A Prescription: Trees for Community Health
A Nurse Prescribes Trees for Family Health
As smoke from Canadian wildfires recently inundated the northeast region, our team toured the forest with professional colleagues. Air quality was horrendous, but under the Forest canopy, it was cool and easy to breathe. Trees absorb gaseous molecules, toxic pollutants and particulate matter (the fine, poisonous dust from engines, furnaces, fires and other exhausts). Studies estimate that trees keep up to 60 percent of particulate matter out of our lungs.
Forests provide a multitude of health benefits. Madison resident and nurse Colette Crescas shares five ways trees are essential to our health.
Trees take pollutants and carbon dioxide out of the air, providing us with clean, hydrated oxygen to breathe in and “feed” our body. Trees keep damaging particulates from irritating our lungs.
Trees store and filter more than half of the water supply in the United States. Thanks to trees, water is healthier for us to drink and our waterways are cleaner.
Trees are a natural air conditioner and reduce peak temperatures during extreme heat waves. A young tree has the cooling effect of five room-sized air conditioners working for 20 hours a day (US Forest Service). According to the Tree Equity Score Report, in cities nationwide, trees prevent approximately 1,200 heat-related deaths and countless heat-related illnesses annually by lowering surface and air temperatures.
Trees have been proven to boost your emotional and physical health. Spending time with trees in our outdoor environment correlates to a drop in anxiety and depression with a resultant drop in blood pressure and heart disease. Hospitalized patients with a window that overlooks trees recover more quickly.
Finally, trees encourage us to move around and exercise, thereby lowering rates of obesity. Children with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) concentrate better after being in outdoor green settings. Students who have trees in and around the school playground also get better grades.
Madison applies for open space funds
A big thank you to the overflow crowd who showed up at the May 29th Madison Borough Council meeting to support the Mayor and Council.
In June, the Borough of Madison filed an application to the Morris County Open Space Fund for $10 million in grant funding to contribute to preserving the Drew Forest. At the June 12 Borough Council meeting, Mayor Robert Conley called on Drew University to agree upon a sale price so that the grant application can go forward. “We certainly hope that Drew joins us ... in supporting the saving of the forest, going beyond the verbal commitment to save the forest with an agreement that ensures that Drew will forever be ‘The University in the Forest,’” the Mayor said.
Friends Partner with Harmonium Choral Society for Earthsongs Performance
Friends of the Drew Forest curated a 5-minute slideshow featuring habitat and wildlife from the Forest, to accompany the Harmonium choral members as they sang “The Peace of Wild Things,” a composition by Michael Conley based on Wendell Berry’s poem of the same name. The piece was part of Harmonium’s June Earthsongs concert, which focused on the planet and our need to protect it. Friends also tabled at the event, collecting signatures and educating enthusiastic concert-goers.
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.”
Forest images accompanied Harmonium's Earthsong Concert
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