New River Valley Residents Plant 2,443 Trees, Recklessly Invest in a Future They May Not Personally Monetize (SOCIALISTS?!)

BLACKSBURG / RADFORD — Hundreds of New River Valley residents spent two weekends in March planting 2,443 native trees along local waterways, undertaking the increasingly radical civic activity of improving something they do not individually own.

The plantings were part of The Big Plant, an annual watershed-restoration effort launched in 2019. The eighth Blacksburg Big Plant drew roughly 400 volunteers who planted 2,118 trees, while the second Radford event brought about 350 volunteers to Bisset Park, where another 325 trees representing 60 species went into the ground.

No luxury apartments were attached.

The purpose is less decorative than the word “tree planting” might suggest. Much of the work involves creating riparian buffers—bands of native vegetation bordering streams and rivers that reduce erosion, filter pollutants and runoff, provide habitat and shade waterways enough to help regulate temperatures for aquatic life. Restoration ecologist Tom Saxton told Cardinal News that these buffers remain among the most reliable and cost-effective tools available for improving water quality and resilience against flooding.

This is particularly relevant around Blacksburg because Stroubles Creek, which runs beneath portions of town and the Virginia Tech campus before eventually feeding the New River, has been federally designated as impaired since the late 1990s. Historic deforestation, development and invasive species have contributed to degraded water quality, elevated temperatures and poorer habitat.

Thus, underneath the Drillfield—where generations of students have crossed campus thinking primarily about exams, football, sex, parking tickets and whether fifteen minutes is technically enough time to get to class—water has been quietly carrying Blacksburg downstream.

Eventually that water joins the New River, then the Kanawha, then the Ohio and Mississippi rivers before reaching the Gulf.

Local litter is nothing if not ambitious.

At Blacksburg’s Heritage Community Park and Natural Area, volunteers planted 830 trees spanning 46 native species along a tributary of Toms Creek. Another 1,288 trees from 24 species were planted around historic Smithfield in the Stroubles Creek watershed. Radford’s Bisset Park received species ranging from American plum and serviceberry to swamp white oak.

Among the more remarkable plantings were 200 white oak seedlings grown from acorns collected beneath the centuries-old trees of Virginia Tech’s Stadium Woods. The Virginia Department of Forestry raised the seedlings before donating them to the project, effectively taking genetic material from trees that predate the United States and asking it to have another go at the place.

One of those seedlings could eventually reach roughly 100 feet tall. The volunteers planting it will almost certainly not be around when it reaches maturity.

This apparently did not discourage them.

There is something almost offensively wholesome about that.

The Big Plant represents a form of local development considerably different from the region’s more familiar cycle of clearing land, putting something expensive on it, naming the development after whatever was removed, and then commissioning a tasteful sign depicting the former ecosystem.

The Oaks at Creekside generally indicates that both the oaks and creek should begin making other arrangements.

Here, development runs in the opposite direction.

Organizers estimate that 80% to 90% of the newly planted trees should survive, with volunteers monitoring the sites for several years and replacing trees that do not. Native flowers and pollinator habitat are also planned around some of the restoration areas.

That long horizon matters in the New River Valley.

Blacksburg, Christiansburg and Radford spend enormous economic and political energy discussing how to attract investment, accommodate university growth, create housing and retain young adults. Those conversations are necessary. But communities are not made attractive solely by constructing things people can purchase.

Sometimes the amenity is a functioning creek.

Sometimes it is public land.

Sometimes it is a tree somebody planted knowing somebody else will sit beneath it.

That is a particularly useful model for a region whose universities continually import thousands of young people and then watch many of them disappear after graduation. Retention depends partly upon employment and housing, but also upon whether a place feels like something worth belonging to rather than merely consuming for four years.

The Big Plant may not solve that problem.

It does, however, demonstrate the social machinery required to solve almost any of them: hundreds of people from different institutions, generations and backgrounds showing up in the same place and performing small physical tasks toward an outcome none could produce alone.

Nobody had to agree about presidential politics.

Nobody had to establish a personal brand.

Nobody had to become a thought leader.

They dug holes.

By the end of the second weekend, the New River Valley had 2,443 more trees than it did before.

It is difficult to make that sound cynical.

The trees are working on it.