JENNIE GARLINGTON: On this episode of EcoSense.

ADAM WARWICK: We stand to lose our biodiversity and that's critical for, you know, sustaining life on this planet.

[Elk bugling] STEVEN DOBEY: And then, it's not just elk and big game but it's river otters.

It's songbirds.

Everything that states manage for the public benefit.

DR.

ARUNI BHATNAGAR: They have less levels of inflammation, which means that they have less risk of heart disease, less risk of age-associated changes.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: Once eradicated from the landscape, elk are now thriving in Kentucky since their reintroduction.

These stunning creatures bring joy to people from all walks of life.

♪ ♪ STEVEN: When the first trailer load of elk were drove up onto a mine site in Kentucky in 1997 and released, there were the estimate, over 4,000 people showed up on that mine site to see that happen.

♪ ♪ That was amazing to see that much excitement, you know, in region in a lot of communities that are looking for something positive.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: Can you tell me about the threats to elk back a hundred, 200 years ago?

JOHN HAST: We had - certainly had elk and saber tooth tigers back before the last glacial period.

And, of course, when the area was colonized and people were coming over the Cumberland Gap, Kentucky was a rich place for game that's well documented by Daniel Boone with bears, deer, elk.

STEVEN: Historically, the threats to elk were the westward expansion of humans.

A lot of the land that was wild was converted to agriculture, and then with that came overharvest of a lot of big game species.

CHRIS GARLAND: There's probably not many acres of this land that hasn't been impacted by man in some way or another.

I mean, you look at old pictures, even back to my great grandparents and great-great grandparents' days, and the hillsides were cropped and farmed, so they were cleared for that.

And then you had, you know, timber production, and then you had the mining impacts as well.

It's been a great source of revenue and livelihood for everyone in this part of the world.

JENNIE: Why was Kentucky the right spot to do a reintroduction for elk?

STEVEN: Elk are grazers.

They need open fields, meadows, much like you see out West.

That's a limiting factor in the East.

It's -- Especially in the Appalachians, it's largely a closed canopy forest.

Kentucky was unique in that it had this history of coal mining and for all the challenges that come with coal mining, what it did create was vast expanses of open habitat.

So, that collectively could almost mimic those fields that we'd see out West.

And so, Kentucky was high on the list when it came to Eastern Elk reintroductions.

CHRIS: That started with Kentucky Fish and Wildlife back in 1997.

They talked to legislators, they had public meetings.

They did a lot of scientific looking at how would they survive, what would be the impact?

And once they had all approvals and had overwhelming public support, they started a stocking effort with bringing elk in from out West.

♪ ♪ STEVEN: Over a five-year period, Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources released over 1,500 elk, which was a massive undertaking.

There are literally no other projects that attacked elk reintroduction at that scale.

That was a huge jumpstart to elk in Kentucky.

Combine that with the quality of habitat on these reclaimed mine lands, and it was just amazing.

[Elk bugling] JOHN: The habitat is incredibly unique.

I mean, we're right on kind of the northern edge of the temperate rainforest that you think of when you think about the Smoky Mountains.

It is an incredibly productive forest habitat.

Couple that with the, just, sheer acreage of land that's in public trust down here, you're not going to find that in any other state in the East.

Of the 1,541 elk that came over here, 400 or more were initially collared.

So, we were getting data the second they came off the livestock trailers into Kentucky.

And that's been a success.

So, we've got 'em in the right spot, in the right habitat, and I see no reason we won't have them hundreds of years from now.

CHRIS: The Kentucky Elk herd is the largest elk herd east of the Mississippi.

They're numbered over 10,000 animals now, and they've been incredibly successful in the 16-county restoration zone.

STEVEN: And all of a sudden, it's generating significant amounts of money for these local economies in the source of lodging, revenue, ammunition, firearm sales, guides.

CHRIS: I believe hunters for elk, you know, even though they do harvest animals and take animals, they're some of the most deeply passionate conservationists that we have.

I'm a hunter myself.

I have spent many an hour in the woods and in a tree stand or out in the field, and I enjoy watching wildlife.

If you get to harvest one, take it home to feed your family, that's, you know, a bonus.

So, I think there's a lot of misconception that hunters are cruel and, you know, don't care about the wildlife.

But, you know, that's -- really couldn't be further from the truth.

Hunters are definitely well educated on the species, on the habitat needs of species, you know, the populations, you know, need hunting, especially now with, you know, fewer natural predators than we may have had in the past.

There's a need for hunting to help balance populations and keep some populations in check.

[Elk bugling] JOHN: The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, completely supported by hunters, of course, the State Fish and Wildlife Agency completely supported by hunters, that was the money that got elk back in here.

That was the money that supported research through the years.

STEVEN: The habitat can only hold so many elk, and, you know, if this herd was to expand, there's going to be issues with human-elk conflict, vehicle collisions, agricultural damage or concerns.

So, hunting is kind of what fills that role to keep that herd or that population at that manageable level.

♪ ♪ In 1937, Congress passed the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act.

These are dollars from the sale of firearms, ammunition that go directly to funding state wildlife agencies.

Hunting is paying for conservation and hunters and recreational shooters are probably the largest financial contributor to wildlife conservation in the U.S., along with many great organizations that fund nonprofit work that help support us and agencies.

And then, it's not just elk and big game, but it's river otters, it's songbirds, everything that states manage for the public benefit, hunters help pay for that.

JENNIE: What is so special about elk to you?

JOHN: Being both a researcher, a biologist and a hunter, I absolutely have had some great times hunting elk in different parts of the country.

You've got bulls bugling, you've got bulls fighting other bulls, you've got this whole hierarchy of dominance, and then you could have anywhere between 100 and 300 cows in their harem.

I've spent a lot of time in the evening or early morning just sitting and watching that and it's fascinating.

STEVEN: In the fall is the breeding season for elk and the largest, most dominant bull elk reaps the rewards.

[Elk bugling] So, he creates this harem of cow elk that he guards and to summon his harem or to threaten other bull elk, he bugles.

So, he makes this very guttural call... [Elk bugling] And it will echo for miles and miles.

To hear it, it will give you chills.

And it's this piercing call that just overshadows anything that you'll hear out on the landscape.

[Elk bugling] JOHN: We've brought white-tailed deer, we've got turkeys back, we've got river otters, black bears have walked across the border from areas of Tennessee and Virginia.

And basically, what's in the woods right now is what was in the woods pre-settlement.

And I think that's just highly interesting, and elk were a part of that.

STEVEN: The elk restoration in Kentucky is a lot bigger than Kentucky.

We're fortunate here to be living you know, eastern part of the state along this Appalachian mountain chain that runs all the way up into Pennsylvania, creates this incredible wildlife corridor that goes through all these states in the East.

It's this incredible migratory corridor for birds, for wildlife conservation to protect these habitats that benefit so many other species.

And, you know, each of these projects we learn something, and so we take that knowledge to the next state if they want to try an elk reintroduction.

And it's just made for some incredible conservation and management success stories.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: We've put a lot of pressure on our forests, and we haven't always listened to the best way to care for them.

In Southern Appalachia, forest managers prescribe ways to bring back health and balance.

[fire crackling] ♪ ♪ ADAM: For tens of thousands of years, humans, indigenous people, were using fire and it was critical to their way of life.

You know, when we were starting to build our country in the early 1900s, we really needed the timber.

So, policies in the early 1900s led to the formation of the U.S.

Forest Service, which led to the era of fire suppression.

♪ ♪ SMOKEY BEAR: Remember - only you can prevent forest fires!

JORDAN LUFF: Smokey the Bear was propaganda to teach people not to accidentally start fires.

And the message, while good, had an unintended effect of perpetuating this fire suppression and fire exclusion policy that has dramatically altered our forests over the last century.

GREG COOPER: Historically, what we would've seen here is American chestnut, white oak, some red oaks.

The American chestnut is gone due to a pathogen that was brought in to the United States from humans, from Europeans.

And we are also seeing a shift towards species that don't like fire, such as maples and poplars that have become more prominent in these forests than they were historically because of the lack of fire.

If we look up into the overstory, we'll see about 50 to 60% of oaks and hickories, which is a good thing.

If we look down at the ground, we'll start seeing saplings of oaks and hickories that are about that big, can be a little bigger, which is also great.

So, it doesn't mean that there's a problem with oaks regenerating.

What we see as a big problem is what we call the oak bottleneck, which is if we look across the mid-story, the smaller diameter trees are primarily 80% poplar, maple, and other non-oak and hickory species.

So as these older overstory trees start dying, they're going to be replaced by these non-oak hickory species that are in this mid-story position.

JORDAN: When trees regenerate, they're fighting for resources.

They want sunlight, they want nutrients, they want water.

And when they regenerate amongst other trees, they're all competing for those resources at that specific site.

Maples and poplars have their place, we just want to control how dense those trees get, and really just to make oak more competitive in the understory so that oak can replace itself in the future.

♪ ♪ Oaks support boundless amounts of wildlife.

Over 400 species of caterpillar rely on oaks as a host.

And that essentially makes oaks the basis of a massive food web.

And without that we're concerned that we could see dramatic drops in wildlife populations, which we're already seeing due to development and climate change.

♪ ♪ SEAN BARRY: I've been a conservationist my entire life.

I grew up in the woods and hunting and fishing and had a grandfather who was really influential in my upbringing, exposing me to nature and outside and so I've always felt a connection.

A ruffed grouse is a charismatic game bird with a large range.

You can find them all the way out in Alaska, and we are actually at the southernmost extent of their range here in the Southern Appalachians.

People have always pursued them as a game bird, and they tell us a lot about the forest.

So, we like to think of ruffed grouse as what we call an indicator species and that's because they live in multiple different forest types and different age classes of forests.

What we have in the Southern Appalachians is a lot of homogenous forests, forests that have the same rough age of tree, not a lot of complex structure.

And so, the grouse is sort of our canary in a coal mine.

And what we know in the Southern Appalachians is that our forests are very ecologically out of whack.

Acorns are huge for ruffed grouse.

So, in the Southern Appalachians, about a quarter of their diet can be made up of acorns and beech fruits.

And so, that's why managing for oak is an important component.

The grouse is our messenger, but when we manage for diverse forests, we're getting a very, very productive forest that will benefit a suite of wildlife species.

And that's why the grouse is important.

♪ ♪ GREG: We're using controlled fire to create forest conditions that promote oak and allow oak.

The other thing is do some thinning, because the trees that have grown up in the past hundred years are now too large for fire to control.

Fire can only control a tree that is about two, three inches in diameter.

Once it gets beyond that, fire no longer can kill that tree from the top.

The way that we're doing this thinning of these mid-story trees is very simple.

We take a hatchet, we hack into a tree, and we take a little squirt of herbicide that's targeted to these trees, squirt it into the wound that we create with a hatchet, and then we walk away.

[rustling leaves] This is a mid-story red maple.

So these are the tree species that will replace mature white oaks like that one and become the future of this forest, if we do not intervene.

So, this is an example of a tree that we did treat already with herbicide, so you can see the hacks in it.

And so, come next spring, next summer, this tree will not grow leaves again.

It's very efficient, it's very meditative because you get to walk through the woods and you're just going through, visiting every tree, identifying it, and then truly surgically selecting that tree as a species that you're going to remove from the forest in order to allow other species, the oaks and hickories, to thrive.

We can't think about climate change as this future condition that we're going towards, we're already seeing it.

We're seeing changes in wildfires, we're seeing changes in the growth rates of trees.

Turns out climate change is actually beneficial for some tree species, and trees are growing faster as a result of warming temperatures and longer seasons.

However, we're also seeing major impacts from pests that are moving north and uphill into these colder weather areas and impacting vast swaths of forests.

We're seeing more stress on trees through droughts and through disease.

JORDAN: With changing climate we have more extreme weather events that fast track that conversion of oak forests, and the cascading effect of that is that wildlife that relies on oak, from insects to bears, could dramatically reduce in our region.

Helene damaged some 800,000 acres that we're aware of and most of that occurred in oak forests and also some of our high elevation forests.

ADAM: As that oak disappears from that spot or that area, there could be a single insect species that depends on that.

Butterflies, for example, really depend on white oak leaves.

So, we stand to lose our biodiversity, and that's critical for, you know, sustaining life on this planet.

When we work in this field, it's a lot about something called "adaptive management," which means we do something and we learn from it, and then we fix it the next time.

And it's a circle.

♪ ♪ JORDAN: If we don't intervene, oak forests will get replaced by those more moisture-dependent species that use more water.

There'll be less water coming from headwaters, to be used as drinking water and downstream reservoirs.

There'll be more invasive species taking over in forests, and, by and large, we'll see a dramatic drop in biodiversity over time.

♪ ♪ I'm super passionate about forests.

I love forests and trees, and ever since I started learning about them, it has been my life's goal to have some kind of meaningful impact that is bigger than me and my little sphere of influence.

I really do think about, like, what my kids are going to inherit and the future that they inherit.

I want to leave something for them that I can say I had an impact in and that they can then carry that forward.

JENNIE: What if we could prove that some of the most effective "medicine" that we have, has been with us all along?

♪ ♪ And what if that proof came from one local experiment dubbed "The Green Heart" project.

♪ ♪ DR.

BHATNAGAR: Well, it started with the realization that much of heart disease could be linked to exposure to air pollution.

♪ ♪ There is so much disease burden because of exposure to traffic and from factories.

♪ ♪ CHRIS CHANDLER: We have the fastest warming city documented in the United States.

Louisville is kind of a bowl.

And so, during the summer we get a lot of air pollution and it just kind of camps out over Louisville.

♪ ♪ DR.

BHATNAGAR: Then we thought maybe one thing we could do is to increase the number of trees in a neighborhood and see what happens.

JENNIE: Why trees?

What's the benefit to people's health?

CHRIS: Trees filter the air, literally making the oxygen we need to breathe, which was the major element of the project.

In that filtration of the air we're breathing, is there a correlated health impact on our heart health, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity?

DR.

BHATNAGAR: We have this detailed map of where the pollutants are.

We wanted to see where the levels of pollution were highest, and we selectively targeted our trees to those areas.

CHRIS: So, for 18 months, we monitored the environmental conditions, noise monitoring, air temperature monitoring, air pollution monitoring, traffic counts on major roads.

And we even flew with fixed-wing aircraft at a high elevation and took scans of all of the trees.

So, we know every single tree that's in the community and the biomass of the tree and the species.

It was important to understand all of those conditions environmentally before we then came in and made the changes, the planting of all of the new trees.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: And how did you pick this specific location to plant the trees?

DR.

BHATNAGAR: We surveyed 50 different neighborhoods in Louisville, and there were certain criteria that we thought the neighborhood should meet.

One of that was it should be low to middle income.

We wanted a neighborhood that was transected by a freeway, where there was a mixed population, so we had black residents and white residents living together.

And then, finally we wanted a neighborhood that was dense enough.

So, we have here over within, like, 3 miles, about 20,000-25,000 people living in this area.

CHRIS: We started by sitting in the community for actually about 18 months, knocking on doors, sitting on front porches, attending community meetings.

We needed to deeply understand the baseline of health of the community, the stress, the cardiovascular health and the well-being of the community, the attitudes and perceptions about nature, and their neighborhood, and how much time they spend outdoors and their perception of safety.

DR.

BHATNAGAR: We talked to the community and said, "Would it be okay if we planted trees in your neighborhood?

Would you like that?"

And they said, "Well, that's one of our missions for our neighborhood, that the more greenness we have, the better the neighborhood would be."

So, we got their permission to do this.

Then, we organized what we call "in-person exams."

We measured their blood and urine and their saliva levels...and we can test them to look at their blood pressure, their heart rate.

So, in the first pass, we did about 800 people in in-person exams, and we've been doing that every year since then, so that we would have a continuous track of what's happening to the health of the people in the neighborhood.

NICK WEYRENS: We go to a facility and have lots of different measurements taken to look at different things like our lung capacity, our blood markers, like triglycerides, cholesterol, things like that.

My total cholesterol decreased over the life of the study.

Correlation doesn't mean causation, but I think looking broadly at the study as a whole, it's showing that that's happening across lots of different people, different stages of life.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: What have you seen from where you started planting to today and people's health?

CHRIS: It's remarkable.

It essentially relates to about a reduction of 10% of heart attacks to the population of folks that live within a close proximity to the trees that we've planted.

JENNIE: So, tell me, how did the community respond to this whole project?

DR.

BHATNAGAR: We've done repeated surveys and over 85, 90% people say they love the trees being here, that nobody's ever paid attention to their neighborhood, and they tell me how excited they are to be part of this grand experiment, and that something like this has never been done anywhere else in the world.

So, they feel part of this something important.

JENNIE: And have you thought about climate change and planting the trees, what it does for that?

DR.

BHATNAGAR: Yes!

So, I think the trees could be the most frontline defense against climate change, because trees not only improve human health, they improve the environment, they improve soil quality, they prevent stormwater runoff, they prevent soil erosion.

They prevent urban heat from accumulating.

So, I think our learning would help us redeem the promise of greenness in combating climate change.

JENNIE: What was difficult about getting these big trees in here and planting them?

DR.

BHATNAGAR: We planted almost 8,000 mature trees because if you had planted small trees, it would take 30 years for us to gather data.

This park is just one place, we planted hundreds of homes, we planted businesses, churches, funeral homes, schools, right of ways... any place that we could get, we planted trees there because we need to have a high coverage.

So, what we have is a central area where we planted all the trees, we call it the target zone.

Around that, we didn't plant any trees.

That's the control zone.

So we're comparing the health of people in the target zone and the control zone.

JENNIE: Did you go back and do all of the same medical workups on the people that you did at the beginning to see the difference?

DR.

BHATNAGAR: Yes.

We do the same battery of tests every year on these people.

They have less levels of inflammation which means that they have less risk of heart disease, less risk of age- associated changes.

JENNIE: So, will this be a model for other projects like this around the country?

DR.

BHATNAGAR: We certainly hope so.

The idea that increasing greenness could improve the health of people in a neighborhood, I hope would permeate into other neighborhoods, other cities, as well as other parts of the world.

♪ ♪ If we have this roadmap that we can offer to different cities, then I think that the project will be well worth it.

♪ ♪ CHRIS: When New York calls, LA calls, Seattle calls, Washington D.C., and we have a story that's compelling and we have something to share that could help improve their cities, it's a large point of pride for us in Kentucky.

♪ ♪ NICK: We enjoy walking around more often because it looks more beautiful.

We've gotten to know a lot of neighbors by name, just by being outside and being able to see them walk safely in our neighborhood.

So, I do think it's created a sense of connection.

♪ ♪ CHRIS: Nature unites us.

Together, we've been able to do something remarkable and grow deep relationships that will go well into the future beyond any funding cycle or grant cycle to continue this work.

These are lasting relationships.

♪ ♪ DR.

BHATNAGAR: We have a relationship with trees, and they are living things just as we are living things.

And there is this sort of unbreakable bond between us and nature.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪