IMAGINE WAKING UP ONE DAY and finding your neighborhood covered in an impenetrable smoke so thick that it is literally “off the charts” for the federal air quality index, even though no fire is burning in your community.

Imagine running around your home and shaking your family members awake because a wildfire is suddenly raging toward your neighborhood, a place that had not seen that kind of fire in generations.

Imagine walking a mountain ridge, carrying heavy equipment and sweating in protective clothing while trying to clear a firebreak — all while uncertain if the fire might jump a ridge and take your life.

While many Americans have never had these experiences, especially Easterners, these kinds of stories are becoming shockingly familiar. When I travel in the West, many of the people I meet have personal stories that connect them to wildfire, sometimes in new and unwelcome ways.

At American Forests, we are challenging ourselves to step into the spaces where our forests and our country need us the most. Wildfire is high on this list. Just consider:

• 2015 and 2017 are the top two years on record for acres burned by wildfire, more than 10 million acres each year. Carbon emissions from wildfire exceeded 150 million metric tons of carbon dioxide both years.
• California’s wave of tree mortality killed another 18 million trees last year, bringing the total since 2010 to almost 150 million. As those standing dead trees  fall, they become fuel for “megafires” so intense they can sterilize forest soils, making it difficult for those forests to naturally regenerate.
• Wildfires are also becoming more dangerous in the Southeast, exemplified by the 2016 fire in Gatlinburg, Tenn. that killed 14 people. The 2018 National Climate Assessment says that such fires will become more common in the region.
• More than half of all U.S. Forest Service expenditures are now related to wildfire, a three-fold increase in fire- related expenses since the 1990s.

So, what can American Forests do to help?

American Forests has long played a role in wildfire recovery by planting trees. For example, wildfire is the single largest driver of reforestation need on our national forests, leading to many of the partnership projects where American Forests has helped to bring forests back to life with tree planting.

But recovery from wildfire is only half of the story. How can American Forests and others help to prevent more catastrophic wildfires from occurring in our rapidly warming climate? In some places, we need to subtract trees from forests instead of planting them.

California’s forests are a great example. California has many areas of forest where the current density of trees is too great for the water that is available in a drying climate, and leaves these forests vulnerable to pest infestations.

Under the leadership of our new California State Director, Brittany Dyer, American Forests has launched a new partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and the State of California to advance a mixture of forest thinning and replanting in California’s hardest hit area for tree mortality — the Southern Sierra Nevada mountains.

Using the “Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change Framework” developed by U.S. Forest Service researchers, we are establishing side-by-side forest treatments that will test different ways we might need to alter forest structure in this landscape to withstand relentless drought, pest infestations and wildfire. Instead of just repeating traditional forestry techniques that are no longer working, we are helping to test new approaches so we can learn how to create truly climate-resilient forests for the future.

We are matching these on-the-ground efforts with leadership on wildfire policy. In 2018, we celebrated long-awaited bipartisan action to enact a “Wildfire Funding Fix” for the U.S. For- est Service. This will provide desperately needed additional funding to not only fight wildfires, but also to accelerate the kind of preventative restoration treatments that American Forests is helping to deliver in the Southern Sierras.

We have even bigger policy goals that match the scale of the problem. This Spring, our allies in the U.S. Congress introduced far-reaching legislation, developed with American Forests’ assistance, which would provide billions of dollars in new funding to restore forest resilience. This legislation would also dramatically increase the pace and scale of replanting forests lost to wildfire and other causes, planting as many as 3 billion trees over a decade.

This is a pivotal moment in the history of America’s forests, and we are doing our best to match the scale and ambition of our actions to the challenges we face. The forest health crisis, fueled by climate change, will provide the organizing principle for much of our future work. Thank you for being a partner with us in creating resilient forests for the future.

For more news and updates from Jad, follow him on Twitter @JadDaley

The post Offshoots: A Burning Question for Our Forests appeared first on American Forests.

MICHAEL DURGLO JR. had no idea how important the whitebark pine would become to him.

Living on a reservation all of his life, Durglo considered himself quite in tune with nature. After earning his degree in Environmental Science, he has worked with his tribe, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai, for 35 years in a variety of capacities, including game warden and environmental director.

As environmental director, Durglo was tasked with coordinating the tribe’s climate change strategic plan. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai were one of the first tribes in the United States to develop the idea, and within it, they identified nine sectors for which they wanted to do vulnerability assessments. Forestry was one of those.

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai is a timber resource tribe. The ponderosa pine, the douglas-fir and even the lodgepole pine are primary sources of timber revenue for the tribe. However, the whitebark pine? In the beginning, the name only vaguely registered with Durglo, whose tribe manages 245,000 acres of the 459,000 acres of forestlands within their Flathead Reservation of 1.3 million acres.

Yet, the tribe has long acknowledged the cultural value of whitebark pine and the environmental threats to its long- term sustainability, including wildfire, insects and disease. In the mid-1990s, the tribe formed an interdisciplinary team that included an ad-hoc group from the tribal community to begin developing a new Forest Management Plan. During the planning process, the group identified restoration goals for whitebark pine and its habitat. The Forest Management Plan was approved in 2000 and is currently being implemented.

But, it was not until the more recent development of the climate change strategic planning process that the Confederated Salish and Kootenai truly focused on whitebark pine restoration. The tribe then realized that many neighboring federal agencies were already well into studies on the species. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Forestry Department received three years of funding from The Wilderness Society’s partnership with the The Dreaming Tree for student internships working with whitebark pine inventory and is also part of the Crown of the Continent’s High Five Working Group, which consists of three major players currently drafting a Crown Whitebark Pine Restoration Strategy.

You see, the whitebark pine is a quite particular, but important, species.

“Whitebark pine is a high elevation, slow growing, kind of gnarly tree,” Durglo says. It grows at elevations above 6,000 feet, and the tree is an essential source of food for many birds and small mammals, like the Clark’s nutcracker, the pine’s primary seed disperser. Other animals depend on it for various reasons as well, including for nesting and summer habitats.

However, blister rust infections and mountain pine beetle infestations, as well as climate change and other disturbances in timberline fire ecology, have caused severe whitebark pine population decline. A study in the mid-2000s showed that the species had declined by 41 percent. So, the tribe has been working to keep — and strategically grow — their whitebark pine forest since 2012.

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai’s ultimate goal for whitebark pine restoration is to reintroduce the seed into its culture. The tribe has recognized the nutritional value of the seed for thousands of years, and it was once part of the traditional diet. The tribe hopes that someday soon, it will have healthy whitebark pine populations that will contribute to a healthy tribal lifestyle with generational understanding of high elevation forest ecosystems.

The effort involves trying to locate healthy, “plus” trees that have been resilient to blister rust, collect their cones, process the seeds and send them to a lab for testing. With funding assistance from The Dreaming Tree, Durglo and his team hope to find which are the most resilient trees of the species and plant more of them.

“We have not done whitebark pine planting yet, but have planned our first planting site this year, in 2019,” he said.

Until then, he reveres those whitebark pines that have survived time and other trials.

“Just this last summer, we hiked up to an area where there’s a whitebark pine tree that, in our native language, translates to Great Great Great Grandparent. We figure that tree is about 3,000 years old,” he shared. “When I hiked up there, and I got to touch that tree, it was pretty special.”

“The whole process, and the tree’s resiliency, reminds me of us. Indigenous people have survived much trauma for many years, and we’re still surviving. So, for me, it became an intimate relation- ship with those trees.”

Since formulating his own tribe’s climate action plan, Durglo has also been helping other tribes around the country.

“You become intimately connected; almost like you become a tree hugger, you know?”

In 2016, Durglo was received at the White House, where he accepted the Champion for Change Award. And in 2017, he was again recognized for his work with an award for Climate Adaptation Leadership in Natural Resources.

The whitebark pine still holds his admiration. Durglo and his brother — a forester — have even begun writing a children’s storybook about the species and the Clark’s nutcracker, the bird that distributes the tree’s seeds.

“It’s almost a creation story,” he shared, explaining that he was fascinated by the way the tree and the bird work together to sustain life. “You learn that everything is interconnected. What happens to one happens to all. This whole process has taught me a lot about interconnection.”

Kate Michael writes from Washington, D.C. and is a lifestyle editor and publisher.

The article was published in the Summer 2019 edition of American Forests Magazine. American Forests has been publishing its magazine since 1895. Filled with beautiful photographs and informative articles highlighting our nation’s forests and trees, American Forests features information for everyone from the environmentally conscious to the outdoor enthusiast. Become a supporter and receive our magazine in the mail. 

The post Earthkeepers: Revering, Recovering the Whitebark Pine appeared first on American Forests.

INSTEAD OF FLOWING toward the ocean like most rivers, the Mojave River winds east into the heart of the Mojave Desert. For most of its length, it flows underground. Nearly a hundred miles from its origin in the San Bernardino Mountains, the river enters a deep canyon and gradually seeps up from the desert sand. Afton Canyon — located in the heart of the Mojave Trails National Monument — is one of only two places where the river flows continuously above ground, brought to the surface by shallow bedrock.

Remarkably, in a landscape that receives just 4 inches of rain per year, and where summer temperatures routinely exceed 110°F, Afton Canyon supports the growth of tall streamside trees and wet grassy meadows. For centuries the canyon’s water and lush vegetation have made it a magnet for wildlife and migrating birds.

Unfortunately, the 20th century brought many changes to Afton Canyon. The Mojave Forks Dam was built in 1967, cutting off the Mojave River’s seasonal floods that native trees need to propagate, like Fremont cottonwood and black willow. The river’s new flow regime and decades of damage to soils from cattle and off-road vehicle use favored the spread of an exotic tree species called tamarisk, also known as saltcedar.

Originally from Eurasia, tamarisk was intentionally introduced to the canyon in the early 1900s to control erosion around the embankments of the Union Pacific rail line. The plant accumulates salt in its needles and the surrounding soil, which prevents other plants from growing, creating a tamarisk-dominant forest with little biodiversity. Tamarisk also consumes prodigious amounts of water in riparian habitats due to the sheer density of its stands. Free-flowing stretches of the river dwindled in Afton Canyon as the tamarisk multiplied.

In 1990, Tom Egan — a riparian restoration specialist with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — was tasked with rescuing the canyon’s native plants and wildlife. Along with reining in cattle grazing and off-road vehicle use, Egan developed a plan to replace the tamarisk with cottonwoods and willows. Egan enlisted the help of fellow staff and the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, a program that employs young at-risk Angelinos to work on conservation and community service projects. Focusing on the western end of the canyon, they burned, cut and chemically treated the tamarisk thickets. When they were finished, nearby sections of the Mojave River began flowing above ground for the first time in years.

Egan and the BLM received one of American Forest’s very first reforestation grants to help with replanting.

Instead of raising seedlings in a nursery, they used willow and cottonwoods’ unique ability to sprout new roots wherever they touch water or moist soil. They harvested live shoots and branches from mature trees upstream of Afton Canyon and planted them deep enough for the young trees to “get their feet wet” and access groundwater.

With support from American Forests, Egan and the LA Conservation Corps workers removed 700 acres of tamarisk and planted more than 10,000 cottonwood and willow poles between 1990 and 2002. Fast forward 20 years and the results are undeniable. Some of the original plantings are nearly 40 feet tall. Migratory birds have returned to the area in force — more than 180 bird species have been spotted at Afton Canyon — and the local Desert Bighorn herd has grown from 30 to more than 300 individuals. The cottonwoods and willows are regenerating naturally, another hallmark of success.

This progress could be at risk without the ongoing stewardship of public servants like Egan and the LA Conservation Corps. Tamarisk requires periodic treatments to keep it at bay. Egan, for his part, continues to advocate for thoughtful management of the area in his role as the California Desert Representative for Defenders of Wildlife.

Austin Rempel writes from Washington, D.C., and is American Forests’ forest conservation manager.

The post Project Showcase: Restoring an Oasis in California’s Mojave Desert appeared first on American Forests.

IT PROBABLY wouldn’t come as a surprise to many that the biggest hurdle the field of urban forestry faces is funding. We have gotten quite good at developing elaborate data and master plans. But if there’s not sufficient funding to implement them, it’s all for naught, and the cycle must begin again.

That’s why American Forests has helped develop a new finance mechanism called City Forest Credits. An- other formidable arrow in the quiver to reverse tree loss in cities and ensure equitable distribution so benefits reach all residents and businesses, its purpose is to engage the private sector in funding the planting and preservation of city trees nationwide.

The Seattle-based nonprofit City Forest Credits facilitates the sale of “carbon+” credits specifically designed for the unique dynamics of an urban forest. Scientist Dr. Greg McPherson developed these credits to include not only a metric ton of CO2 like a traditional carbon credit, but also quantification of stormwater runoff reduction in cubic meters, reductions in air pollutants, and energy savings. There are also less quantifiable community and public visibility benefits that have value for corporate buyers. American Forests has been working closely with City Forest Credits for the past few years to develop the protocols, launch the registry and, now with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, bring this exciting new urban forestry finance mechanism to scale.

On December 1, 2018, American Forests piloted one of the nation’s first City Forest Carbon+ Credit projects in Shoreline, Wash. Community volunteers joined locally-based volunteers from Bank of America, staff from the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, American Forests and City Forest Credits staff to plant 200 trees at the 3-acre Ballinger Open Space site.

That site had long been inaccessible to the public due to blackberries and other overgrown invasive plants. The site is adjacent to a subsidized public housing facility, so restoring and replanting the site contributes to social equity and environmental justice. This planting was the beginning of a long-term project that will clear out invasive plants to restore public access and eventually plant 2,000 trees on the site.

The Ballinger Open Space site is projected to deliver the following quantified benefits over the next 50 years:

• Storage of up to 1,000 metric tons of CO2
• Reduction of more than 62 million liters of stormwater (rain fall interception), at a savings of approximately $455,000
• Energy savings (heating and cooling) of $73,000
• Improvements in air quality valued at more than $5,000
• Total dollar benefits over 50 years: $533,000

“This Shoreline project is a great example of bringing private funding into a public project,” says Mark McPherson, executive director of City Forest Credits. “The City of Shoreline, the Greenway Trust, American Forests and Bank of America all deserve recognition for their work to pioneer this new opportunity. Everyone benefits, from the nearby residents at the Ballinger Homes, to the neighborhood, to the City of Shoreline’s budget for managing critical urban forests.”

Ian Leahy writes from Washington, D.C., and is American Forests’ vice president of urban forestry.

The post Project Showcase: Piloting City Forest Credits in Shoreline appeared first on American Forests.

ON A SUNNY DAY in Phoenix, Jad Daley, American Forests’ president & CEO, and Lindsey Putz, director of corporate giving, met with Elysa Hammond, Clif Bar’s vice president of environmental stewardship. Hammond had joined American Forests the day before in planting 75 native desert trees and shrubs in North Mountain Park as part of the GreenBiz Conference, a convening of the brightest minds in sustain ability. After putting shovels in the ground together, Hammond gave us a glimpse into why our historic partner- ship is such a natural fit for Clif Bar.

Clif Bar and American Forests have been restoring landscapes together since 2004, planting nearly 150,000 trees across the country. The partnership began in a very organic way, pun intended, as Hammond was spearheading Clif Bar’s commitment to going organic, which is the foundation of their sustainability program. Through this process, Hammond was inspired by the deep ecological connection she saw between our food system and climate change. So, she decided to take Clif Bar’s sustainability commitments even further.

“When we launched our commitment to organic, we also decided to put a stake in the ground and take responsibility for our carbon footprint,” Hammond explained. “It was a holistic approach to addressing climate change.”

Clif Bar began investing in numerous environmental initiatives, including a powerful natural climate solution – trees. In fire-damaged areas of the Sierra Nevada mountains, the range showcased on Clif Bar wrappers, the company worked with American Forests to plant tens of thousands of trees. In Idaho, home of their new one-of-a-kind sustainability-focused bakery, the organizations have been planting the keystone whitebark pine tree species, a main food source for the grizzly bear. To be able to reforest landscapes in places they live and work lines up perfectly with the company’s values of striving for a healthier, more sustainable world.

“I’m really excited for the future of our work together,” Hammond shared, “to not only continue planting trees but to do so in increasingly more intentional ways that educate and engage people in restoring public lands.”

The post Partner Profile: Clif Bar appeared first on American Forests.

THE DORIS DUKE Charitable Foundation (DDCF) has become a catalyst among philanthropies for the growing movement to promote “natural climate solutions,” which entails conserving and restoring ecosystems, including forests, wetlands and other lands to provide a natural carbon sink. DDCF’s commitment to address climate change has become a critical strategy to advance its longstanding mission to conserve wildlife habitat and other natural assets, given the spreading impacts of climate change on lands and waters worldwide. In natural climate solutions, the foundation recognizes an opportunity to demonstrate that society can effectively reduce its emissions while benefiting nature.

DDCF’s broadened focus on climate change aligns closely with American Forests’ own embrace of the climate challenge, sparked by our organization’s recognition of already visible climate change impacts on forests and the huge role that forests can play in solving climate change. DDCF’s support is touching virtually every aspect of American Forests’ Climate Leadership Strategy, a transformational investment in our organization’s leadership capacity on natural climate solutions. American Forests is just one organization being empowered in this way by DDCF’s work on natural climate solutions, just one example of the foundation’s catalytic leadership for this work nationwide.

Our shared interest first came together through DDCF support that enabled American Forests to host an unprecedented climate change “Learning Lab” in the summer of 2018. The Learning Lab brought together delegations of officials from the 17 states in the U.S. Climate Alliance (now up to 23 states) to develop customized strategies for each state to use forests and other lands as a climate solution. American Forests assembled more than 60 experts in science, policy and finance to coach the state teams through a series of exercises and presentations of their findings. The results have been remarkable — many of these states have already drafted new policies and aligned financial resources to advance reforestation and other natural climate solutions.

This work with the Alliance continues with renewed support from DDCF via a new grant awarded in February of 2019 that will enable American Forests to convene additional natural climate solutions Learning Labs. American Forests also has new support from DDCF to match this work on state policy with equal efforts aimed at federal policy, including the opportunity to align the funding and activities of the U.S. Forest Service with natural climate solutions.

American Forests also has support from DDCF to lead natural climate solutions by example. American Forests was recently awarded a grant from the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Climate Adaptation Fund, supported by DDCF, to develop new climate-informed techniques for our replanting of Tamaulipan thornscrub forests in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. DDCF is also supporting American Forests’ work on urban forests, funding a comprehensive national leadership initiative to provide urban forest practitioners with new tools to reduce energy use and protect public health in our rapidly heating cities. DDCF’s support will also facilitate statewide demonstration of this climate and health-informed approach to urban forestry in partner- ship with the State of Rhode Island.

We are very grateful for this powerful new relationship!

The post Donor Profile: The Doris Duke Charitable appeared first on American Forests.

Jennifer Broome, Vice President of Philanthropy

AMERICAN FORESTS had a strong presence at this year’s GreenBiz conference, the premier annual event for sustainable business leaders focused on corporate social responsibility, held each February in Phoenix.

GreenBiz 2019 brought together more than 1,200 of the world’s bright- est thinkers and most influential sustainability leaders for an unparalleled look into the pressing challenges, emerging trends and biggest opportunities in sustainable business. American Forests was there to ensure that America’s forests remain front and center in the conversation about how best to address climate change. In addition to mounting an informational booth that drew heavy traffic, and speaking at several sessions on topics like “responsible forestry” and “forests as natural climate solutions,” we also had the good fortune to partner with Microsoft to conduct a Native Desert Landscape Restoration planting. The planting attracted around

50 conference attendees, as well as volunteers from the Arizona Sustain- ability Alliance, and resident experts from the Phoenix Parks & Recreation Department. We planted trees, cacti and other native desert vegetation, including ironwood, saguro and Teddy Bear cholla, in North Mountain Park, part of the Phoenix Mountain Preserve in the heart of the city.

In addition to beautifying the park and helping to restore the fragile ecosystem of the Phoenix area, this planting provided an opportunity to educate participants about the critical work and mission of American Forests in both cities and wild landscapes, as well as to help offset the carbon footprint of attending the conference.

Our participation at this conference has already sparked promising new partnership opportunities with companies who are serious about addressing climate change, engaging their employees and greening their businesses. We are proud to partner with such good corporate citizens!

The post From the Field: Phoenix, Ariz. appeared first on American Forests.

Sarah L. Anderson, Senior Manager, Tree Equity Programs

A SKILLED WORKFORCE is fundamental to our mission of growing and sustaining healthy urban forests.

Unfortunately, urban forestry, landscaping and horticulture professionals are facing a massive skilled labor shortage. Studies show that communities with the highest tree canopy needs generally tend to be those that have the highest unemployment; yet, public agencies, nonprofit groups and tree- and lawn- care companies are struggling to engage and retain women and low-income people of color. In 2017 alone, 71,000 landscaping jobs went unfilled.

American Forests’ newly launched Tree Equity: Career Pathways initiative seeks to address this shortage.

In February, I was pleased to share successful strategies for diversifying the green workforce at the National Association of Landscape Professionals’ first National Workforce Summit held just outside Washington, D.C. During my session, Diversifying the Workforce, summit participants were introduced to scenarios that could be hurting retention like isolation, lack of accommodations and tokenism, and recognized potential solutions to these obstacles. For instance, ensuring that there is more than just one person of color on a crew is important. Ensuring that women have access to a restroom while on job sites is critical to retaining women in important field roles. And, any senior leader that happens to be part of an underrepresented group should not be the only go-to person for all questions dealing with the organization’s inclusion efforts.

Reviewing examples like these, along with definitions of key terms like diverse, divergent, representation, inclusion and equality, have helped reveal opportunities for participants to improve inclusion efforts that ultimately create a more representative workforce. With a qualified and inclusive workforce, we will sustain healthy cities through resilient urban forests for generations to come.

The post From the Field: Washington D.C. appeared first on American Forests.

ON CAPITOL HILL, spring is about more than cherry blossoms. It’s when Congress begins the critical process of budgeting and planning for federal priorities for the next year. This year, we have been sounding the alarm because America’s forests are in crisis. We are witnessing their loss and destruction at a staggering rate. As a nation, unless we change the way we manage them, we will lose them.

Our forests are struggling to adapt to a changing climate — to extreme drought, low humidity, high winds and shortened “cold spells.” These extremes produce dramatic tree mortality and high intensity wildfires in the West and changing tree species composition and declining forest health in the East. To adapt forests to this “new normal” will often require more active forest management, including harvesting dead and dying trees, reforestation, reintroducing controlled fire and other measures. More active forest management will require increased federal and private investment and level of effort sufficient to halt this crisis.

Unfortunately, the Administration’s budget for fiscal year 2020 did the opposite. It proposed significant cuts or complete elimination to critical forestry programs. This spring, we testified to Congress and asked them to consider what is at stake. In California’s forests, more than 147 million trees have died since 2010, with roughly 85 percent of those located in the Sierra Nevada. If Congress continues with “business as usual,” many areas will experience fires so intense that they cannot be reforested and will transition to a shrub ecosystem. The best hope for sustaining forests, like those in the Sierra, will be to thin areas with dead and declining trees, while restoring a more resilient forest and using controlled burns more frequently. By providing the U.S. Forest Service with the critical tools and increased resources it needs, Congress can stop this looming crisis.But, it’s not only western forests that are under threat. A recent University of Florida study found that southeastern forests are already seeing a changing mixture of tree species in response to prolonged drought. Dangerous forest pests are reaching farther north into New England as its climate warms. New stresses are coming to all of America’s forests. Unless Congress significantly increases funding for critical U.S. Forest Service programs, forests across the nation will be in crisis.

Thankfully, this spring marked only the beginning of the federal funding process on Capitol Hill. At American Forests, we will take every opportunity through this summer and into fall to urge Congress to provide the U.S. Forest Service with the tools and re- sources they need to address this crisis. But we cannot do it alone — Congress needs to hear from readers like you! To get involved, go to our Action Center at americanforests.org/TakeAction.

Together, we can stop the crisis threatening our forests and protect them for future generations.

Alix Murdoch writes from Washington, D.C. and is American Forests’ vice president of policy.

The post Washington Outlook: Urging Congress to Protect Our Forests appeared first on American Forests.

American Forests took a star turn on the “Silver Carpet” for the 25th Anniversary Screen Actors Guild Awards, taking our forest message to new audiences. We committed to plant 25,000 trees in honor of the anniversary show, continuing the SAG Awards’ legacy as the only awards show to win the coveted Green Seal for sustainability 10 years in a row.

Part of our job at American Forests is to give our forests a louder voice. At the SAG Awards, we gave the microphone over to celebrated actors, like those pictured here, to share stirring stories of personal connection to our forests and passion for issues like using forests to slow climate change. Thanks to new friends like Jason George and others, our videos and social media from this event engaged whole new audiences with our work, even inspiring some to spontaneously start American Forests fundraisers on their social media pages.

Our forests need us more than ever, and we need them more than ever, too. American Forests will continue to use our creative and award-winning approach to communications to engage America in this effort — including letting our friends, like the Screen Actors Guild, do some of the talking for us!

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