Healing hurting lands.

AMERICAN FORESTS is demonstrating that planting trees with loving care can turn a worthless patch of scrub into a valuable Heritage Forest.

What do you do with weed-covered landfills, abandoned strip mines, streambanks denuded by overgrazing, timberlands planted with the wrong trees, lowlands drained for growing crops? Do you just neglect these damaged lands because they are devoid of economic or aesthetic value? Not any more.

In 1990 AMERICAN FORESTS decided to adopt as many acres of these lands as possible and show that they can be restored as viable, valuable ecosystems. The result is an innovative reforestation program for public lands called Heritage Forests, a part of AMERICAN FORESTS' Global ReLeaf campaign. The sites selected to be Heritage Forests are ones for which public funds for reforestation are unavailable. AMERICAN FORESTS provides these lands a second chance by means of private funding donated by individuals, foundations, and businesses. In its first year, the program started small with a pilot project of 100 acres in Michigan involving habitat of the endangered Kirtland's warbler. A mere two years later, the Heritage Forests' millionth tree was in the ground. One hundred to one million is not exponential growth. It's more like warp speed.

But listen to 1994's agenda. Enough projects are in the works this year to double what's been done to date. That means a total of 58 reforestation projects on 5,000 acres in 30 states completed by the end of this year, resulting in over $2 million worth of work on the ground. This is equivalent to restoring an area four miles long by two miles wide.

People like to plant trees. That is one reason for the program's success. But Heritage Forests go beyond the Johnny Appleseed urge because they also satisfy the human need to heal the earth. Each Heritage Forest includes a carefully planned strategy for restoring a productive ecosystem.

These lands can be tough places to heal. Reforesting a landfill or a strip mine takes expertise, and that's where the tree-planting partners come in. The local, state, or federal agency that manages the selected site does the planning, oversees the planting, and provides long-term care and management.

Take, for example, the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona, where the first stage of a 2,000-acre Heritage Forests will be established this year in cooperation with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Research by a BLM wildlife biologist, Mark Fredlake, turned up descriptions written by pioneers and aerial photographs taken in 1935 that provide clues to the kinds of vegetation that existed along the riverbanks before they were overgrazed.

One outcome is that Fredlake has his work cut out for him. He'll oversee the planting of a mix of tree species to restore the original riparian (streamside) habitat: mesquites, which produce beans that are highly valued as wildlife forage; Arizona black walnut, favored by ground and rock squirrels; and desert willow, whose large, showy, purple blossoms attract hummingbirds. The desert is a harsh place to plant trees, and Fredlake is turning to solar technology to ensure the seedlings' survival. The idea is for a submersible pump powered by solar cells to fill a water tank, from which gravity-fed pipes provide drip irrigation to each seedling during its first two critical years. The San Pedro project illustrates the central credo of Global ReLeaf: The right tree is planted at the right place at the right time in the right way.

Another reason for the success of Heritage Forests is that good ecology is also good economics. The aesthetic value of a forest compared to that of a strip mine is obvious. What is less evident is that the beauty of a forest has economic value. The San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area is a major drawing card in a budding local ecotourism industry that attracts people interested in desert ecology.

"It's hard to quantify," says Fredlake, "but we know there's a relationship between habitat quality and the number of visitors, and that translates into dollars spent in nearby communities."

Restoring riparian ecosystems produces wildlife habitat, and that also has economic value. San Pedro draws birdwatchers seeking the green kingfisher and the gray hawk, an endangered raptor. The conservation area has 18 nesting pairs. Restoring wildlife habitat has also made good economic sense in eastern Ohio, where recreational opportunities for horseback riders and hunters were increased by reforesting strip-mined land. In Harrison State Forest, 161 acres were planted in 1993 with 97,000 tulip poplar, green ash, red oak, white ash, sweet gum, black locust, and sycamore. A bridal path runs through the new hardwood forest.

State and federal laws required the company that owned the mineral rights to preserve the topsoil, restore the original rolling slopes after mining, and then plant grasses. The grass cover stabilizes the soil, but trees do an even better job.

Dennis Cable, district forest manager with the Ohio Division of Forestry, is proud that the project demonstrates that strip-mined land can be successfully reforested despite soil compaction caused by the heavy earth movers used to restore the contours.

Ohio's next Heritage Forest will be in Perry State Forest, where a 72-acre strip-mined area will be reforested with 65,000 Virginia pine. The major benefit will be watershed protection for a reservoir that supplies drinking water to nearby New Lexington. The trees will lessen the runoff from raindrops hitting the highly acidic soil--a legacy of strip mining--and thus will improve the quality of the town's water.

A project in Florida's panhandle region demonstrates another economic benefit,--restoring timberland. Reforestation in Blackwater River State Forest is part of a massive effort to bring back a Southeast ecosystem in serious decline--longleaf pine--and its associated rare species, the red-cockaded woodpecker. The three-stage Florida project--219,000 longleaf pine seedlings planted on 302 acres in 1992, 87,000 on 113 acres in 1993, and 218,000 on 300 acres this year--is restoring timberland as well as producing wildlife and recreational benefits.

"In the early 1950s," John O'Meara of the Florida Division of Forestry explains, "reaserch on how to increase cellulose production on sandy land showed that slash pine would do better than longleaf, so a lot of land was converted. But on marginal sites, the slash pine essentially stopped growing after about six years. So a forestry mistake happened because the experimental data weren't extended out long enough."

The Florida panhandle is a rural area, and contracts for site preparation and the planting of nearly a half-million seedlings had an immediate economic impact. Improvement thinnings will add long-term dollar benefits as well, although O'Meara points out that timber sales "will not cut anywhere near the growth, so the outcome will be an old-growth longleaf forest."

Occasionally, a Heritage Forest is planted on private land if it is open to the public. Property owned by the YMCA in Arizona, for example, was restored with cottonwoods and willows.

A similar case involves a bottomland hardwood ecosystem in Arkansas that was originally purchased by The Nature Conservancy but then turned over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The land is part of the Mississippi River delta system that the 49 nations of the Ramsar Convention recognized as "Wetlands of International Importance."

The Nature Conservancy's ambitious goal is to create "The Big Woods," a wildlife corridor of unfragmented forest along the Mississippi and its tributaries. Included will be 520 acres of Bayou DeView land that was drained and cleared in the 1960s for growing soybeans. The Conservancy has already reforested 40 acres but will partner with AMERICAN FORESTS to replant the remaining acres as a Heritage Forest.

This project illustrates another kind of economic benefit. Mike Culotta, of the Conservancy's Arkansas field office, explains: "By purchasing the farm's marginal cropland, the Conservancy increased the percentage of productive land on the remainder of the farm and thus its per-acre value."

In this instance, the trees that are planted will never be harvested. But, Culotta adds, the concept of increasing the economic value of productive farmland is no less valid.

As for the purchased land--the new Heritage Forest--the economic benefits will result from soil stabilization, improved wildlife habitat, increased recreational opportunities, improved water quality, and--as with all wetlands--flood control.

This Heritage Forest, like the others, is demonstrating a promising way to address the jobs-versus-the-environment dilemma.

Bill Tikkala, administrator of the Heritage Forests program, hopes that all 50 states will have Heritage Forests before long. But a larger hope is that these forests will serve as demonstration projects that will inspire others to apply the program's information and technology on other appropriate sites. By thus leveraging the admittedly limited dollars available from AMERICAN FORESTS, the economic impacts of reforesting damaged lands will expand exponentially.

"In the long run," says AMERICAN FORESTS' Executive Vice President Neil Sampson, "there is no economy without a sustainable ecology." That pretty well sums up the idea behind Heritage Forests.

Norah Davis, former managing editor of American Forests, writes on natural-resource issues from her home in Washington, DC.