By Ashira Morris for Reasons to be Cheerful.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

When the owners of running store Bull City Running Co. were scoping out a second location in Durham, North Carolina, they set their sights on retail space near the planned Durham Belt Line. Their flagship store already benefits from a spot along the city's American Tobacco Trail.

"We know that it is good for foot traffic, bike traffic, active living," co-owner Kim Chapman says, "which is our target market as a running shop - but it also makes it convenient for local races and for our training groups to go on long runs."

The American Tobacco Trail is just one small stretch of the East Coast Greenway, an evolving network of trails from Calais, Maine down to Key West, Florida. Project leaders at the East Coast Greenway Alliance have been working since 1991 to stitch them together and create new greenways with the goal of establishing a car-free, 3,000-mile route for walking and biking. The Durham Belt Line will add about two more connecting miles to the Greenway's remaining 2,000 miles. Although it's a fraction of the path's full Eastern Seaboard-spanning journey, it will be a critical car-free route for Durham residents on a daily basis.

Greenways can be a simple low-tech solution to complex, intersecting issues. In the face of the climate crisis, transportation remains the top source of emissions for the US. With safe, functional paths, people swap driving for commuting by bike or foot. Greenways also keep people safe from cars. A study of 12 cities found that separated bike lanes were one of the biggest factors in reducing fatalities and injuries for everyone on the road, lowering risk by 44 percent.

Access to trails is also a public health benefit. In Morgantown, West Virginia 60 percent of people surveyed said they exercised more once they started using the city's trails. Greenways also boost economies. A study of North Carolina's shared-use paths found every dollar spent on trail construction generated $1.72 in revenue, while also providing health and transportation benefits.

According to the East Coast Greenway Alliance, there are 50 million bike rides, runs and walks every year along the existing route.

"For business owners, for property owners, for the health of the community, there are so many positives that are going to come from this trail," Chapman says.

Ready for funding

Over the next four years, billions of dollars from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law could flow to bike paths across the country - and the East Coast Greenway Alliance, which works in collaboration with local cities and towns to build trails along their route, is poised to help communities secure those dollars.

The Durham Belt Line was awarded $9 million in federal funding in 2021. The Alliance also helped Charleston, South Carolina secure $18.1 million for a bicycle-pedestrian bridge that will, according to the city's transportation director, make "over 73,000 jobs accessible within a 20-minute radius and [activate] over 12 miles of greenway." Construction is expected to start this year.

One of the primary barriers to completing the full East Coast Greenway track is land acquisition: buying the literal ground the path will cover and moving it into public control. Land is more expensive in high-cost real estate markets, but averaged out over the envisioned route, it takes about $2 million per mile to build a greenway path. It would take an estimated $4 billion to build the remaining 1,900 miles, a single percent of the overall infrastructure funding in the federal package.

"We're trying to help our communities navigate this moment and see the potential," says Dennis Markatos-Soriano, the Alliance's director.

Connecting the path

The paths that have been built along the East Coast Greenway have already transformed many former industrial areas and abandoned railway tracks into community hubs.

The trail along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia's Center City is now "a refuge," as the Alliance's Mid-Atlantic Manager Daniel Paschall puts it. That wasn't always the case. When the Schuylkill River Development Corporation initially envisioned a park along the riverbank, it was isolated by highway traffic and train tracks and choked with trash. The nonprofit started as a group of neighbors and has since worked with the Alliance to secure funding and continue to connect segments of the path.

Joe Syrnick has been the president and CEO of the Corporation for nearly 20 years, but when the trail was initially built, he was the chief engineer and surveyor with the city's Streets Department, designing and overseeing its construction.

"People were yearning for open space," he says. "Once the trail was under construction, literally the next day people were out running around the bulldozers. It didn't take long to figure out this was going to be successful."

By bringing people closer to the river, the completed portions of the route have also brought attention to cleaning up along the waterway. The Corporation coordinates regular trash pick ups, and they've been a part of bigger systemic changes, like restoring habitat along the riverbanks with native plants and trees.

"It's seeding a long-term effort to help rebalance everything," Paschall said. "Obviously it doesn't happen overnight, but that's the kind of thing happening up the Delaware River and along the East Coast Greenway."

He's seen similar transformations unfolding along waterfront trails in Wilmington, Delaware, and Trenton and Camden, New Jersey. According to a 2019 analysis of the impact of the Greenway in the Delaware River Watershed, the environmental benefits in the region add up to $39 million. The analysis takes into account factors like the carbon sequestration and air pollution removal provided by plants along the greenway.

Philadelphia has seen economic growth along the path, too. Syrnick cites commercial and residential building developers that chose their location because of the river trail. A recent bridge was built from the children's hospital to the trail so employees can take a break in green space.

Such development can have a negative side effect. Absent intentional planning, greenways increasing nearby property values in the US has led to displacement of longtime residents. That unwanted outcome is top of mind at the Alliance, says Markatos-Soriano, who believes that scale is one way to address that concern.

"If it's something that people love and it's rare, the price is gonna go way up," Markatos-Soriano said. "We want to flood the market. We want more greenways for all."

An inclusionary trail planning toolkit by the Alliance team and the Pennsylvania Environmental Council outlines best practices for centering community needs, including maintaining affordable housing along trails.

And though Chapman is a business owner who stands to benefit from the Greenway, the path is not only about the bottom line. She's excited for the ways the trail will enable exercise, both for her own family and for the run clubs that Bull City Running leads, and generally improve quality of life for the city's residents.

"With all the growth in downtown Durham in the last 10 years, one of the things I feel hasn't been given enough attention is enough green space," Chapman says. "People stop off the trail for a drink of water, to use the bathroom, to borrow an air pump for tires, to pick up a snack for the rest of their ride. Even if it's not directly a business transaction, we have always tried to create a community space as much as a business space."


Ashira Morris wrote this article for Reasons to be Cheerful.


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A new study raised red flags about respiratory health in Pennsylvania, particularly for those living near oil and gas activity.

The study by GeoHealth said nationwide, oil and gas venting and flaring exacerbate asthma in 73,000 children, including nearly 12,000 in Pennsylvania.

Jackson Zeiler, public health analyst for the Environmental Health Project, said energy developers do flaring and venting on a regular basis to remove excess gas. He explained the study looked at the potential health risks associated with the practice.

"There's adverse birth outcomes, there's cancer outcomes," Zeiler pointed out. "Volatile Organic Compounds are a big part of these emissions, which have a whole host of health effects, including respiratory health issues, different neurological effects like headaches and dizziness for people who are working in those facilities, and people who live really close by."

Zeiler noted flaring also contributes to an increased risk of hospitalizations, emergency room visits, worsening asthma and even premature death. But the energy industry said flaring is needed to minimize pressure at well sites, for testing and other reasons.

The study used satellite images and gas-imaging techniques to visualize emissions. Zeiler added companies are required to report their emissions to regulatory authorities and the data is compiled into a National Emissions Inventory through various sensors.

"They looked at the National Emissions Inventory numbers and compared it to the actual imaging that they looked at," Zeiler emphasized. "They found that the imaging saw way more emissions than was accounted for in the National Emissions Inventory. They're able to conclude that companies are underreporting, essentially, what they're flaring and what they're emitting."

He suggested Pennsylvanians could work with lawmakers on stricter reporting guidelines and transparency requirements for oil and gas operators. He also recommended advocating for greater setback distances between well sites and residential areas to minimize exposure.


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Balancing the needs of the many with those who have traditionally reaped benefits from public lands is behind a new rule issued Thursday by the Bureau of Land Management.

A quarter-million acres of public lands, including 13 million in New Mexico, now fall under the Public Lands Rule. The BLM is charged with managing multiple uses but has historically prioritized extraction, such as oil and gas drilling, along with cattle grazing, over conservation and outdoor recreation.

Jesse Duebel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, believes the new rule is more fair-minded.

"I really feel like this new rule doesn't minimize those other things," Duebel asserted. "The other uses are still going to be allowed to continue but now, decisions are going to be made with conservation in the forefront. And of course, conservation by definition, is the 'wise use' of our natural resources."

The rule requires BLM managers to prioritize designating more "Areas of Critical Environmental Concern" in their land use planning. Right now the number is small, but they help protect cultural sites and wildlife habitat.

The rule also allows BLM managers to issue conservation leases to nonprofit and community organizations, including tribal communities, for landscape restoration work on public lands.

Keegan King, executive director of the Native Land Institute, believes in the face of climate change, the long-term health of public lands must be a priority.

"I'm a conservationist but I'm also a hunter, and it's important that we protect these places for a variety of different uses," King explained. "There are ranchers and other people that utilize federal lands and it's important that all of it is maintained for future generations."

According to the Commerce Department's 2022 Bureau of Economic Analysis data, outdoor recreation generated $2.4 billion in added value for New Mexico and created almost 28,000 jobs.

During the BLM's public process on the issue, more than 90% of comments were in favor of elevating conservation for a more balanced approach to public land management.

Support for this reporting was provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts.


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By Max Graham for Grist.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Arizona News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Below the red-tile roofs of the Catalina Foothills, an affluent area on the north end of Tucson, Arizona, lies a blanket of desert green: spiky cacti, sword-shaped yucca leaves, and the spindly limbs of palo verde and mesquite trees. Head south into the city, and the vegetation thins. Trees are especially scarce on the south side of town, where shops and schools and housing complexes sprawl across a land encrusted in concrete. 

On hot summer days, you don’t just see but feel the difference. Tucson’s shadeless neighborhoods, which are predominantly low-income and Latino, soak up the heat. They swelter at summer temperatures that eclipse the city average by 8 degrees Fahrenheit and the Catalina Foothills by 12 degrees. That disparity can be deadly in a city that experienced 40 straight days above 100 degrees last year — heat that’s sure to get worse with climate change. 

The good news is there’s a simple way to cool things down: Plant trees. “You’re easily 10 degrees cooler stepping under the shade of a tree,” said Brad Lancaster, an urban forester in Tucson. “It’s dramatically cooler.”

A movement is underway to populate the city’s street corners and vacant lots with groves of trees. Tucson’s city government, which has pledged to plant 1 million trees by 2030, recently got $5 million from the Biden administration to spur the effort — a portion of the $1 billion that the U.S. Forest Service committed last fall to urban and small-scale forestry projects across the United States, aiming to make communities more resilient to climate change and extreme heat. 

But in Tucson and many other cities, tree-planting initiatives can tackle a lot more than scorching temperatures. What if Tucson’s million new trees — and the rest of the country’s — didn’t just keep sidewalks cool? What if they helped feed people, too?

That’s what Brandon Merchant hopes will happen on the shadeless south side of Tucson, a city where about one-fifth of the population lives more than a mile from a grocery store. He’s working on a project to plant velvet mesquite trees that thrive in the dry Sonoran Desert and have been used for centuries as a food source. The mesquite trees’ seed pods can be ground into a sweet, protein-rich flour used to make bread, cookies, and pancakes. Merchant, who works at the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, sees cultivating mesquite around the city and surrounding areas as an opportunity to ease both heat and hunger. The outcome could be a network of “food forests,” community spaces where volunteers tend fruit trees and other edible plants for neighbors to forage. 

“Thinking about the root causes of hunger and the root causes of health issues, there are all these things that tie together: lack of green spaces, lack of biodiversity,” Merchant said. (The food bank received half a million dollars from the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act.)

Merchant’s initiative fits into a national trend of combining forestry — and Forest Service funding — with efforts to feed people. Volunteers, school teachers, and urban farmers in cities across the country are planting fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and other edible plants in public spaces to create shade, provide access to green space, and supply neighbors with free and healthy food. These food forests, forest gardens, and edible parks have sprouted up at churches, schools, empty lots, and street corners in numerous cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Seattle, and Miami. 

“It’s definitely growing in popularity,” said Cara Rockwell, who researches agroforestry and sustainable food systems at Florida International University. “Food security is one of the huge benefits.” 

There are also numerous environmental benefits: Trees improve air quality, suck carbon from the atmosphere, and create habitat for wildlife, said Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh, an urban forestry expert at James Madison University in Virginia. “I think food forests are gaining popularity alongside other urban green space efforts, community gardens, green rooftops,” she added. “All of those efforts, I think, are moving us in a positive direction.”

Researchers say food forests are unlikely to produce enough food to feed everyone in need of it. But Schmitt-Harsh said they could help supplement diets, especially in neighborhoods that are far from grocery stores. “A lot has to go into the planning of where the food forest is, when the fruits are harvestable, and whether the harvestable fruits are equitably distributed.”

She pointed to the Philadelphia Orchard Project as an emblem of success. That nonprofit has partnered with schools, churches, public recreation centers, and urban farms to oversee some 68 community orchards across the city. Their network of orchards and food forests generated more than 11,000 pounds of fresh produce last year, according to Phil Forsyth, co-executive director of the nonprofit.

Some of the sites in Philadelphia have only three or four trees. Others have over 100, said Kim Jordan, the organization’s other executive director. “We’re doing a variety of fruit and nut trees, berry bushes and vines, pollinator plants, ground cover, perennial vegetables — a whole range of things,” Jordan said. 

The community food bank in Tucson started its project in 2021, when it bought six shade huts to shelter saplings. Each hut can house dozens of baby trees, which are grown in bags and irrigated until they become sturdy enough to be planted in the ground. Over the past three years, Merchant has partnered with a high school, a community farm, and the Tohono O’odham tribal nation to nurse, plant, and maintain the trees. So far they’ve only put a few dozen saplings in the ground, and Merchant aims to ramp up efforts with a few hundred more plantings this year. His initial goal, which he described as “lofty and ambitious,” is to plant 20,000 trees by 2030.

The food bank is also organizing workshops on growing, pruning, and harvesting, as well as courses on cooking with mesquite flour. And they’ve hosted community events, where people bring seed pods to pound into flour — a process that requires a big hammer mill that isn’t easy to use on your own, Merchant said. Those events feature a mesquite-pancake cook-off, using the fresh flour.

Merchant is drawing on a model of tree-planting that Lancaster, the urban forester, has been pioneering for 30 years in a downtown neighborhood called Dunbar Spring. That area was once as barren as much of southern Tucson, but a group of volunteers led by Lancaster — who started planting velvet mesquite and other native trees in 1996 — has built up an impressive canopy. Over three decades, neighborhood foresters have transformed Dunbar Spring’s bald curbsides into lush forests of mesquite, hackberry, cholla and prickly pear cactus, and more — all plants that have edible parts.

“There are over 400 native food plants in the Sonoran Desert, so we tapped into that,” Lancaster said. “That’s what we focused our planting on.” 

The Dunbar Spring food forest is now what Lancaster calls a “living pantry.” He told Grist that up to a quarter of the food he eats — and half of what he feeds his Nigerian dwarf goats — is harvested from plants in the neighborhood’s forest. “Those percentages could be much more if I were putting more time into the harvests.” The more than 1,700 trees and shrubs planted by Lancaster’s group have also stored a ton of water — a precious commodity in the Sonoran Desert — by slurping up an estimated 1 million gallons of rainwater that otherwise would have flowed off the pavement into storm drains.

Another well-established food forest skirts the Old West Church in Boston, where volunteers have spent a decade transforming a city lawn into a grove of apple, pear, and cherry trees hovering over vegetable, pollinator, and herb gardens. Their produce — ranging from tomatoes and eggplants to winter melons — gets donated to Women’s Lunch Place, a local shelter for women without permanent housing, according to Karen Spiller, a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of New Hampshire and a member of Old West Church who helps with the project. 

“It’s open for harvest at any time,” Spiller said. “It’s not, ‘Leave a dollar, and pick an apple.’ You can pick your apple, and eat your apple.”

Merchant wants to apply the same ethic in Tucson: mesquite pods for all to pick — and free pancakes after a day staying cool in the shade.


Max Graham wrote this article for Grist.


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