nature benefits Archives - Page 2 of 3

The FWP weekly digest of wondrous wildlife happenings
and other interesting items from the natural world

Creatures to meet | Things to learn
Things to do

Lisa S. French

The Big Benefits of the Big Love of Bison

1.5-minute read

Do you have a favorite nature spot where you go to feel all of the good feelings—joy, hope, optimism, comfort? Whether your outdoor sanctuary is a lofty mountain peak, a pristine stretch of beach, an enchanted forest, or a wide-open prairie, connecting to nature is broadly acknowledged to improve human well-being. Interestingly, the mood-enhancing benefits of time spent in nature also benefit nature. How so? Well, according to biologists at Colorado State University, the positive emotions that we associate with a specific soul-soothing place on the planet also aid conservation by increasing our inclination to keep the great out there intact. And what is one of the best ways to amplify emotional connections to a particular landscape? Add wildlife.

To better understand what motivates people to care about preserving the natural world, researchers set out to determine if the reintroduction of bison to the Colorado prairie after a 150-year absence would increase visitor attachment to the North American grasslands—one of the most threatened ecosystems in the world. In the 18th century, bison, the largest mammals in North America, roamed grasslands in the tens of millions. By 1889, only 541 remained. Thanks to ongoing restoration efforts, today, there are around 20,000 of the hefty grazers in parks and reserves in the United States and Canada.

So do these iconic animals have a role to play in connecting people to nature and conservation? How do humans feel about bison, anyway? As it turns out, pretty darn good! Surveying visitors to the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area in Fort Collins, Colorado, before and two years after the reintroduction of a herd of bison, researchers measured a significant increase in how attached people felt to the conservation area. Soapstone Prairie visitors felt more at home, wanted to visit the area more and a resounding 95% felt that it was more important to protect the space after the high plains drifters returned to their historical home on the range. Bringing back bison had an immediate positive impact on people feeling a connection to conservation. We want to protect what we love, and if the experience of visitors to Soapstone is anything to go by, to know bison is to love them. And that’s good news for the preservation of our grasslands and native wildlife.

If you’d like to experience those big bison feelings for yourself, and you’re up for a winter road trip, you can find a list of all of the places they roam here.

And if you’d like to learn more about ongoing bison restoration projects across the rolling plains, visit American Prairie.

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Lisa S. French December 3, 2021

Back in Black—and Orange: California Monarchs

1-minute read

If you’re in need of some good news this week, we’re happy to oblige with a hopeful update from the Pacific Grove monarch butterfly sanctuary in Northern California. Since the 1980s, the number of monarchs west of the Rockies has dropped by an alarming 99%. In 2019, as reported by the Washington Post, there were zero sightings at the sanctuary. Zero. This year, observers counted 2,500 monarchs in the pollinator’s Pacific Grove migratory rest stop. That’s good news, indeed!

While the 2021 sightings aren’t a guarantee of more monarchs to come, taking action to make the planet more hospitable for butterflies by increasing pollinator habitat, reducing pesticide use, and combating climate change will improve the odds of long-term recovery. If you’d like to help ensure that monarch butterflies east or west are back to stay, here are some make-it-better organizations offering handy tools to enable you to lend a hand with monitoring and mapping the migration of the winged beauties across the United States:

And if you’d like to attract monarchs as well as other pollinators to your personal patch, we’re firm believers in the plant-it-and-they-will-come paradigm. You can find useful info on how to garden to increase biodiversity by cultivating habitats in your backyard, front yard, side yard, or window box here. Because whatever else is going on in the world, and something’s always going on, it’s better with butterflies. Just ask our in-house butterfly gardeners, Frankie and Peaches.

To encourage budding young pollinator gardeners in your school or neighborhood, you can order milkweed seeds from Save Our Monarchs to hand out as a special butterfly-saving treat this spooky season and year-round. Wishing you a happily hair-raising Halloween!

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Lisa S. French October 23, 2021

What on Earth is Tree Equity?

1.5-minute read

When we first heard the term tree equity, we wondered—what could it mean? Trees getting their fair share? Trees getting what they have coming to them? As it turns out, tree equity isn’t about what trees get; it’s about what they give and how they’re distributed. Trees are often sparse in socioeconomically disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Achieving tree equity ensures that every community has enough trees to attain the highest level of life-enhancing health and climate benefits.

To make a case for urban forestry investment in areas with the greatest need, our planting partners at American Forests have developed the Tree Equity Score Project, enabling cities and towns of at least 50,000 people to calculate whether enough trees have been planted to positively impact all of their residents. This spring, American Forests will deliver Tree Equity Scores to all 486 Census-defined urbanized areas in the country—home to 70% of the U.S. population.

Mapping tree cover is the first step in addressing harmful environmental inequities and climate change-induced problems that affect everyone, but especially the most vulnerable. Planting trees to achieve neighborhood by neighborhood green equity helps create healthier, safer, more climate-resilient communities by:

Improving air and water quality
Lowering temperatures
Reducing heat related illness
Improving mental health
Enhancing cognitive function
Reducing stress
Reducing energy use
Reducing flooding
Increasing biodiversity
Increasing carbon storage

So far, American Forests has created pilot Tree Equity Scores for Rhode Island, Phoenix and Tucson, AZ, Detroit, MI, Houston, TX, Puget Sound, WA, San Francisco Bay, CA, and Miami, FL. You can find out how these urban areas stack up tree-wise at TreeEquityScore. We’ll keep you posted on new scores as they roll out. In the meantime, you can learn more about American Forests’ plan to maximize the health and climate benefits of urban tree planting to ensure everyone gets their fair share of nature from Vibrant Cities Lab.

Btw, it’s officially Earth Week! Exciting! You can find educational resources and activities to help teach K-12 students to nurture nature at WideOpenSchool. And from April 20-22, you can follow Restore Our Earth™ events at EarthDay. See you there!

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Lisa S. French April 19, 2021

Earth Month: One Nation Under Trees

2-minute read

If you’re a friend of Favorite World Press, you know that we’re tree people. We love trees for their beauty and solidity, their music, and their majesty. We love looking at them and listening to them, and most of all, we love planting them so that everyone can benefit from their leafy, green goodness. That’s why we have partnered with American Forests to plant one wildlands tree for every print or electronic book that we sell from our K-4 series Frankie and Peaches: Tales of Total Kindness. We’re investing in the future health of our planet by planting trees on behalf of our young readers—trees that will grow with them and for them.

As we celebrate Earth Month at Wild & Wondrous, we’re thinking about forests and how they bring us together—one nation under trees. Restoring our forests by planting trees helps us all by providing jobs, cleaning our air and water, and nourishing our bodies and minds. Plus, forest restoration is one of the most effective natural ways to combat climate change. Trees help to cool our warming planet by capturing 15% of U.S. carbon emissions. Forests and trees also provide critical food and shelter for wildlife. Vulnerable keystone tree species like the whitebark pine, found across the western U.S. and Canada, are essential to the health of biodiverse high-elevation ecosystems. Supporting American Forests helps to ensure that we can save our summits by protecting the struggling whitebark pine and all the creatures that depend on it for survival.

You can learn more about projects underway and plans in the works to reforest the U.S. from our planting partners. And you can explore American Forests’ participation in the World Economic Forum initiative to increase the number of trees on the planet and prevent the loss of trees that are already in the ground at the Trillion Trees Campaign. The global campaign brings together a like-minded community of people, governments, non-profit organizations, and corporations committed to stopping deforestation and forest degradation. As co-managers of the U.S. chapter of 1t.org, American Forests has pledged to plant 100 million trees in large forested landscapes and 1.2 million trees in cities.

Favorite World Press is proud to contribute to the growing movement to create healthy and resilient forests. We have planted thousands of trees thanks to thoughtful readers like you—we are so grateful for your ongoing support. And for new friends of FWP (well, hello there!), this Earth Month, we hope that you’ll consider branching out and joining us in our mission—one nation under trees for people, for wildlife, for the planet.

Photo credit: Timothy G. Lumley, Bugling Elk, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.

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Lisa S. French April 9, 2021

Backyard Biodiversity: Making Your Yard a Home

2.5-minute read

In the race to protect and restore the rapidly dwindling natural world, we humans occupy the space between hope and healing, and we have the power to make that space both beautiful and life-sustaining. If you are an aspiring citizen conservationist motivated to show our home planet a little love in honor of Earth Month, you may be surprised (and excited!) to learn that one of the most impactful contributions that you can make to support nature is to turn your backyard into a haven for wildlife. By tending to your outdoor patch in a way that increases native species, contributing to both biodiversity and your local green infrastructure, you can help to shape healthy, stable ecosystems that support all living beings.

The good news is you don’t need to be an expert in horticulture or wildlife biology to nurture nature and become a champion for green connectivity—the linking of natural areas so that animals can safely move from one place to another. Wherever you are, city or suburb, and whatever the size of your outdoor space, you can create habitat stepping stones for birds, pollinators, and other wild ones. It all comes down to what you grow because what you grow determines which species can live on your patch. By learning which native plants are the best choices to support wildlife, you can help prevent the loss of precious flora and fauna and the resulting disruption of ecosystems. Over the last 50 years, biological diversity has diminished by 68% globally, and 1,000,000 species are currently at risk of extinction. Now, more than ever, it’s all green thumbs on deck.

To guide the transformation of your backyard, patio, or terrace garden into a wildlife-supporting habitat, we’ve pulled together some useful resources to get you growing in April:

Nature’s Best Hope/Douglas W. Tallamy: A New York Times Bestseller, Nature’s Best Hope offers engaging, expert insight into the need for and benefits of backyard conservation, the specialized relationship between plants and animals, as well as an easy-to-follow blueprint for choosing plants that increase biodiversity. It also features helpful FAQs such as why Monarch caterpillars only eat milkweed and why you should care that birds are disappearing—for the bird-indifferent.

The Wildlife Gardener/Kate Bradbury: This photo-filled gardening guide details step-by-step projects to help you bring nature home.

National Wildlife Federation Native Plant Finder: Just enter your North American zip code into this handy tool to find out which plants host the highest number of butterflies, moths, and birds in the place where you live.

National Wildlife Federation Certified Wildlife Habitat Program: If you’ve decided to go all-in, you can have your garden officially certified as a habitat for wildlife. Fill out this application to let NWF know about your sustainable practices and how you provide food, water, cover, and places to raise young.

Audubon Native Plant Finder: The National Audubon Society offers another excellent location-specific planting tool. Enter your zip code into the Native Plant Finder to receive an emailed list of the best plants for your local birds, get tips on how to create a bird-friendly habitat, and track your contribution to Audubon’s goal of planting 1 million native plants for feathered friends.

Monarch Watch: A non-profit conservation, education and research organization dedicated to the preservation of the Monarch butterfly, Monarch Watch offers free milkweed plants to create a Monarch waystation, as well as tips on how to grow milkweed and monitor caterpillar growth.

Prairie Moon Nursery: This is one of our favorite native plant nurseries and the largest in the United States. With over 700 plants in stock, if you need it, they probably have it, including keystone plants like asters, milkweed, goldenrod, and sunflowers to get you started. And they are staffed by lovely, knowledgeable people to boot!

We hope that you’re feeling at least a bit inspired to dig in and explore ways that you can participate in the backyard biodiversity movement. By pitching in to nurture rather than diminish nature, we can help keep the planet that we depend on for survival functioning in top form, and that’s a wonderful and necessary thing. Grow native and they will come!

Happy gardening! Wishing every bunny a peaceful holiday!

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Lisa S. French April 1, 2021

A Trillion Trees! A Trillion Trees!

1-minute read

Good news alert!

In the midst of converging global challenges-COVID-19, climate change, biodiversity loss, and economic upheaval, there is a light at the end of the tunnel—and it’s green!

Our planting partners at American Forests have teamed up with the World Economic Forum to launch the U.S. Chapter of 1t.org. The goal of the collaboration is to conserve, restore and grow one trillion trees by 2030, creating millions of jobs to help ensure equitable environmental progress towards a green recovery.

This hopeful news for people and the planet also means cleaner air and water, more action on climate change, greater tree equity for our cities, and expanded habitat for the wild ones. What’s not to like?

American Forests and 26 diverse organizations have collectively pledged 855 million trees so far, as well as investments in mapping technologies and carbon finance. Planted across the United States from sea to shining sea, those 855 million trees will store more than 500 million tons of carbon dioxide. In case you’re wondering, that’s equal to the annual emissions from 108 million cars. Bring on the lovely, leafy sky vacuums.

FWP is delighted to contribute to this big tree-planting effort in our small press way, and if you’re feeling it, you can help too. Every time you buy a print or e-book from the Frankie and Peaches: Tales of Total Kindness series, we’ll thank you very much by planting one wildlands tree. If you’d really like to dig in and participate in the global greening movement, you can volunteer and share ideas through the 1t.org digital platform UpLink. We’re all in. Hope to see you there!

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Lisa S. French August 27, 2020

To Bee or RoboBee

3-minute read

Sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them. — Carol Ann Duffy

Keep your eyes peeled, autonomous robotic bees may be coming to crop-fields near you. Measuring about half the length of a paper clip and weighing in at less than one-tenth of a gram, the insect-inspired microbots were developed by scientists at Wyss Institute to replace rapidly dwindling populations of bees, the world’s natural food crop pollinators.

While a global fleet of Robobees may sound pretty cool from a tech-wow perspective, when it comes to substituting pollinating machines for the real deal, researchers at the Centre for Agri-Environmental Research and Institute of Bee Health say not so fast. Before we roll out tiny red carpets to welcome substitute bees to the planet, according to an analysis published in Science of the Total Environment, we should consider a simpler, more holistic solution—protecting our natural pollinators and the landscapes they depend on for survival.

In the debate around bees versus Robobees, it turns out that replacing live bees with pollinating machines is not that straightforward. Bees have been honing their sophisticated sensory abilities and specialized pollination skills for over 130 million years in response to the unique shapes, scents, and colors of hundreds of thousands of flowering plants. While microbots may be capable of pollinating easy-access plants like sunflowers, the innate expertise of bees is hard to replicate across diverse crop species.

Not only are bees adaptable and super-skilled at their jobs, they also work for free, contributing between $235 to $577 billion to annual global food production. In contrast, robotic bees are pricey. At an estimated cost of $10 per microbot, replacing the billions of bees needed to pollinate crops with machine bees would run in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And unlike live bees, robotic bees need maintenance. Rather than creating a new machine-bee rental and repair industry, scientists argue that restoring pollinator habitats would be a far more cost-effective way to support food production. At a time when we are aiming to reduce our global carbon footprint, the environmental impact of manufacturing, distributing, and disposing of fleets of robotic bees could be enormous.

And bees don’t go about their important business in isolation. They’re critical components of biodiversity, helping to maintain the balance of environmental systems that support life on Earth. Replacing diverse pollinators with a single microbot is a risky business. It’s not clear what impact swarms of machine bees may have on the delicate interdependent workings of nature. The adage when you fix one thing, be careful not to break something else comes to mind.

The idea that we can address environmental problems by replacing elements of the natural world with technology-based substitutes is not a new one. As the guardians of the planet, we have the ability to transform our relationship with nature and apply innovative, emerging technologies to map, monitor, protect, and restore rather than replace. Because beyond their much-appreciated bottom-line contributions to food security, bees are iconic and beloved members of the community of life and play an important role in human culture and well-being.

How components of nature are valued depends on who is doing the valuing. We treasure these industrious insects not just for their productivity but also for their poetry. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of watching a pollen-flecked bumblebee drowse in a dahlia, we think you’ll agree that there are some things in life for which there are no substitutes. It’s just better with bees—tiny, perfect soul anchors for a world in flux.

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Lisa S. French August 24, 2020

Protecting Forests to Prevent Pandemics

1-minute read

As we live with the daily reality of how rapidly and efficiently the frustratingly tenacious coronavirus has been spreading from points A to Z, a new study from Stanford University shows how protecting forests can help prevent the future transmission of zoonotic (i.e., animal to human) disease.

Close to 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases originate in animals. When proximity and interactions between humans and wildlife increase as a result of ongoing deforestation and habitat loss, the spread of zoonotic disease becomes more common. To reduce the risk of future virus outbreaks, researchers recommend planting forest buffer zones to create natural barriers to disease transmission, protect biodiversity, and provide alternative sources of food and fuel to forest-dependent communities. In a nutshell, to create safe roaming room for wild ones and help keep people and planet healthy—add trees.

If the unrelenting pandemic news cycle leaves you inert and feeling generally out of sorts, we empathize. During challenging intervals, we take comfort in knowing that there is still tremendous beauty to be found in the world, and difficult circumstances can sometimes inspire people—big ones and little ones—to create their own.

Until we cancel the coronavirus, hang in, stay safe, and be well!

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Lisa S. French June 30, 2020

Sweet City: Cultivating Citizen Pollinators

1.5-minute read

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature — Joseph Campbell

Cities—energizing, innovative hubs of productivity as well as stress-inducing sources of noise, pollution, and congestion that often diminish nature, negatively impacting the health, well-being, and resilience of inhabitants. Instead of depleting nature, what would happen if city planners reimagined urban living in a holistic way that promotes nature and green living by design?

When the Mayor’s office of the small Costa Rican city of Curridabat realized that the vast majority of its 65,000 citizens lived with paved surfaces that discouraged the attraction of native flora and fauna, they came up with a transformative nature-based solution for sustainable urban development—the Sweet City. Curridabat’s urban planners envisioned a naturalized city as a “sentient” space that boosts biodiversity and enhances ecosystem services by granting citizenship to V.I.P.’s—very important pollinators.

The Sweet City model recognizes that humans are not separate and distinct from nature but are members of a community of living beings that contribute to the creation of healthy, resilient, biodiverse environments.

Curridabat has reframed the role of essential pollinators, including bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and bats as prosperity agents, valuable native citizens that increase well-being and help ensure the continuity of natural systems that support fresh, nutritious food through local production. By studying conditions that help pollinators thrive, and planting trees, flowers, and community gardens that are natural attractors, the city of Curridabat is encouraging pollinating activities, increasing connectivity to nature through biological corridors essential to species conservation and improving the beauty of visual landscapes.

Naturally recovered urban space, thriving biodiversity, happy citizens—both people and pollinators. We call that a triple-win! It’s no wonder that Costa Ricans are some of the most contented humans on the planet. Apparently the pollinators are feeling pretty alright too!

You can read more about Curridabat’s sustainable development policy to increase biodiversity and protect essential urban pollinators here.

If you would like to join a network dedicated to connecting cities and nature, sign up at biophiliccities.org.

As it so happens, May is Garden for Wildlife Month, and that’s just what we’re gonna do! If you’re also feeling inspired to cultivate your own “sentient space” for pollinators, you can learn about butterfly heroes, native plants and certified habitats from the National Wildlife Federation. Sweet!

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Lisa S. French May 21, 2020

The Zen of Remote Jellyfish

2.0-minute read

During this anxiety-provoking period of universal uncertainty, we’re always on the lookout for nature-based distractions to help you maintain your mental peace. While the restorative psychological and physiological benefits of interacting with the natural world are well documented, current recommendations and mandates for reducing roaming are limiting access for many of us. So what’s a locked-down wanderer to do?

According to a 2019 meta-study from the University of West Scotland, one potentially psyche-soothing, no-cost workaround may be found in video exposure to animals in aquariums. The analyzed studies evaluated human response to aquarium sea life and found significant benefits overall: improved mood, reduction in agitation, blood pressure, and heart rate, as well as an increase in pain threshold, whether watching on video for as little as 10 minutes or visiting an aquarium over six months. Right now, you probably can’t get to a public aquarium from wherever “here” is. However, thanks to the miracle of technology, you can get a nature fix by meditating on the movements of jellyfish, sea otters, sharks, and other aquatic animals from anywhere in the world by tuning in to the Monterey Bay Aquarium live cams. Not only are the luminous moon jellies mesmerizing, the antics of the sea otter pups can keep you calmly occupied for ~~hours~~ a fair amount of time, or so we’ve heard.

In addition to tele-jellyfish-ing, here are some other hopefully cheering and engaging items of interest:

The World Health Organization is now recommending the use of active video games during the pandemic. If you’d like to increase your knowledge of endangered species conservation while gaming, check out Wildeverse, created by Kenyan augmented reality game developer Internet of Elephants in conjunction with conservation scientists from around the world.

For a low-tech celebration of nature in poetry form, we suggest A Thousand Mornings, by Mary Oliver.

If you’re planting a fruit and veg patch this year and are concerned about protecting it from the creature contingent, you may relate to this First Dog on the Moon cartoon about the pitfalls of possums and quinces.

We’d also like to remind everyone that April is Earth Month. You can find out how to participate online here. And by the way, every month is Earth Month at Favorite World Press. For every print or e-book sold, we plant one wildlands tree in partnership with American Forests so that more people can experience the health benefits of nature and breathe a little easier.

However you choose to de-stress, music can make everything a bit better. Golden by Frazey Ford has been an uplifting repeat play here this week, because well, it’s golden. Speaking of music making things better, scientists have converted the structure of COVID-19 into musical sequences to help find binding sites for drugs or antibodies. You can learn more about that innovative thinking from Science Magazine.

We’ve said it before, but now more than ever, it bears repeating, so we’re repeating it: we love our readers! As a small business, we are incredibly grateful for your support throughout this challenging time. Thank you ever so much!

Until we come out on the other side, take good care and be well.

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Lisa S. French April 8, 2020