BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Monday is Earth Day – when people all over the world look at how they can give back to their planet. In our area, some organizations have mastered that art year-round.
At the Intervale Center, they work to make the planet a greener and cleaner place 365 days a year. For folks who are looking to be involved, the Intervale is hosting a Nature Spectacular Day at the end of April.
“So with our mission being to strengthen the community food system, we know that the environment is the foundation of that food system. So we steward this land with that vision. And we engage the community in a lot of different ways to really foster our food system, our environment, and our community as a whole. There is a Nature Spectacular Day happening at the end of the month where people can come down and learn more about how to steward the environment,” said Melanie Guild, Development Director of the Intervale Center.
“This is a partnership event and it happens throughout the month, through the city nature celebration, and this is our own little event that we hold at the end of April for folks that come down and engage in various activities, like plantings and bird walks and lots of different ways to sort of welcome spring and really dig into the season,” said Guild.
Guild says community involvement is important for understanding our food system and local economy.
“The closer that we are to our food system, the more connected we are as a community, the better we are to support our local economy. So it just really fosters our connection to our food, to our natural environment, and to each other,” she said.
Ben Fishbein runs the conservation nursery at the Intervale Center, and he says the trees they plant can help protect the land from flood damage.
“So the conservation nursery was set up by the Intervale Center back in 2001. And since then, we’ve planted nearly 500,000 trees across Vermont, nearly like 2000 acres of forest approximately, and these trees are all riparian, so they naturally live and thrive in floodplain forests alongside river stream banks and riversides. So they do a fantastic job at mitigating against flood impacts, providing habitat for various wildlife species and pollinator species as well,” said Fishbein.
“We saw firsthand down here the importance of these floodplain forests and buffer zones and slowing down the flow of the Winooski who was raging down over by the falls and flowing very fast rate here. And it was amazing to see how it slowed down this flow of the water and saved a lot of the farm fields that we rely on a lot for food in Burlington to not get as damaged as that could have been,” he said.
For those of us who don’t have a big nursery or the ability to plant thousands of trees, Fishbein says there are still ways to give back to your land.
“I mean, awareness is an amazing place to start – just walking around and appreciating what nature has to give to protect us to keep us safe and what we can do to get back to it by tending to it in any way we can. Coming down here helping out at the nursery, helping out with the various other programs that we have done at the Intervale Center are great ways to help,” he said.