Heritage Forests: healing the earth with trees - tree planting program by American Forests

American Forests, Nov-Dec, 1992 by Bill Tikkala, Michelle Robbins

Approaching the million-tree mark, this growing program is bringing new life to damaged lands and convincing people young and old that they can make a difference.

It is but a small seedling nestled among hundreds of other seedlings in an area once considered unlikely for rebirth as forest. Patted into place by hands representing thousands of other hands, the young tree is a testament to a growing concern: healing the earth. As it grows, so too grow the hopes of citizens young and old who say we must leave the land a little better for those who come after us.

The faces behind AMERICAN FORESTS' Heritage Forests program are as varied as its trees and the locales it's regreening: a Kentucky couple requesting plantings in lieu of wedding gifts, a grief-stricken woman remembering a friend who had lost a baby, hundreds of volunteers planting ponderosa pine and bareroot chokecherry on fire-ravaged national-forest land in Colorado.

AMERICAN FORESTS created Heritage Forests in 1990 as a rural component to its Global ReLeaf program. Global ReLeaf is an international public education and action campaign to make people aware of ways they can help mitigate the causes of global environmental problems. Heritage Forests provides the link between private donors and public lands needing restoration.

The goal of the program is to heal damaged ecosystems, and to that end it considers only proposals for repairing "orphan lands" that are accessible to the public. These areas, described by professionals as "tough," are ones that are not scheduled for any kind of government improvement. Without help, they likely would remain barren or damaged for some time to come.

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of potential sites. Man's abuse and misuse of the land have resulted in numerous potential projects that meet the criteria for a Heritage Forest planting. In the quest for food and fiber, man has cut down, cultivated, manipulated, and often abandoned thousands of acres of forested lands, even land with only marginal potential for those uses. And forest fires, insects, and drought continue to wreak havoc from coast to coast.

When Hurricane Hugo swept through South Carolina in 1989, it destroyed thousands of trees and years of intensive forest cultural practices on the Francis Marion National Forest. It decimated seed orchards, which help provide for the next generation of genetically improved seedlings, and severely set back the nation's second largest population of the rare red-cockaded woodpecker. A Global ReLeaf Heritage Forests grant allowed forest officials to plant 125,000 longleaf pine seedlings. That, in turn, allowed the National Forest to help re-establish the longleaf pine-wiregrass ecosystem that has experienced a severe decline in acreage along its native East Coast habitat.

In Arizona, 90 percent of the presettlement riparian areas have been lost to development. A Heritage Forest project near Mayer will begin to restore one of North America's most endangered forest communities: the cottonwood/willow riparian gallery forest. Andy Sudbrock, manager of the Agua Fria Restoration Project on YMCA's Chauncey Ranch, says his work at the Heritage Forest site is healthy not only for the land but for himself as well. It's satisfying to put back some of the components of a natural forest community and to see that community reestablished, he said. Sudbrock is working to protect and restore a portion of the cottonwood/willow community, and in the process to preserve wildlife habitat and provide opportunities for environmental education and volunteer participation.

The Heritage Forests grant for the Chauncey Ranch work supplemented money donated by students at Arizona's Prescott College. Sudbrock, who graduated from Prescott last December, gave a presentation to students last fall on the site and on riparian forests in general.

Afterward, the Student Union voted to spend part of that year's budget to get the project started. They decided "they would rather give $2,000 to start a restoration project that they could be involved in and would last....than just blow the money on a band and a dance, a one-time shot," Sudbrock said. Since then, the Student Union has funded several other conservation projects.

A testament to the emotions that the idea of Heritage Forests stir is the fact that the three-year-old program expects to plant its millionth tree in 1993.

Equally remarkable are the geographic spread, the variety of local partnerships involved, the diversity of species being planted, the variety of purposes for the projects, and the sources of cost-sharing funds for those Heritage Forests already established or in some stage of development.

"It's real positive all the way around," said Lisa Harrison, mail-order manager for Cooking Light magazine. Cooking Light this year planted trees on behalf of 29 advertisers in its catalog section. Although she describes their efforts as "a drop in the bucket," she says the idea has pleased both advertisers and readers of the healthy lifestyles magazine.