Into the Woods

This week, Shara Clark and I teamed up to write the Flyer's cover story on the controversy surrounding the old-growth forest in Overton Park.

The Memphis Zoo currently controls 17 acres of old-growth forest that it plans to one day use for a low-impact boardwalk through the woods. But after the zoo bulldozed four similar acres for its new Teton Trek exhibit, local grassroots group Citizens to Preserve Overton Park reformed and asked that the zoo take down their fence and return the 17 acres to public use.

To read the full story, click here.

I get the impression that the zoo — for better or for worse — has a great deal of autonomy. Yes, the zoo is owned by the city (which then contracts its management out to the Memphis Zoological Society for $100,000 a month) and reports to the city's parks division and ultimately, the City Council.

But it also gets a large chunk of its funding from private donors and the City Council doesn't seem all that concerned with what the zoo is doing, as long as it continues to prosper.

CPOP recently went before the council to ask that the zoo's boundary be redrawn and the surviving acres of old-growth forest be protected in perpetuity. They also asked for an update to the Overton Park master plan and the zoo's contract with the now-defunct Memphis Park Commission. They have also followed up with a letter to council members and Mayor Willie Herenton.

Tree Time

The NYT has an interesting story in its Science section today about Diana Beresford-Kroeger, a biochemist and botanist who sees trees as chemical factories.

From the story:

"She favors what she terms a bioplan, reforesting cities and rural areas with trees according to the medicinal, environmental, nutritional, pesticidal and herbicidal properties she claims for them, which she calls ecofunctions.

Wafer ash, for example, could be used in organic farming, she said, planted in hedgerows to attract butterflies away from crops. Black walnut and honey locusts could be planted along roads to absorb pollutants, she said."

But here's what might be most interesting to Midtowners:

"'In a walk through old-growth forest, there are thousands if not millions of chemicals and their synergistic effects with one another,' she said. 'What trees do chemically in the environment is something we’re only beginning to understand.'"

Both Beresford-Kroeger and Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson have proposed using stock from old-growth forests in planting new forests to take advantage of those trees' good genetics.

"'There’s an enormous difference between old-growth forests and tree plantations,' Dr. Wilson said."

I've heard local CPOP member Naomi Van Tol say quite a few times that people don't realize how old some of the trees are in the old-growth forest in Overton Park because they — the trees, not the people — might be roughly the same size as trees in people's front yards.

But the trees in the old-forest have had to fight for survival and their place in the forest, which makes them fitter, hardier, and (apparently) smaller for their age.