We already knew nature makes healthy. Here’s a group helping nature help troubled youth make nature healthy.

From the website of Youth and Ecological Restoration Program:

Planting native trees and shrubs in local watersheds provides habitat and protection for fish, birds and many other species.

Stephen Hume wrote for the Vancouver Sun yesterday, Healing power of troubled waters: An ecological program that links at-risk teens with damaged watersheds has breathed new life into both,

After Carnation Creek, Wendy applied and was accepted at university as a mature student, successfully studying ecology and land reclamation, presenting her own scientific papers. Then, eight years ago, she began putting her wisdom to work teaching the next generation to pay attention to the consequences of heedlessness, greed and ignorance about our dependence on the natural world.

Her innovative Youth and Ecological Restoration Program helps teenagers at risk. Some struggle with

school and employment challenges. Some have had early brushes with the law. Some face communications barriers that hinder connection with families and communities.

Her program helps kids find inner strength, recognize their personal value and then to reconnect, first with each other and then with their com-munities, by undertaking the hard and often thankless work of restoring damaged and degraded local water-sheds to ecological health—to heal by healing.

-jsq

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