By Claire Elise Thompson for Grist.
Broadcast version by Eric Galatas for Colorado News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

When Lois Brink’s kids were in elementary school, she remembers being struck by how uninviting their schoolyard was. She described it as “scorched earth” — little more than a dirt field coated in “I don’t know how many decades of weed retardant” and some aging play equipment. But Brink, a landscape architect and professor at the University of Colorado Denver, didn’t just see a problem. She saw fertile ground for a solution. Over the next dozen years, she helped lead a transformation of nearly 100 elementary school grounds across Denver into more vibrant, greener spaces, dubbed “Learning Landscapes.”

Public schools alone cover about 2 million acres of land in the U.S. Although comprehensive data is hard to come by, the “scorched earth” that Brink witnessed is the norm in many places — according to the Trust for Public Land, around 36 percent of the nation’s public school students attend school in what would be considered a heat island. And as with green spaces writ large, a dearth of schoolyard trees and other vegetation tends to be most common in lower-income areas and Black and brown neighborhoods.

“It really makes sense to think about how those spaces can serve well-being, development, learning, and social cohesion — and also environmental justice and resilience goals that can help a community thrive,” said Priya Cook, director of green schoolyards and communities at Children & Nature Network, one organization working to advance this goal. The org recently published a report looking at how the benefits of green schoolyards translate into economic value, focusing on Denver as a case study and using data from Brink’s work.

Incorporating factors such as school attendance and academic scores, carbon sequestration and rainwater retention, and overall community health and public safety, the report estimated that communities can reap a more than $3 return for every $1 invested in green schoolyards.

In Denver, Learning Landscapes schools saw increases in math and writing scores and overall school performance (a measure combining factors such as academic scores and graduation, dropout, and participation rates). And although this research is not definitive, the study stated that “if green schoolyards can improve student achievement in elementary school, they likely have a positive impact on high school graduation rates.” That in turn cascades into improved employment outcomes, and increased tax revenue. The study also concluded that benefits are amplified if green schoolyards are made available to the public. For instance, previous research has shown that property values increase by as much as 5 percent when the properties are within 500 feet of a park.

For Cook, translating the benefits of greening schoolyards into a monetary value is about more than helping schools think about how to spend their limited budgets – it’s about opening up new avenues of funding. “School districts are notoriously underfunded,” Cook noted. “And this is a strategy that benefits all of society. And so the financing needs to come from organizations in community development, economic development, public health — these sectors that are thinking about the whole child, whole community, society-level outcomes.”

After Brink’s aha moment at her own kids’ school, she decided to get her graduate students at the university involved in designing a better alternative. Realizing the school district didn’t have money to implement their vision, they raised the funds themselves to install a pilot at Bromwell Elementary, the school her kids attended. “Then we realized, when you raise the money for something, the district is much more willing to maybe do things nontraditional and rethink what a schoolyard could look like as a civic space,” Brink said.

That approach got the school district on board for expanding the initiative to other schools. In 2000, Brink formed the Learning Landscape alliance, a public-private partnership with support from the city, local nonprofits, and contractors that were willing to donate pro bono services to keep costs down. Over the next three years, they worked with communities to design and convert 22 schoolyards in Denver’s industrial crescent.

“What we were trying to convince the district of is that each schoolyard needs to be a total transformation,” Brink said. Each project was unique, both in its design and in the process it took to implement it. For instance, Brink recalls at one school, many of the parents happened to work in the landscape industry, so they volunteered their time alongside the contractors, laying irrigation and sod. At another school that primarily served Latino students, Brink said, the team designed raised planters that mimicked Aztec geometry.

In 2003, and then again in 2008, the Denver Public School Board proposed, and citywide voters passed, a ballot measure to set aside funding to expand the conversions throughout the city. “You had a city where 60 percent of the voters didn’t have children. And yet this passed overwhelmingly every time,” Brink said. “It was just really, really great to see that sort of level of engagement.”

All told, between 2000 and 2012, the Learning Landscapes initiative converted every single public elementary school campus in Denver to a green schoolyard, totaling 306 acres.

And all the while, Brink has been collecting data. In December of last year, she prepared a report for Children & Nature Network analyzing some of the key takeaways from Learning Landscapes (that formed the basis of its study on the economic benefits of green schoolyards more broadly). Among other impacts, the report noted a 7 percent reduction in student mobility (the rate at which students transfer in and out of a school), a $1.3 million boost in state funding thanks to increased student enrollment, and 1,284 tons of carbon sequestered each year across all the green schoolyards.

With all the benefits of green schoolyards, for students, communities, and the environment, it may seem like a no-brainer solution. Still, there are barriers to converting every single schoolyard into a green space — a vision that Children & Nature Network hopes to help realize by 2050, Priya Cook said.

Cost is one obvious one. But even more than the actual dollars, Cook said, it’s often the initiative it takes to bring together diverse stakeholders to make a project happen — what Brink and her students did when they scrapped together the resources to implement their vision in Denver, through a combination of volunteer labor, pro bono services, and public and nonprofit dollars.

Ironically, Cook noted, a significant barrier to finding the funding for green schoolyards lies in one of their greatest strengths: They’re a multifaceted solution. “Markets tend to underinvest in strategies that produce broad benefits to society,” she said. For instance, if a school, nonprofit, or other funder wanted to make changes to prioritize students’ mental health, it might invest its limited dollars in counseling programs or other targeted interventions, rather than thinking about something like nature access — even though nature access does improve mental health, in addition to other benefits.

“We have to think differently to pick multi-solving interventions,” Cook said.

Still, she’s hopeful that the growing body of research on green schoolyards will continue to bring more stakeholders to the fold.

“I think there’s absolutely more hunger for it,” she said, “and people do it in really ingenious ways. Some places have multimillion dollar investments in a single site, and some places find small grants and they do a lot of surface installations that change kids’ experience every day.”


Claire Elise Thompson wrote this article for Grist.


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A national land trust has purchased 44,000 acres of forest in Northwestern Maine to keep it wild and free for generations to come.

The Hilton Family Forest near Jackman contains mountain peaks, waterfalls and vital habitats for rare plant and animal species like the golden eagle. It is also a popular recreational area for hiking, biking and fishing.

Tom Duffus, vice president and northeast representative for The Conservation Fund, said the land will remain open to the public.

"We want to just keep things the same," Duffus explained. "What we've learned from this community so far is how important the stability of these landscapes is to them."

Duffus pointed out his organization purchased the land from the Hilton Family for $44 million and is now working with area communities on a permanent conservation solution.

Duffus stressed protecting the forest from subdivision or development contributes to the state's climate goals and improves climate and wildlife resilience. He added the land will also continue to provide revenue and jobs in the commercial sugaring, forest products and tourism industries.

"Working forests work for nature, they work for people," Duffus emphasized. "That is really the point of keeping all that going in a real sea change of land use that is happening in the forested landscapes around the country."

Maine is the most forested state in the nation and most of that forest is privately owned. Duffus noted there has been high turnover in land ownership since the 1990s, when paper companies began to sell their properties to timber investors. He added The Conservation Fund is helping to build a growing network of protected lands for the public good.

Advocates for public lands access are raising alarms about a lawsuit that could be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Utah has filed a suit arguing the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is holding about 18.5 million acres of land in the state unconstitutionally, saying it can't keep unappropriated land in perpetuity.

Idaho and twelve other states have joined the suit. They say federally controlled land should be transferred to states.

But Executive Director of the Idaho Wildlife Federation, Nick Fasciano, said that would be disastrous for public lands and the people who use them.

"State ownership of land at this scale is a direct path to privatization," said Fasciano. "State budgets do not have the capacity to manage lands at enormous scale like this without selling it off. Idaho has a constitutional mandate to maximize the financial return of the land under its management."

The U.S. Justice Department said Utah's claims are "without merit" in a brief filed with the Supreme Court.

The BLM manages nearly 12 million acres of land in Idaho.

Outdoor recreation has been increasing in Idaho, adding nearly $4 million to the economy in 2023.

Fasciano said hunters, anglers, and other recreationists fear privatization will mean they're cut off from access to public lands.

But he noted that when Congress tried to transfer public lands to states in 2017, there was an overwhelming response from the hunting community and the legislation was dropped.

"Hunters," said Fasciano, "we spend so much of our lives on public lands that we're very invested in these things continuing to be open and public, and prepared to get pretty loud in opposition to this sort of idea."

Fasciano said public input on how lands would be managed could be reduced if the state is in charge as well.

"The federal government has the ability to hold lands in perpetuity and has the financial capability to manage them," said Fasciano. "The state does not. And so, it's not a question of local versus federal management. It's a question of whether or not these are open and accessible to the public and available for habitat for wildlife or if they're not. And that's the big fear."




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Members of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance are supporting two moratoriums on concentrated animal feeding operations to be voted on today by the Arkansas Administrative Rules subcommittee of the Arkansas Legislative Council.

Concentrated animal feeding operations are large agriculture facilities which keep animals confined in small spaces.

Gordon Watkins, president of the alliance, said Regulations 5 and 6 include a moratorium on swine Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations in the watershed, but Regulation 5 does not include adequate public notification requirements. He pointed out the regulation only requires a request for a permit be posted on the Department of Agriculture website.

"If someone wants to put a 10,000-animal hog-confinement facility next door to you, you'd probably like to know about that," Watkins contended. "Secondly, in order to oppose a permit -- legally -- it's a 30-day comment period, and unless you submit comments on it, you do not have standing to legally challenge a permit."

He acknowledged Regulation 6 has stronger notification requirements which include notifying nearby landowners, publishing the permit request in the local newspaper and contacting school superintendents within a 10-mile radius of the proposed facility.

The last concentrated animal feeding operation allowed near the Buffalo National River, C and H Swine, was shut down in 2019. Watkins added he is a farmer but feels the area needs to be protected.

"It's the first National River ever created in the country. It's also a state icon," Watkins stressed. "If you look at any of the literature, put out by the department of tourism to promote the state, you'll see images from the Buffalo National River. It's an economic engine to some of the poorest counties in the state."

It was discovered in 2018 the C and H swine operation contaminated the water quality in Big Creek and the Buffalo River. Today's meeting is scheduled for 2 p.m.


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