Author: Site Owner

By Suah Cheong, American Forests

Snoqualmie Falls in Snoqualmie, Wash. Credit: Suah Cheong.

One of the first things I tell people about myself is that I’ve lived in six different cities and 12 different homes. Every couple of years, my dad’s job took us to a new place. I had to make new friends, learn new languages, adjust to new maps and adopt new cultures. So, while most feel safe and comfortable at home, I’ve grown to love being a fish out of water.

Still, I inevitably got homesick. It first struck me at age five when my family made the long trip from Seoul, South Korea to San Jose, Calif. I couldn’t speak English. The kids at school looked down on me because I couldn’t communicate with them. My favorite playgrounds were an entire ocean away. And, most importantly at the time, my favorite Korean candies were nowhere to be found.

Every time I went somewhere new, even if only for a few months, I longed for the old. But eventually, I had lived in so many different places that I wasn’t sure which one to call home. This is when I realized that just one thing had remained constant in my life — nature.

Whether I was reading under the giant redwood tree that lived in my Californian backyard, swimming in the lakes of Austin, Texas, hiking along the Blue Ridge Mountains in Boone, N.C., or playing in the snow at Snoqualmie Pass, Wash., crisp air surrounded me. I find it so amazing that each place has unique ecosystems that fuel and protect its human populations. I have always been comforted by the knowledge that nature will follow me wherever I go.

However, we face a different reality today. Climates are changing; temperatures are rising. We’re polluting our air and cutting down our trees, consequently leaving ourselves without the clean air we need to survive. I realized how critical this issue was when I watched lakes I loved become craters and forests I’d visited get chopped down.

Saying that we should care more about the environment is a gross understatement. It’s not that we should do more — it’s that we must. It’s our responsibility as humans to give back to nature what it has endlessly provided us, especially considering the severe damage we have done to the environment.

I am double-majoring in Communication Studies and Political Science at American University. There are many changes I’d like to make with the knowledge and skills I’m gaining there; this is certainly one of them. I look forward to using my opportunity at American Forests to communicate the importance of forests and environmental conservation.

By Doyle Irvin, American Forests

Chernobyl. Credit: Timm Seuss via Flickr.

Over the course of the 30 years since the Chernobyl disaster, many things have changed in the Exclusion Zone — and many things have stayed the same. So, let’s explore the impact of the nuclear accident on nature.

In tragic irony, the cause of the Chernobyl explosion was an experiment meant to test the safety of the nuclear reactor. Things went badly wrong, the Chernobyl 4 reactor exploded, and the nearly 116,000 local residents were evacuated over the following months. Since then, scientists have been exploring the consequences for wildlife in the area — of both radiation and the absence of humans.

What isn’t occurring is what dime-store novels would have you expect, such as extra limbs or extranormal abilities. There were isolated incidents of serious mutation directly after the incident, but for the most part the biological changes are limited, or as yet undiscovered. There are examples of birds with smaller brains, and a conspicuous absence of spiders. But, when it comes to big game, such as deer, boar, moose, elk and bears, nature has seen the human-evacuation as an opportunity.

“It’s just incredible,” says Jim Beasley, a scientist studying in Chernobyl told National Geographic. “You can’t go anywhere without seeing wolves.”[i]

The recovery of the wolves, in particular, is remarkable: the studies are showing that they are seven times more numerous than in other nature reserves, including Yellowstone. The populations of the other big animals have also been on a steady rise over the last 30 years.

Scientists are still worried, however.

“This doesn’t mean radiation is good for wildlife, just that the effects of human habitation — including hunting, farming and forestry — are a lot worse,” says Professor Jim Smith, another scientist studying Chernobyl.[ii]

Some scientists worry that there haven’t been enough generations of breeding yet to truly tell the impact of the radiation on big animals.

Unfortunately, it seems that it is mainly just the mammals who are benefitting. There is already worrying news about smaller organisms and plant life. A recent study[iii] focused on the decomposers of the ecosystem — everything from mushrooms to microbes. They took leaf litter and placed it in various kinds of bags in more than 500 locations throughout the Exclusion Zone, returning a year later to measure how much had decomposed. In places with no radiation, 70-90 percent of the leaf litter had been processed as normal. But, in areas contaminated by the explosion, the process of decomposition seemed to have halted.

To highlight this, one only needs to look at the forest directly surrounding the reactors. All of the trees are dead, after the explosion slowly turning from evergreen to a rust color, earning the woods the name “Red Forest” and clearly exhibiting the lethal effect of radiation. Yet, the trees still stand, 30 years later, essentially untouched by the micro-organisms that render dead vegetation into dirt.

There are a number of consequences involved here, both short- and long-term. The immediate worry is that the build-up of leaf litter and dead wood increases the chance of catastrophic wildfires, and the smoke from these fires would spread radiation into populated areas beyond the Exclusion Zone. The longer term worry is that without decomposers, the nutrients of the Chernobyl ecosystem are no longer being recycled — meaning that this robust recovery of wildlife is founded on borrowed time, like an investment bubble waiting to pop.

[i] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science/

[ii] http://www.livescience.com/52458-wildlife-populations-chernobyl-disaster.html

[iii] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00442-014-2908-8

By Rebecca Turner, American Forests, Senior Director of Programs & Policy

As of today, Donald Trump is officially the 45th president of the United States. And, while we still don’t know exactly how his presidency will impact our forests, the signals he has sent so far raise a great deal of concern.

The new president’s public statements on climate change, fossil fuels, public land use and suggested budget cuts to environmental programs indicate a drastic change in federal environmental policy and practice. Many of these would, undoubtedly, have serious negative consequences for our nation’s forests. While some of his cabinet picks have contradicted his climate change stance, we will have to wait and see which of Trump’s statements will come to fruition.

Regardless of the administration’s actions, our mission and core activities will remain the same. We’ll continue to inspire and advance the conservation of forests. We’ll continue to protect and restore threatened forest ecosystems, promote and expand urban forests and increase understanding of the importance of forests.

Specifically, we will continue to fight:

• to keep forests as forests — protecting them from overdevelopment and fragmentation
• against opening our forests to more drilling for oil and natural gas
• to keep our public lands public — not sold off to private interests
• to ensure green infrastructure is a key part of overall infrastructure spending
• to ensure forests remain part of a climate change solution and protected from the threats exacerbated by climate change

American Forests has remained nonpartisan since our inception, and as a 501(c)3 charity, we do not engage in political activity. However, throughout our 140-plus year history, beginning with the Ulysses S. Grant Administration, we have advocated for policies that keep our forests healthy and thriving, our urban forests and greenspaces increasing, wildlife habitat safe and expanding and for all the benefits our forests provide us. We have worked together with both Republican and Democratic administrations whenever possible and stood up and fought when our forests were at stake. We will continue to do this work and remain vigilant in our efforts to protect and restore our forests.

By Doyle Irvin, American Forests

Jia Haixia and Jia Wenqi have been friends since they were schoolboys together, growing up in the village Yeli, in China’s Heibei province. Their fathers were best friends, too.⁽¹⁾ Wenqi lost both of his arms at the age of three when he touched a power cable, growing up with his disability and doing his best to lead an ordinary life.

“I used to play normally with the other children in the village … I swam with them, I tried to do work with them,” Wenqi said in a short video filmed by the company GoPro.⁽²⁾ 

But, when his friend Haixia became permanently blind in his mid-40s it was much harder for Haixia to adapt to his new life.

“Because he went blind during his prime years, he was filled with despair,” Wenqi said.⁽³⁾

Haixia attests that it was his children that drove him to find a new calling in life.

“My son came home one day and said, ‘Dad, I smelled an orange when another kid was peeling it and it was like I could taste it,’” Haixia said. “I felt sorry for my son, that he couldn’t even eat his own orange. This motivated me to live on. I had to live.”⁽⁴⁾

Wenqi approached Haixia with an idea, and the duo decided to start planting trees.

Haixia admits that “Originally, we planted trees to make money, but now it’s for the environment — to improve air quality.”

The two now attest that environmental motivations are the significant reason for why they continue year after year. Their area of China is populated by a number of quarries, and the dust gets everywhere, decreasing air quality and poisoning local streams.

“We started to notice, the birds were disappearing,” Wenqi said.⁽⁵⁾

Haixia and Wenqi have planted more than 10,000 trees since 2002, completely filling an eight-hectare area, and it has not been easy work. Because money is very tight and they cannot afford nursery-grown saplings, blind Haixia must climb 20 feet up into pre-existing trees, guided by his friend from the ground, cutting branches in order to have clones to plant. Wenqi cantilevers a shovel using his shoulder and his chin, pushing with his foot, to start a hole, and then Haixia follows with a hammer and a stake to create the space for the branch. Wenqi then waters the tree, holding a bucket with his feet.

Their first year working together, they planted 800 trees into the dry ground. Only two survived.

“For normal healthy people, you can achieve [this] by sweating … But for the two of us, handicapped, it takes blood and tears,” Haixia attested.⁽⁶⁾

He was discouraged, after that paltry first year, and wanted to quit.

“But Wenqi was mentally stronger than me. He’s endured hardship his whole life… he said we will lead the water here,” Haixia said.⁽⁷⁾

The people of their village were highly skeptical of their project, when the two began.

“They didn’t believe what we were doing was possible,” Haixia mentioned, “the whole riverbank had been bare for years and there were hardly any trees.”

The two learned from their early mistakes — their 10,000 tree estimate only counts the survivors. Now, 14 years later, the villagers are believers, too, helping the men fix their tools, trim weeds, water trees, even donating to a pension and organizing a surgery to help Haixia hopefully fix his sight. He insists that he will carry on even if he is no longer disabled.

“It doesn’t matter if my eyesight comes back or not, I’m going to continue my work until my last breath,” Haixia said.⁽⁸⁾

Their work is a testament to an enduring sense of responsibility, and the men are proud of their contribution, even if their disabilities means that the work is slow.

“We stand on our own feet,” Wenqi said to one interviewer. “The fruits of our labor taste sweeter. Even though we are gnawing on steam buns, we find peace in our hearts.”⁽⁹⁾

Their story has spread around the world, gathering hundreds of thousands of shares. GoPro helped them record some of their efforts, showing the painstaking effort involved — and catching a couple candid moments, like the two teaming up to read a newspaper, one holding it up and the other reading over his shoulder. Even with their newfound fame, the two continue to plant day after day.

“Let the generation after us, and everyone else, see what two handicap individuals have accomplished,” Wenqi told the camera crew. “Even after we’re gone, they will see that a blind man and an armless man have left them a forest.”⁽¹⁰⁾

Photos and videos of the two are quite charming, and can be found through the links below. We recommend you watch the GoPro video!

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx6hBgNNacE
2. http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-32315809
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx6hBgNNacE
4. http://www.odditycentral.com/news/chinas-eco-heroes-blind-man-and-friend-with-no-arms-plant-10000-trees-in-10-years.html
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx6hBgNNacE
6. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/10000-trees-planted-in-china_us_576b6268e4b09926ce5dcb15
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx6hBgNNacE
8. http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-32315809
9. http://www.odditycentral.com/news/chinas-eco-heroes-blind-man-and-friend-with-no-arms-plant-10000-trees-in-10-years.html
10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx6hBgNNacE