This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Mother Nature has been recovering from Helene’s impacts – and some people are helping the process along. Volunteers and paid workers with MountainTrue and North Carolina State University have been planting trees all winter to help prevent worse floods the next time the region experiences extreme weather.
The region’s rivers are in a fragile place. During Helene, swollen rivers tore trees from riverbanks and erased the eddies and pools where brook trout, hellbenders, and other key species make their homes. Debris removal funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency created a second wave of environmental changes, as community members and environmental scientists documented living trees and shrubs being torn from riverbanks by heavy equipment.
With funding from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and other private sources, the crews planted 53 river miles in Buncombe, Transylvania, Henderson, Madison, Yancey, Watauga, Polk, Mitchell, Avery, Ashe, and Rutherford counties.
MountainTrue, NC State experts, and volunteers planted 20,000 trees by the Green River alone. Regionally, so far they have planted 226,000 new trees and are in the process of planting and distributing 36,000 more. According to MountainTrue’s count, the work created 104 jobs and engaged 109 volunteers. Workers have also removed hundreds of river miles of debris. MountainTrue staff told BPR they’re hoping that the result isn’t only beautiful, but also reduces flood risk in the future.
Erica Shanks is the Riverkeeper for the Green River, a river frequented by trout-fishing and kayaking enthusiasts, that runs south of Asheville through Polk County. Shanks saw how flooding and, later, debris removal took away the plants whose deep roots hold riverbanks together. So she joined with other workers and has been out nearly every week since November to plant native trees like elderberry, river birch, red maple, black willow and silky dogwood — all of which thrive near water. The newly-planted trees are known as “live stakes,” a dormant cutting of a live tree which can grow and take on a life of its own if planted during the cold season.
This year, they’re small, but soon, Shanks said, they’ll grow.
The trees’ flood prevention work will begin the first year, as they establish roots to hold the banks together. Shank said in the second year, and going into the third and fourth, is when the trees begin to grow, blossom, and become a part of the habitat around them as the ecology does its careful work. “Mama Green will be able to do a lot of that restoration work kind of on her own,” Shanks said, referring to the river.
Mitch Woodward, an NCSU extension agent who works on water quality issues, has used volunteer days to educate local landowners on the science of native plants and to give away free live stakes to plant. The work is essential, he said, because many non-native trees and shrubs aren’t evolved to handle the volume of rain this region gets, and will continue to get as climate change fuels extreme rain.
“The areas that had a lot of native vegetation, trees, shrubs, I mean even weeds, the banks held up fairly well in most locations,” Woodward said.
Other efforts to restore native vegetation to the region are ongoing, with special sensitivity not only to the environmental qualities of native riverside plants, but also to their cultural importance. Local nonprofits like Riverlink, Haywood Waterways, and Conserving Carolinas have also been working on landowner education and riverside planting, as have other universities like Warren Wilson College, often in conjunction with local governments. Adam Griffith, an NCSU extension agent who works with the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians, is collaborating with community partners on a linked effort to plant rivercane, a native bamboo with especially firm, deep roots that’s been used for thousands of years in traditional Cherokee basket weaving.
With western North Carolina’s continued growth, Woodward says, comes more impervious surfaces”like roads and roofs, which contribute to stormwater runoff, and can make even smaller rains dangerous. “We need to somehow look at what we call the 3 S’s,” he said. “Slow it down. Spread it out. And soak it in before it gets into the stream.”
