COLLECTING LOGS: Ridgeview Turtles Trail Stewards collect logs to line the trails at the Ridgeview Conservancy. Area students meet in the forest every Sunday with Conservancy Director of Stewardship Patricia Shanley and work to restore the woods and foster connections with nature for all.  (Photo courtesy of Ridgeview Conservancy)

By Donald Gilpin

Conserving Princeton’s forests and wetlands, fostering connections with nature — especially for youth — and providing equitable access to nature for all were the themes last week, as Ridgeview Conservancy Founder, Board Member, and Director of Stewardship Patricia Shanley spoke to the Princeton Council.

In a 30-minute presentation accompanied by 16 illustrative slides and joined at the end by two young Ridgeview Conservancy volunteers (Ridgeview Turtles Trail Stewards), Shanley urged Princeton to embrace the health and community benefits of green space.

Describing Shanley as “an inspiration,” Councilwoman Michelle Pirone Lambros applauded Shanley’s presentation. “Of all the things we’re doing on Council, I would say nothing that we’ve done is more important than conserving those acres,” she said. “There’s no going back, and we couldn’t do it without your inspiration and leadership.”

Council President Mia Sacks, highlighting Shanley’s “vision that has led us through this really significant preservation effort in a short time,” pointed out the value of “smart growth,” the balance sought by Council in trying to foster careful development in the core of the town while preserving key environmentally sensitive areas around the perimeter.

In her speech Shanley repeatedly emphasized the connection between nature and human health. “The loss and degradation of forests has detrimental impacts on human health,” she said. “It impacts us enormously.”

She explained a new term called “environmental grief,” describing a disease that sets in as people drive or walk by a forest that they loved and see it’s no longer there. “People feel that inside themselves,” she said. “We don’t have much to work with, so what we’re trying to do in Princeton and many other towns is restore some of the degraded area and make an impact.”

Another key element she mentioned is the necessity of equitable access to green space for the sake of health care. “There is a disparity of health outcomes depending on whether you live near green or not near green,” she said. “It’s a social environmental justice issue. There’s a privatization and corporatization of green space everywhere. Access to greenways for marginalized populations is diminishing globally.”

Access to nature and forests, said Shanley, lowers morbidity and mortality, extending people’s lives by eight to 10 years and more. “Being near green vastly magnifies the benefits of exercise and recreation, so putting physical exercise and green space together is about the best thing you can do to improve your life span and your quality of life,” she added.

Cognition, mental health, disease regulation, and the promoting of community are all enhanced by the presence of green spaces. Shanley went on to explain how nature prompts the brain to “release natural opiates” and is “both calming and invigorating.”

She highlighted the synergies between recreation and open space, which together slow aging; diminish incidence of chronic disease; improve cardiovascular health, metabolism, and mood; and improve the capacity to learn and solve problems.

“We know it reduces depression, lowers anxiety and stress, improves self-esteem, and, after all these years of COVID, increases sociability,” she said. “It’s good to help us get out and be together.”

Shanley went on to address the global situation, where 190 countries have agreed to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s land and waters by 2030.

She praised the Council for the work it has been doing to get Princeton up to 27 percent, and offered a goal of working together to increase that number and make connections between the open spaces in Princeton and the surrounding area. She noted Princeton’s beautiful parks and called for “stringing together those gems to create ‘Princeton’s Emerald Necklace.’”

She continued, “They’re beautiful each individually, but if they were strung together with some kind of connection it would be vastly better for the wildlife and for the people because you could easily reach those places without cars.”

Increases in intergenerational contacts, property values, and tourism, and improvements in public health and the quality of life also arise from enhancement of forests and green spaces, Shanley said.

She went on to talk about “Princeton’s green legacy” and thanked the Council members for their “transformational leadership” in preserving green spaces. “Princeton is such a wonderful place to live,” said Shanley. “Everybody wants every square inch of land to put their homes on. You have not allowed that to happen in particular cases, and we really applaud you. You’ve worked really hard and taken risks and jumped a lot of barriers to save what you’ve saved, and we hope we can continue doing this together.”

Shanley pointed out the importance of the young people involved with the Ridgeview Conservancy and how in many cases their experiences there change their lives. “These kids are going to face a lot of conflict in their lifetime, and we need them to have inspired ideas,” she said. “We need them to have this time in nature so that they have something to draw from to get those ideas. If they’re on their phones for 12 hours a day, which many of them are, they will not be having those ideas.”

She continued, “We need to make nature nearby so they can get there, and we need to make it attractive with nice trails and fun trails. Kids are making the trails for other kids, to pull them in. They will be magnets.”

Shanley described the impact that Ridgeview Conservancy has had on many student participants, the Ridgeview Turtles Trail Stewards — “young people protecting old forests.”

“They come back after college,” she said. “They change their majors to the environmental field. They’re trying to scale up by teaching in the schools to get young kids interested. They feel a sense of purpose. It boosts their mental and physical health, and there are a lot of career opportunities in this because all urban centers will need to be green.”

Kyleigh Tangen, a 17-year-old rising Princeton High School (PHS) senior, described how her work as a Ridgeview Turtle affected her. “Working to restore Princeton’s forests every Sunday is what starts off my week right,” she said in an email. “I feel like restoring the forest restores me. Out of everything I’ve done to fight against climate change, this work feels the most effective. I’m doing something that truly helps the earth, and that relieves the stress I feel about the future of the world.”

Tangen and her father figured out how to do a 26-mile hike in a loop around Princeton — an emerald necklace of sorts, and the day she walked that with her father, she said, was “the happiest day of my life.”

She continued, “I had no idea how much open space there was in Princeton. When I walked through the 26-mile loop of trails with my dad, I was not only blown away by the extent, but by how many beautiful places there were that I hadn’t known about.”

Kate Krehel, a 2023 PHS graduate and leader of the Turtles for the past two years, is taking a gap year to work with the Conservancy in helping to expand stewardship to other towns, using Princeton as a template “because of the wonderful effects the experience has had for me, my friends, and others.”

She told the meeting of Councilmembers, “Every Sunday in the woods we learn about flora and fauna, stuff we never learned in school. We help create trails for the public to access so we can share this amazing nature with other people.”

She continued, “Being in nature for me is always so rejuvenating. It relieves academic pressure and stress. We use a lot of technology every day. We’re always on our computers, and having an outlet like Ridgeview Woods, to be off our phones, away from technology, is always so rejuvenating.

“I always walked in feeling tired and stressed out, and I walked out feeling energized, ready for another week of school. That made me passionate to protect the woods and share them with other people. And another thing it creates is a sense of empowerment. Being able to go and take local action that makes a difference as young people makes us feel really empowered and passionate about this type of stuff. I hope the same admiration and passion can grow in other Princeton residents.”

Erin Kim, a rising PHS senior who, along with Tangen, will be leading the Turtles in the coming year, told the Council how her work with Ridgeview Conservancy has helped to change her life. “Being in the woods and helping to remove invasive species, instead of taking away my time, actually added to it. It helped me focus and perform better in school because of how grounding and anxiety-reducing it was.”

Describing time in the forest as “a massive tonic for your brain, body, and spirit,” Shanley reflected, “I am amazed each week when students show up. I can see that in restoring the forest, they become connected to it and are transformed. To save the Earth, we need more programs to save forests, and to get kids into them.”