. From there, I gathered my gear and gratefully trudged up Nidever Canyon to the rustic campground. It felt good to be on my feet, marveling at the native flora like island poppies and buckwheat. A lone island fox sitting atop the picnic table in my site was the only other soul in the campground.

The next morning, I lit out on the trail to Point Bennett located on the northwest tip of the island. Along the way, I stopped at Caliche Forest, a ghostly grove of sand casts made up of calcium carbonate encrusted around ancient tree trunks and roots. The combination of perpetual wind, fog, sand and other particles coming together to create this thick, paper mache-like layer around each gnarled stump gives this petrified forest a ghostly appearance.

Scientists theorize that these trees may have been food for mammoths before they went extinct 10,000 years ago. The Channel Islands were created by volcanic upheaval about 25 million years ago, when a large mass of land broke away from what is today San Diego. At its closest, the resulting super-island scientists have dubbed Santarosae was just five miles from the mainland. Columbian mammoths could smell food on the island and, Pachyderms being good swimmers, could make the channel crossing. There were minimal but sufficient food sources for the 14-foot-tall herbivores. However, when the polar icecaps melted roughly 12,000 years ago and sea levels rose, the chain was formed and the distance to the mainland doubled, stranding the mammoths for good. Due to isolation and increasingly scarce food sources, the mammoths evolved over time into a pygmy species only 4 feet tall at the shoulder. What happened to them next was a question whose answer awaited me back on Santa Rosa Island, near the end of my journey.

THE FIRST ISLANDER

The bow of my kayak eased atop a dense flotsam of tangled kelp and splintered driftwood where cool spring water fed a freshwater estuary at Arlington Canyon on the north shore of Santa Rosa Island. After dragging my kayak above the high tideline, I put on my trail shoes and hiked up the narrow canyon to one of the most important anthropological sites in North America.

Scientists theorize that the pygmy mammoths may have eventually been hunted to extinction by the first humans on the Channel Islands. The oldest human remains in North America were discovered at Arlington Canyon in 1959 by anthropologist and paleontologist Phil Orr. Known as “Arlington Man,” the two femurs found above the creek are 13,200 years old.

As I stood where Orr unearthed his monumental discovery, I understood why Arlington Man chose this spot to live. He had a year-round water source and advantageous view of his surroundings and could live off what the sea provided. Whoever Arlington Man was, he decided to break away from the mainland and venture across the channel in his own makeshift watercraft, possibly constructed from driftwood, willows and deer sinew.

The northwest winds had become a mere whisper and, with them, the swell had vanished too. As I completed the remaining 32 miles across a now-glassy channel back to the mainland where I live in Carpinteria, Calif., I couldn’t imagine paddling something as likely unseaworthy as Arlington Man did so long ago. But Arlington Man may not have been thinking about that when he built his watercraft and made his journey. His thoughts may even have been similar to mine: When looking across the channel at the islands, all I wanted to do was paddle around them. They simply beckoned. I like to think that’s what was going through Arlington Man’s mind as he gathered all the natural materials available to him to build his craft. Called by the islands, he paddled to a unique ecosystem rich in biodiversity — so close to the mainland yet worlds apart — eking out a life on the sea.

Chuck Graham is a freelance writer and photographer based in Carpinteria, Calif., and editor of DEEP Surf magazine. Learn more at www.chuckgrahamphoto.com. 

The post Kayaking the Galapagos of the North appeared first on American Forests.

New American Forests Science Advisory Board member Dr. Jennifer Jenkins is a forest biogeochemist specializing in GHG fluxes at the interface between forests and the atmosphere. She has worked in forest, agricultural and urban systems and is currently the director of science and strategy at Applied Geosolutions, a consulting firm that specializes in developing and applying remote sensing, image processing and modeling techniques for environmental decision making.

Why did you choose to work with forests?

I loved camping as a kid. When I was in high school, I did a lot of kayaking and rock climbing in the Washington, D.C. area and spent a lot of summers in the backcountry in national parks in the West and Alaska. I fell in love with those huge, majestic landscapes and I always felt right at home in the woods. For my career, I knew I wanted to do something related to the environment and I enjoyed the kind of in-depth research and synthesis that is required for graduate school. I’m also passionate about climate change and appreciate the complexity of climate change policy. My career has been a winding road, but I’ve always maintained a focus on forests and climate.

Why did you decide to join the American Forests Science Advisory Board?

I support American Forests’ mission on behalf of forest ecosystems. I also believe in the capacity of objective scientific research to help solve problems and especially in the importance of science-based policy. I am looking forward to being involved with American Forests’ work and I think it’s terrific that American Forests is looking to science and this group of experts to help inform its programs.

What is your favorite aspect or favorite part of your field?

I love to tackle a complex problem and break it down into its component parts. The more complicated the better! Lucky for me, the climate change problem has many interlocking and interacting pieces. For example, on the technical side, we talk about land use change, emissions up and down the supply chain, inventories and inventory data, interactions between elements like carbon and nitrogen and so much more. Then, on the policy side, we talk about policy tools like cap and trade, offsets and carbon taxes, not to mention the complicated political dynamics that change from day to day.

What was the most difficult challenge you’ve experienced in pursuit of your work?

When I worked at the Environmental Protection Agency, I was part of the U.S. negotiating team that traveled to Copenhagen for the COP15 conference in 2009. Parachuting into that process as a newcomer was profoundly difficult because the decision-making process of the U.N. Framework Commission on Climate Change is so different from any other process that exists anywhere in the world. It takes years to master the language and nuance of diplomacy, and I found the slow pace of discussions to be very frustrating. It was also tough to be a member of the U.S. team in that situation, because the other countries were looking at the U.S. and asking, “What reductions can you commit to? What do you bring to the table?” At that point, there wasn’t much, so progress was slow.

Do you have a favorite story from your years in the field?

I was doing fieldwork for my dissertation at study sites in Connecticut. I was using buried bags to measure nitrogen mineralization and since microbial activity is slow in the winter months I buried one set of bags in the fall to dig up in the spring, rather than the monthly bags you would use during the growing season. In the spring, my field assistant and I drove to Connecticut to pick up the buried bags from the first half of the field sites and stopped for the night at a motel outside Hartford. When we woke up in the morning, ready to drive to the rest of the field sites, we found that the car had been stolen, along with all of the buried bags with my overwinter samples! Chasing down that field vehicle was kind of interesting — the police learned that it had been taken on a joyride by some kids. When we got it back, it was filled with random stuff like snacks and clothing. But no soil samples!

Where was the most interesting, most intriguing, most impactful or favorite place you were able to travel to in the name of science and why?

I’ve been fortunate to travel to some interesting places, usually for meetings rather than fieldwork. I’ve attended IPCC and UNFCCC meetings in places like Geneva, Copenhagen, Bangkok, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Mauritius, Frankfurt, Arona — just outside Milan — and Oslo. But my favorite place — by far — is Australia. I traveled to Sydney one year and almost didn’t come home.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would you be and why?

My work combines science with a lot of other things, like business and policy, so I don’t have to give up science to take on something new. So, I think I’ll always do something science-related, but I also enjoy business and entrepreneurship. For something completely different, I’ve thought about opening a Crossfit gym. I think that would be really fun.

The post Forest Frontiers: Dr. Jennifer Jenkins appeared first on American Forests.