Help Trees Work for Us

Since trees are an important means of absorbing carbon emissions, The Arbor Foundation, headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska, engages in large-scale tree conservation projects in 27 countries, supplies trees from its Tree Nursery (arborday.org.shipping), and provides informative bulletins about trees.

Arbor Foundation projects save threatened rain forests and offer education and tree planting assistance for farm communities. For example, you can read about the Latin American farmers who grow coffee in the shade and natural nutrients of rain forest soils at shop.arborday.org/coffee. At this site, you also can purchase Arbor Day Blend coffee for yourself or as a gift. This rain-forest-saving coffee avoids the problems mentioned in earlier blog posts: "I Love Coffee, I Love Tea" and "Coffee Prices Going Up, Allowances Going Down?"

Developing hybrid trees and bushes that resist disease and insect damage, thrive in various soils and climates, and provide an abundant yield also is the work of The Arbor Foundation. One such project involves meeting the global demand for hazelnuts that now outruns the supply of this nutritious food, one that can grow on marginal soils. Although a collection of 1,899 wild hazelnut plants, some from behind the former Iron Curtain, already has been screened for this project, more plants are welcome. To learn how to help, visit arborday.org/hazelnuts.

From the Arbor Foundation, you also can obtain a copy of the publication: How to Fight the Emerald Ash Borer. The bulletin tells how this Asian insect operates and what chemical treatments prevent beetle damage. Request a copy at arborday.org/bulletins.

Infection-Killing Bugs and Antibiotics

Children who like to look under rocks for bugs (See the earlier blog post, "The Bees and the Birds.") have company in the scientific community that is searching for microbes to cure drug-resistant infections from bacteria and fungi in patients all over the world.

     According to an article by David Wahlberg in the Wisconsin State Journal (April 14, 2014), soil-based microbes produced miracle antibiotics after World War II. In Alexander McCall Smith's book, The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon, for example, a character in Botswana, Africa, attributes cures to the kgaba plant. But recent soil-based research keeps rediscovering the same antibiotics.

     Consequently, kids can get in on the search for ants, beetles, bees, wasps, termites, sponges, and sea squirts that have found new microbes in bacteria that could act as antibiotics in humans.

     At the moment, the U.S. National Institutes of Health is funding a $16 million, five-year study to discover bugs, marine life, and other species that could help produce the drugs needed to treat staph and other infections. (An earlier blog post, "Medical Profession Suffers from International Conflict," tells how blue light phototherapy is being used to treat staph infections.) In January, 2015, the teixobactin antibiotic which has been shown to foil infection resistance passed animal tests without side effects.

     Young people interested in helping collect specimens or in doing a project involving the development of antibiotics from new microbes might get in touch with:
     Dr. David Andes, Chief of Infectious Diseases at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, Wisconsin
     Cameron Currie, a bacteriology professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, who is doing research in Florida, Wisconsin, and possibly in Hawaii
     Tim Bugin, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, who is doing research in Puerto Rica and the Florida Keys.

     Also see the later posts, "Global Search for New Antibiotics" and "Bacteria Talk to Each Other."