It was a sudden firestorm that left two people dead, some 1,700 homes burned to the ground and 33,000 acres of the Lost Pines area just east of Austin, Texas, destroyed. The Labor Day weekend wildfire of 2011 had followed a long stretch of 100-plus-degree temperatures that parched Central Texas. As the long weekend approached, Tropical Storm Lee was churning westward over the Gulf of Mexico promising saving rains. But the storm brought no moisture, only strong winds that whipped power lines and set off sparks, igniting a blaze that ripped through the drought-stricken forests.
Over three blistering days, three separate forest fires merged to engulf the area. It would take firefighters a month to quell the flames completely. It would take residents years to recover — some are still waiting to move into rebuilt homes. But while physical and psychological scars remain, now thanks to volunteers and a massive reforestation project, there is hope that the Lost Pines will be renewed.
Called the Lost Pines because of their isolation, the loblolly pines that blanket this area grow about 100 miles apart from their East Texas cousins. They have adapted over the years to the drier conditions found in Central Texas — they’re generally a little shorter than the loblolly pines found in the Southeastern United States, their needles a little waxier and their trunks not as straight. For Austin-area residents, they are a beacon. On the drive back from Houston or from a woodsy weekend in a Bastrop State Park cabin, the familiar site of the pines lining the hilly roadside just to the east of Austin lets you know you’re almost home.
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Many people who lost their homes in the 2011 fire lived or worked in Austin. Nearly 700 of the victims were low-income residents who were left homeless. “It’s our neighbors,” says Nina Hawkins, communications director for TreeFolks, an Austin nonprofit that has long been committed to enhancing urban forests with annual free-sapling giveaways.
The simple fact of seeing neighbors in need prompted TreeFolks to play a key role in reforesting the area. After the fire, the Texas A&M Forest Service pledged a five-year plan to plant trees, including 6,600 acres of state parkland that had been consumed by the blaze. TreeFolks then stepped in, armed with donations and grants from the Alcoa Foundation and the American Forests Global ReLeaf Partnership for Trees, to help further replant privately owned land. Since many landowners could barely afford to rebuild their homes, it was unlikely that they could pay to plant new trees.
The TreeFolks project, which aims to plant 1.1 million trees in five years, has just completed its second year. In Central Texas, tree-planting season runs from October to March, Hawkins points out, and this year TreeFolks embedded nearly 600,000 seedlings on private land in the devastated area. Over the winter, hundreds of volunteers of all ages, working with TreeFolks and the park reforestation program, got down on their hands and knees to press the tiny seedlings into the charred soil.
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The seedlings are being grown at several nurseries in the timber-growing areas of Georgia, Louisiana and Oklahoma, and at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. Without these contributions, it is unlikely that the area could be revived, according to Dan Pacatte, TreeFolks’ reforestation coordinator. The few trees that survived the fire would not have provided enough seed stock to replant the area. “They talk about a crown fire, or a ground fire,” says Pacatte, “but this was both. It was like a blowtorch. The fire was so hot, it burned up the seed source.” The ubiquitous pine cones that dot the forest floor were wiped out.
“We are shooting for a 50 percent survival rate,” Pacatte says, noting that drought still has a stranglehold on parts of Texas and that spring rains are needed. “Last year we had about a 40 percent survival, but we are happy with that.”
It will take 20 to 30 years for the trees to reach maturity, but this won’t be the first time the Lost Pines have been resuscitated. In the 1930s, when the Civilian Conservation Corps came in to establish Bastrop State Park, now a popular retreat for Austinites, the forest had already been suffering, likely thinned by lumber harvesting. A decade later, during World War II, more trees were cut down to build the U.S. Army training base, Camp Swift, nearby. It would take several decades for the forest to recover from the impact of that harvesting.
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Then in the 1950s, a bit of circuitous serendipity: Texas lumber company executives persuaded Allan Shivers, who was then governor, to fund a nursery and tree-breeding program to support the state’s timber industry. The Lost Pines trees, valued for their drought tolerance, were eyed as a potential boost to the industry and so seeds were collected, and an East Texas nursery began to grow the seedlings. The nursery survived until 2008, but by then demand for the Lost Pines trees had diminished — lumber companies preferred the taller, straight-trunked loblolly pines.
When the nursery closed, a cache of some 1,000 pounds of Lost Pines seeds was left. Somehow, those seeds found their way into an industrial freezer 200 miles away in Lufkin, Texas. They were tentatively slated by the Forest Service to be discarded in a landfill by September 2011 — but then came the Labor Day fire. These are the precious seeds now being used to reforest the scorched lands surrounding Austin.
Local legend says the Lost Pines were originally planted by Native Americans who moved into the area from the Piney Woods of East Texas, bringing with them the seeds of loblolly pines. Scientists say the pines date back nearly 20,000 years to the Pleistocene era. Today, whether inspired by legend, scientific wonder or by the sheer spirit of endurance of the trees themselves, hundreds of volunteers are committed to restoring the Lost Pines to a familiar and favorite place.
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Tag: Austin
SXSW: 10 Panels That Could Change America
What can bring innovators, entrepreneurs, journalists, activists, geeks, and hipsters all together? That would be South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW), which kicks off today in Austin, Texas.
This rather eclectic crowd gathers for panels, presentations, and even parties on all that is new and next. Not only are there a wide range of attendees, but panel discussions as well: They cover everything from “The Internet of Cars” to “Hacking Princess Culture” to “Being Social With Grandma: Social Media for 50+.”
For those of us with our eyes on the most creative solutions to our national challenges, here are the sessions we think have the most potential to impact America. Certainly, their messages will extend far beyond the podium and long past the Q&A:
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Heading to SXSW? Hopefully, we’ll see you at the one of these panels. But if you’re not able to make it, use the hashtags listed on the session URLs to join the virtual conversation, then let us know how you plan to take action!
The Man Behind No Child Left Behind Has a Surprising Answer on How to Improve Education
If you’re a music fan or a film buff, guaranteed you’ve heard of South by Southwest, a gathering in Austin, Texas that’s more commonly known by its acronym SXSW. But the annual event isn’t only rocking concerts and documentary viewings. It also attracts some of the brightest, innovative minds in education. The SXSWedu sessions discuss ways to improve teaching and learning and are filled with a-ha moments of invention and inspiration around how to help our kids.
But in a keynote session titled “Education: The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time,” Rod Paige, the former U.S. Secretary of Education, focused on the achievement gap that exists in our country and what needs to change.
After the session ended, NationSwell had the opportunity to ask him two exclusive questions: What is working in education and what is his call to action for the room of people he had just addressed?
He quickly replied: “Go visit Rocketship and visit KIPP.”
By mentioning these charter schools networks (KIPP is national network consisting of 141 schools; Rocketship currently serves three regions: The Bay Area in California; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Nashville, Tennessee), Paige echoed what has come up time and again in the full days of conversations and long halls of conference rooms at the Austin Convention Center: The importance of re-imagining the traditional school system. The underlying message of his two answers in one? His belief that bottom-up solutions (such as charter schools) are more exciting than some of the innovations in the public arena.
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The focus of Paige’s keynote conversation with Evan Smith, Editor in Chief and CEO of the Texas Tribune, comes out of a stance the former secretary of education has taken for years — that education is a civil right. That position was a driving force behind his work in the George W. Bush administration and in his book The Black-White Achievement Gap: Why Closing it is the Greatest Civil Rights Issue of Our Time, which was published in 2010.
“There is no strategy available that has a higher leverage opportunity to change the ethnic equality issue than closing the achievement gap in education,” he said on Wednesday. When Smith asked whether closing the gap should be dealt with at the federal level, Paige responded that while the federal government can have some influence, “the primary impact has to be at the place where the people walk the halls of the schools and look in the eyes of the children.”
Coming from a man who helped develop the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, this was certainly an interesting answer. However, Paige said he views education as a three-legged school made up of “the school, the home, and the community.”
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“We are doing all we can” to improve what goes on in the school and “very little” to improve what is going on in the home and the community, Paige added. “A child who has a loving and caring and supportive parent has a huge advantage,” he said. Those who lack that support are at a major disadvantage — a void that a teacher cannot fill on his or her own.
And when it comes to making sure that the original intent of No Child Left Behind Act “to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice” is realized, Paige said the leadership in African American and American Latino communities have to own this issue.
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Still, he said he does see a place for a national approach to education when it comes to the Common Core (also a controversial topic in education), explaining that 50 different state systems cannot control the public education of the United States.
Referencing the 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, Paige said it was called “A Nation at Risk,” not “50 States at Risk,” for a reason. “There has to be some coordination,” he said explaining that there cannot be efficiency when there are too many points of authority.
But real change cannot come without those aforementioned three legs of the stool.
Perhaps that is why Paige was so quick to mention Rocketship. Its motto? “We do more than educate students. We empower teachers, engage parents, and inspire communities.”
The Foodie Caucus: In Texas, Politicians Push Good Eats for All
The old saw “politics makes strange bedfellows” doesn’t seem to hold much weight anymore in Washington, a city where a pillow fight would be a welcome change from the trench warfare that has settled in.
Take the national farm bill, once a vehicle for bringing together those strange bedfellows — urban liberals and rural conservatives — to make farmers happy and to feed the urban needy. Earlier this month, legislators finally passed the nearly $1 trillion bill, but not before arguing rancorously, for four years, over crop subsidies and cuts to the federal food-stamp program.
Meanwhile, in Texas, where one-party domination by Republicans would seem to preclude the need for legislative alliances, there’s a promising act of cooperation: the Farm-to-Table caucus, a “first in the nation” (according to its founders) bipartisan caucus that focuses on promoting the local production of healthy food and helping consumers gain access to it.
Call it the foodie caucus, it was co-founded by State Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, a Democrat from Austin whose district includes working-class neighborhoods, a couple of urban farms and some of the city’s hippest new restaurants, and State Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, a Republican who hails from the rural town of Brenham, east of Austin, home to the much-loved Blue Bell ice creamery. The joint effort has been spreading the word to both policymakers and to the public about the goodness of sustainable, locally grown foods — produced by family farms, ranches and fisheries, along with urban farms — and reducing the regulatory obstacles that hinder their sale.
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“For many, food means freedom, and we must make sure we lower the barriers to that freedom,” says Rodriguez.
In 2013, for example, the House passed a bill introduced by State Rep. David Simpson, a Republican caucus member, to allow sampling at farmers’ markets. Previously, health regulations prohibited consumers from, say, tasting a local grower’s carrots before buying. Regulations also prevented makers of “cottage products” — homemade baked and canned goods like candies, pickles, herbs, vinegars and the like — from selling their wares, but another caucus-sponsored bill did away with that hurdle. Not all the Farm-to-Table legislative efforts have met with success, however: An effort to reduce restrictions on the sale of raw milk products failed. Additionally, Rodriguez was unable to move along a bill for property tax breaks for urban farmers — unlike larger commercial farms, smaller operations don’t receive agricultural tax relief — but he says he will pick up the issue again in 2015.
“The Farm-to-Table caucus is representative of an underlying dynamic that food issues really do cut across partisan barriers,” says Judith McGeary, founder of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, an advocacy group in Cameron, Texas, for independent ranchers, farmers and homesteaders. “One of the great things about the food movement — and you see it on the ground if you walk into, say, a sustainable ag conference in Texas or anywhere in the country — is the people come from the full political spectrum.”
The caucus began in 2011 — the Texas Legislature meets in odd-numbered years — and was formalized in 2013. It now has 18 Democratic members and 10 Republicans. All members share a passion for the cause, but they come from different perspectives, McGeary says. For some, the concern is health and environmental issues; others are focused on child obesity, food security or hunger; and still others have a passion for “old-fashioned family values,” she says.
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The collaborative spirit hasn’t reached every corner of Texas politics. The legislative process is still adversarial, and some of the caucus’ measures draw opposition from powerful groups and regulators who are concerned about health issues and loss of tax revenue, McGeary says. But what has clearly worked is the bridge-building between rural and urban legislators: In 2012, the Texas House of Representatives’ Urban Affairs Committee had a meeting with the Agriculture and Livestock Committee, where members discussed the needs of urban farmers. “For the first time, rural issues are getting the attention they deserve” from urban legislators, says McGeary, noting that his city counterparts are becoming aware of these issues through food-savvy constituents who are concerned about where their food comes from and how sustainable it is.
Increasingly, in fact, the “food movement” is turning traditionally rural matters into urban ones. Ask Dr. Linda Willis, director of the county office of the Texas Agrilife Extension Service, in Houston. Funded at the state and federal level, the extension service has historically served rural communities, offering farmers and their families professional advice and opportunities, but in recent years Dr. Willis has been busy developing programs to promote agriculture and food access among city-dwellers, many of whom are poor and living in so-called food deserts, areas where access to grocery stores or other sources of healthy food is limited or nonexistent.
Dr. Willis’ office works with more than 400 master gardeners, who volunteer to show families and community groups how to garden and harvest fresh foods. They’ve also helped create gardens in 60 area schools. The extension service also runs a master wellness program, training volunteers how to maintain healthy lifestyles so that they, in turn, can teach others in the community to do the same — a strategy that Dr. Willis hopes will stem the rising tide of diet- and lifestyle-related illness and disability.
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“One of the areas we can build a lot of consensus around is — whether you live in a food desert or not, whether you represent a food desert or not — the cost of health care is eventually going to impact all of us,” says Dr. Willis, who works closely with community leaders and urban lawmakers.
That’s a reality that motivates Farm-to-Table caucus member State Rep. Borris Miles, a Democrat who grew up in an area of southeast Houston that he describes as a food desert. In 2011, Miles co-sponsored a bill with a Republican, State Sen. Craig Estes from Wichita Falls in north Texas, to establish the Urban Loan Microenterprise Support Program, which helps fund fruit and vegetable growers in cities with more than 500,000 residents.
Miles summed up the caucus’ work this way in August 2013, at the first annual Houston Urban Food Production Conference: “In the direction in which this country is going, we have to be more self-sustaining, especially when it comes to health and resources of our own, this is going to be the start of something big across this country. When things get tough and times get hard, we just go right back to the basics of what got us here. And if farming the earth got us where we are, then we need to go right back to it. I’m excited about that.”
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Correction: February 21, 2014
An earlier version of this story misspelled the surname of the founder of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance. She is Judith McGeary, not McGreary.
Why Does This College Professor Live in a Dumpster?
Jeff Wilson, an environmental science professor at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, lives in a dumpster as an educational experiment in low-impact living. “The Dumpster Project” started with a used, sanitized unit measuring just 33 square feet. Wilson and his students are going to start by making it comfortable, but not sustainable, with environmentally inefficient lighting, air conditioning, and plumbing. Once they establish its energy consumption baseline, they’ll turn it into a sustainable, efficient living space. Wilson plans to turn the project into a K-12 curriculum and traveling project so the self-proclaimed “Professor Dumpster” can teach a large number of students about his grand experiment in sustainable living.