WV Highlands (Tucker County)
The Japanese practice of ‘forest bathing’ is scientifically proven to improve your health
From an Article by Ephrat Livni, Quartz News, October 12, 2016
The tonic of the wilderness was Henry David Thoreau’s classic prescription for civilization and its discontents, offered in the 1854 essay Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. Now there’s scientific evidence supporting eco-therapy. The Japanese practice of forest bathing is proven to lower heart rate and blood pressure, reduce stress hormone production, boost the immune system, and improve overall feelings of wellbeing.
Forest bathing—basically just being in the presence of trees—became part of a national public health program in Japan in 1982 when the forestry ministry coined the phrase shinrin-yoku and promoted topiary as therapy. Nature appreciation—picnicking en masse under the cherry blossoms, for example—is a national pastime in Japan, so forest bathing quickly took. The environment’s wisdom has long been evident to the culture: Japan’s Zen masters asked: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears, does it make a sound?
To discover the answer, masters do nothing, and gain illumination. Forest bathing works similarly: Just be with trees. No hiking, no counting steps on a Fitbit. You can sit or meander, but the point is to relax rather than accomplish anything.
Forest air doesn’t just feel fresher and better—inhaling phytoncide seems to actually improve immune system function.
“Don’t effort,” says Gregg Berman, a registered nurse, wilderness expert, and certified forest bathing guide in California. He’s leading a small group on the Big Trees Trail in Oakland one cool October afternoon, barefoot among the redwoods. Berman tells the group—wearing shoes—that the human nervous system is both of nature and attuned to it. Planes roar overhead as the forest bathers wander slowly, quietly, under the green cathedral of trees.
From 2004 to 2012, Japanese officials spent about $4 million dollars studying the physiological and psychological effects of forest bathing, designating 48 therapy trails based on the results. Qing Li, a professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, measured the activity of human natural killer (NK) cells in the immune system before and after exposure to the woods. These cells provide rapid responses to viral-infected cells and respond to tumor formation, and are associated with immune system health and cancer prevention. In a 2009 study Li’s subjects showed significant increases in NK cell activity in the week after a forest visit, and positive effects lasted a month following each weekend in the woods.
This is due to various essential oils, generally called phytoncide, found in wood, plants, and some fruit and vegetables, which trees emit to protect themselves from germs and insects. Forest air doesn’t just feel fresher and better—inhaling phytoncide seems to actually improve immune system function.
Experiments on forest bathing conducted by the Center for Environment, Health and Field Sciences in Japan’s Chiba University measured its physiological effects on 280 subjects in their early 20s. The team measured the subjects’ salivary cortisol (which increases with stress), blood pressure, pulse rate, and heart rate variability during a day in the city and compared those to the same biometrics taken during a day with a 30-minute forest visit. “Forest environments promote lower concentrations of cortisol, lower pulse rate, lower blood pressure, greater parasympathetic nerve activity, and lower sympathetic nerve activity than do city environments,” the study concluded.
In other words, being in nature made subjects, physiologically, less amped. The parasympathetic nerve system controls the body’s rest-and-digest system while the sympathetic nerve system governs fight-or-flight responses. Subjects were more rested and less inclined to stress after a forest bath.
Trees soothe the spirit too. A study on forest bathing’s psychological effects surveyed 498 healthy volunteers, twice in a forest and twice in control environments. The subjects showed significantly reduced hostility and depression scores, coupled with increased liveliness, after exposure to trees. “Accordingly,” the researchers wrote, “forest environments can be viewed as therapeutic landscapes.”
Berman advised the forest bathers to pick up a rock, put a problem in and drop it. “You can pick up your troubles again when you leave,” he said with a straight face.
City dwellers can benefit from the effects of trees with just a visit to the park. Brief exposure to greenery in urban environments can relieve stress levels, and experts have recommended “doses of nature” as part of treatment of attention disorders in children. What all of this evidence suggests is we don’t seem to need a lot of exposure to gain from nature—but regular contact appears to improve our immune system function and our wellbeing.
Julia Plevin, a product designer and urban forest bather, founded San Francisco’s 200-member Forest Bathing Club Meetup in 2014. They gather monthly to escape technology. “It’s an immersive experience,” Plevin explained to Quartz. “So much of our lives are spent interacting with 2D screens. This is such a bummer because there’s a whole 3D world out there! Forest bathing is a break from your phone and computer…from all that noise of social media and email.”
Before we crossed the threshold into the woods in Oakland, Berman advised the forest bathers to pick up a rock, put a problem in and drop it. “You can pick up your troubles again when you leave,” he said with a straight face. But after two hours of forest bathing, no one does.
Joy Chiu, a leadership and life coach on the forest bath led by Berman, explained that this perspective on problems lasts long after a bath, and that she returns to the peace of the forest when she’s far from here, feeling harried. “It’s grounding and I go back to the calm feeling of being here. It’s not like a time capsule, but something I can continually return to.”
See also: WV Highlands Conservancy
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This Natural Phenomenon In West Virginia Happens Just Once A Year And It’s Spectacular
Most of our state is bursting into fall foliage color right now, and you can go just about anywhere in West Virginia to see beautiful trees. But there’s one place in the state where the color is not just in the trees… the ground also turns into a brilliant carpet of red. You can see this take place for just a few weeks in the Dolly Sods Wilderness area of West Virginia. The high elevation and unusual climate creates an atmosphere that stands apart from the rest of the scenery in the state.
Directions to Dolly Sods:
From Petersburg follow WV 28/55 south to Jordan Run Road. Turn right and go 1 mile to Forest Road 19. Turn left and follow FR 19 six miles to the Dolly Sods Scenic Area. The wilderness is directly ahead of you at the intersection with FR 75. Turn right for Wildlife and Fisher Spring trailheads; turn left for Rohrbaugh and Red Creek trailheads.
From Canaan Valley: follow WV 32 south to the Laneville Road (WV 45). Turn left and go approximately 6 miles to the Red Creek Bridge, where the road changes from pavement to gravel and is now Forest Road 19. Red Creek trailhead is on the left behind the Laneville wildlife management cabin. Continue on FR 19 to get to Rohrbaugh trailhead and FR 75.
The roads into the Dolly Sods area are rough, so drive slowly. Use caution when hiking or camping in this area. The area was once used to test explosives. If you find an object that could be an explosive, don’t touch it. Make sure to extinguish all fires, and use fires only in designated areas. Several campfires burned out of control here a few weeks ago.
For another great look at West Virginia fall foliage, check out this scenic road trip.
Source: http://www.onlyinyourstate.com/west-virginia/dolly-sods-wv/
See also: http://www.wvhighlands.org
WV- Still Ours!
From Lissa Lucas, Cairo, Ritchie County, October 21, 2016
Morning is my favorite time to hike. Our trail runs along the edge of our ridge going North-South, so as the sun comes up it begins peeking through the trees, and even through the grasses, like a forest fire.
The world starts in black and white, and color spreads out as the light hits it, like Oz has come without the storm. I can see the light move its way through the grasses, climb the trunks of trees, and call out the autumn colors like Bob Ross. The hickories are golden.
The trees throw long shadows into my path, across the carpet of fallen leaves. I can feel alternating spots of light and dark on my shoulder as I go: warm, cool, warm, cool.
In the fall with some of the leaves down—or for that matter in the spring before all the leaves are up—that sense of walking through a strobe is even stronger.
And when there’s a breeze, even the small, pallid locust leaves catch patches of sunlight and are transformed into showers of shimmering confetti as they fall.
Seeing that, my dog Reggie performs a series of goofy leaps and pounces, jumping at the leaves, and then chasing after their shadows. After some moments of doggie confusion at their lack of substance, he finally flops over on his back and rolls back and forth until I catch up to him. Then he rights himself, leaving a flopsy ear askew and aiming a grin at me. Good dog.
That’s how it was yesterday morning. And I needed those moments of beauty, since there was to be another public meeting last night regarding the fracking jeopardy our state is facing—this one in Jackson’s Mill. We’re being threatened with two more pipelines here n West Virginia. It’s not clear there’s even a need for them.
I had committed to speak at the meeting, but there’s just too much to say. I hardly know where to begin. How can I make beautiful days like these understandable to people who judge the value of something based solely on how much of it they can transform into cash?
The stress of living in Frackistan is making it difficult to sleep, I’ll be honest. I’ve been up since 2am. At least we still have our forest, our trails. Some people here have lost that already. But our winding creek is still intact.
It’s filled with silvery fingerlings, and occasionally those same waterbugs that used to fascinate me as a kid playing in Jackson Creek in Vienna. I know what time of year to go down to the creek see the blooming trilliums, and what time to gather morels. I know where our box turtles like to lay their eggs.
There are crawdads. And we have a couple little wetlands, not bigger than ponds, with newts and frogs and toads. I’m lucky. We still have our creek. For now.
But with the thought of the creek on this beautiful day, and with my dog of a mind to play, I head all the way down to the holler in a series of south and east zig-zags.
It’s maybe a 20 minute descent. Once you get down the last part of the narrow path, it opens, with the caves directly in front, up a steep slope on the opposite bank.
Reggie is all wags, and plunges into deep spots while I dip my toes in and keep my eyes peeled for arrowheads. Leaves fall, and I brush them out of my hair. The dog splashes, and eventually sits beside me on the bank and presses against my arm until I wrap it around him. It’s a beautiful day.
He’s happy and exhausted when we finally get back to the house. I’m calm… but the lack of sleep is wearing. Still, it’s time to go to the meeting.
My husband will be home in a little bit. I find my notes, grab my cards. He made me cards, bless him. So I clean up, change into my suit and kiss Reggie goodbye. Then I head out. There are many presenters, and the facts are depressing.
When it comes time for me to speak, I talk about some of the things I’ve talked about here before. West Virginia’s Resource Curse–how extraction activities target impoverished areas, and bring more poverty. I have all the data on the website here, but West Virginians all know extraction doesn’t help regular people. If that were true, coal mining communities would be dripping with wealth, and that’s just never been the case. But it’s not just financial wealth it drains, that’s the really tragic thing.
We know that in McDowell county, for example, residents are literally paying those socialized costs with their lives. Profits are private. The average life expectancy there, due to coal extraction, is far lower than average. Each person pays an average of a decade or more. Wealth pours up; it doesn’t trickle down. Extraction execs pocket their sacrifice in the form of profit.
It’s as if there is some monstrous thing living in the hills exacting a ghastly toll on the whole county, every man, woman, and child. It creeps into homes at night, hovers over them as they sleep, and feeds on bits of their souls, sucking up the days until 10 years are gone for every one of them. It’s eating them bit by bit… and we’ve been doing such a good job of feeding that ravening beast with Appalachian coal, that it’s coming for our gas and oil now, too.
Resource Barons are essentially transforming those lost years into cash for themselves. They pocket it and go without a second thought, leaving their victims bleeding out. And our politicians are allowing, even encouraging it… because, campaign contributions.
That’s what is coming here to frack-impacted counties. I have the stress that will kill me early, enough foreboding for a series of horror flicks. It’s hard to sleep, because I see monsters when I close my eyes.
That’s why I hike… and it’s why I have so much horror and sympathy for the people who have already had their peace of mind stolen or destroyed by companies like Antero. FERC is not there to help regular people. The threatened Mountain Valley Pipeline, one of the proposed lines discussed at the meeting, would socialize a huge cost on the people who live along its path. They would be paying 8 billion dollars.
Not all of it in money: much will be in years.
And we know that both proposed pipelines are not even needed, since existing pipelines are sufficient. Not only that, the study concludes that they “would be financially beneficial to utility companies and investors while burdening customers with higher bills to cover the cost of the unnecessary construction.”
That’s why I write, why I share my photos. It’s because I care about this life; I care about this West Virginia. I care about OUR West Virginia. It’s still ours, but we have to fight for it.
If I do run for office in 2018, I’ll do my best to change the conversation. Win or lose, I have to communicate what is being lost, because many folks in Charleston—or who want to be there—really don’t remember. Or care. Or something. Otherwise how could they allow this slow death for us.
Writing is a way to fight the monster, keep it at bay. Because if I can remind our representatives that there’s more to value here than what’s in their pockets and on their resumes—so much more—maybe we can vanquish that greedy thing and make this a prosperous place for all of us.
If you love West Virginia, too, raise your voice. Let your representatives know. Don’t give up. We’re fighting for our lives.
Holler from the hollers, Lissa Lucas, Ritchie County, WV
Source: https://lissalucas.com/2016/10/21/wv-still-ours/
Court Rejects Drilling in Upper Desolation Canyon, Utah
From the Redrock Report of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, October 13, 2016
A federal judge recently issued an order rejecting a natural gas project on public lands along the Upper Desolation Canyon stretch of the Green River in eastern Utah.
Part of the larger, highly controversial Gasco Natural Gas Development Project approved by the BLM in 2012, the 16-well project at issue in the judge’s ruling was slated for construction on three drilling pads adjacent to the Upper Desolation Canyon stretch of the Green River, where families and river runners enjoy solitude between high canyon walls, sandy beaches, and groves of cottonwood trees.
The court held that the BLM’s evaluation of air pollution, and in particular ozone pollution, was inaccurate and inadequate. The judge also agreed with us that the agency did not seriously consider the noise from drilling these wells and how that would affect river runners and families.
A big thank you to all our members who submitted comments on the Gasco project, wrote letters to the editor opposing the project, or otherwise supported our efforts to send this one back to the drawing board. We couldn’t have done it without you!
The National Forest in England
The National Forest is an area of 200 square miles spanning across 3 counties. At present there are 17 Forestry Commission woodlands within The National Forest, comprising of 3 existing woodlands and 14 newly planted sites.
Download our National Forest explore leaflet for a detailed map of all the main forests and their features. More details of each forest can also be found in the left hand column.
Walking — There are plenty of forest walks for everybody. Hicks Lodge and Sence Valley offer scenic lakeside walks. At Rosliston, adventure and discovery trails lead you away from the visitor centre to explore the woods. Shellbrook Wood, Seale Wood, Tunnel Woods and Swainspark Woods provide a peaceful escape from the hustle and bustle.
Cycling — Hicks Lodge, The National Forest Cycle Centre, offers 16km of off road cycle trails ranging from family friendly surfaced paths to more technical and challenging mountain biking routes.
Cyclists can also enjoy miles of shared use paths across the forest. At Sence Valley cyclists can take a gentle ride around the lakes and follow the bridle path to Kelham Bridge, a raptor viewing hotspot. At Alistairs, Bignall’s and Jaguar Lount Woods you can follow the surfaced cycle route from the Ferrer’s Centre through all three woodlands taking in the walnut plantings and large open grassland.
Horse riding — A network of public bridle paths cross The National Forest, however riders wishing to complement these can use the purposely designed horse routes at Seale Wood and Bignall’s and Jaguar Lount Woods. Use of these routes is by TROT permit, information and permits can be obtained from TROT, http://www.tollrides.org.uk.
Fishing — Fishing is available on two lakes on Forestry Commission sites; Goss Water, at Sence Valley Forest Park and Greenheart Lake, at Rosliston Forestry Centre where fishing is by permit only from the onsite visitor centre.