Currently, our world is facing an overwhelming range of crises: from degrading public health, degrading environmental health, loss of biodiversity, climate instability, extreme weather, soil erosion, pollution, insect collapse, ocean collapse, economic pressure, nutritional degradation, declining mental and emotional health, screen addiction, overuse of technology, lack of community, political decay and a general lack of human-nature connection.

No humans in history have ever faced this breadth of extreme existential crises all at once. Looking at everything that needs fixing can feel entirely daunting and destabilizing. However: some of the simplest solutions have always been in our reach. Nature has always given us the simplest, easiest and most effective solutions, if only we are willing to slow down and recognize the genius of the tools already here:

Planting free public fruit trees is one of many elegant solutions to help our world. Creating free public orchards like the Newtown Fruit trail helps almost every issue at once:

Public fruit trees: Generate fresh, healthy nutrient-dense food for everyone, without demanding a high price.

Public fruit trees: Do not require poisons, insecticide, pesticide, herbicide or glyphosate, but they still produce MORE and MORE food EVERY YEAR.

Public Fruit Trees: create rich environments for childhood development, allowing kids to have nourishing experiences in nature, picking berries, creating real-life relationships with other kids, building family traditions and positive family memories. Foraging cultivates curiosity, problem-solving, nature literacy and helps developed deep bonds to the land, allowing children to grow into adults who are more likely to value and protect nature, because of their early relationship to the fruit trees. Kid who play outdoors are more likely to develop into capable, stable adults with tangible, real world experience from their fun foraging experiences, compared to those with excessive, dissociative screen time. It’s actually more fun to play outside and forage for fruit in nature than forage for notifications online.

Public orchards support our precious pollinators. Diverse flowering trees and herbs are CRUCIAL for insects and pollinators… and insects are CRUCIAL for our lives. Insects are a foundation of healthy ecosystems. Without insects, ecosystems unravel, with ecosystems, our world unravels, and our lives become unlivable. They are a crucial domino that we cannot allow to tip. Whether you like bugs or not, we NEED them to survive on Earth. Mixed orchards create havens for imperiled species to recover.

Public orchards help wildlife. In addition to pollinators: public orchards create habit for wildlife like birds who are also in decline across the globe. We need to continue living side by side with wildlife species, so that our planet can remain habitable, stable, beautiful and magic.

Public orchards create a safeguard against economic and political instability. The more that we depend on food grown from hundreds and thousands of miles away, shipped using excessive oil and emitting excessive carbon, the MORE VULNERABLE that we are to economic and political swings. The more food that we grow close to home, at local farms and orchards, the more resilient and immune we are to fragile systems.

Climate Health: We have been warned for decades about the realities of climate crises, extreme weather, and degrading planetary health. Our ecological emergencies stem from over-pollution and overconsumption of Earth’s finite resources. We MUST make a shift. Growing perennial food at home is a way to generate food WITHOUT extreme pollution, poisons or carbon emissions, in fact, it actually helps to SEQUESTER carbon and helps our climate!

A step toward regenerative agriculture: We each have a responsibility to help our one, shared, living planet wherever we call home. We each have a corner of the Earth to protect and restore. Replacing industrial food with regenerative local food is a tremendous way to mitigate ecological harm while actually helping the land. Orchards are an integral pat of the solution. Trees heal the climate. Trees heal ecosystems. Trees sequester carbon and generate oxygen. Trees don’t need excessive annual inputs. Trees can grow where annual crops can not. Trees are more resilient than annual crops. Tree crops help the planet WHILE producing food and value for people. We need more tree crops everywhere, starting with your yard or park!

Biodiversity: Our planet is facing an alarming loss of biodiversity in the plant and animal kingdoms. We can not afford to continue clearing land. Instead, we must conserve the remaining habit that we have left, and assist the restoration of already damaged landscapes. Converting grassy lawns and parks into edible food forests is a perfect, effective, easy, fun and rewarding way to help restore local biodiversity. Design your food forest to feature native edible and medicinal plants. Food forests that feature native plants create an oasis of biodiversity that can spread and spread. Create a foothold for rare species where they can mature and then repopulate… all while creating food, fun, play and cleaner air and water for us all!

Public orchards are beautiful: Beauty must not be abandoned. Today, the motivating priority behind most endeavors is to maximize profit and maximize ‘economic value’. Sadly, this has caused many towns and many developers to abandon the importance of deep beauty and diversity. Cultivating beautiful, colorful spaces is crucial for human wellbeing. Mental health, emotional health, quality of life and quality of relationships goes up when we live in vibrant, healthy, beautiful spaces. It is important to continue putting energy into beauty. It is important to put energy into health, happiness and well-being. We must measure the value of human health and human happiness with as much care as people measure economic growth. We must quantify the value of the healthy environments and ensure that they increase with as much fervor as people invest into watching finance increase. We must recognize that degrading the environment is a deep loss the every single person. We must prioritize the value of green spaces and environmental diversity among the highest goals of society.

Beauty is a value that must be prioritized equal to economic measures, or else our world is hardly worth living in. No matter how ‘economically’ successful our world is, if the landscape is dead, we have failed. If the air is polluted, the water is foul and the land is empty of life, no amount of money will help us. A world with money but no beauty is not a world worth creating. Instead, Food forests generate a deeper value: Edible landscapes create a healthy world that makes us ALL RICH! Public orchards and food forests become beautiful outdoor spaces full of life for all to be nourished by the beauty of our planet. Society improves when people have spaces to walk slow, breathe deep, contemplate, have moments of quiet, and spaces to rest. Valuing other’s wellbeing is key to a mature, wise world. When our neighbors suffer, we suffer. When our neighbors thrive, we share in collective vibrancy. It is not wise to accumulate money at the expense of your neighbors’ wellbeing. Their anguish will impact your own wellbeing. It is not wise to extract private wealth while destroying public health. Pain inflicted on others is pain inflicted on oneself. It is not good business to destroy local habitats for private profit. The long term costs of ecological decline affect everyone, no matter your fortune. It is key to measure the value of ecological health and generate collective well-being with the same fervor that the economy strives to generate profit.

The Fruit Trail recognizes a value that the economy has forgotten to measure: planetary health and collective wellbeing: our TRUE wealth. The Earth is the foundation beneath every other foundation in society. Without a healthy planet, we have nothing. The Earth is our greatest fortune, that has been compounding and appreciating for millions of years. The earth is our shared fortune, our shared inheritance and our collective bequest to the future. It is not for a small handful to destroy. It is for us all to safeguard and increase. Rebuilding beauty and rebuilding ecological diversity is one way to increase our collective wealth. We look forward to a world where the priority of society is increasing our COLLECTIVE bank account: the soil. The Earth.

Food forests and parks in general enable neighbors to connect and wonder in person. We all need connection. Most turn to bright screens, but we deep down we need real interactions with real people in the physical world. Technology has advanced, happiness and well-being has plummeted. Screens create a facade of connection but keep further apart than ever before. Our minds may be fooled but our bodies and hearts know the difference. We need real connection with land and people. When people are chronically depressed, society erodes. We must conserve outdoor spaces. The value of healthy outdoor spaces on community health must not be abandoned for short-term profit. The long term costs that accumulates from lack of space and lack of beauty is a steep price. We must invest in health, landscapes, places to play together and spaces of quiet sanctuary.

Human Connection. Mental health. Community health: The easiest way to erode a society is to turn neighbors against one another. One of the quickest ways to foster rich, meaningful human connection is to work side by side, walk together, and connect eye to eye, in real life. Virtual, technological realms create the illusion of connection while driving communities apart, eroding families and driving people toward mental illness. Pause. The natural world has always prided a safe, enriching place for real human connection. Beautiful outdoor public orchids where people gather to pick fruit and pull weeds are one of the simplest, cheapest, and most effective remedies to restore mental and emotional health and restore a sense of community, and meaningful human connection.

Public orchards give us free, healthy, nutrient dense, non-poisoned food while healing the climate, helping pollinators, helping wildlife, helping the climate and safeguarding our communities against instability in a manner that reestablishes human connection and human wellbeing, for more united communities that center around their common good instead of competing between illusionary political ideologies, and ultimately rekindle a deep relationship to the natural world that we depend on for life.

Human health and planetary health are inseparable. We must treat them together. Public Orchards are step toward a world that prioritizes human wellbeing and planetary health as one.