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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The White House announced two new national monuments in California on Tuesday, one just east of Palm Springs and the other near Shasta Lake.

A signing ceremony will take place next week, as the unveiling event was postponed due to high winds.

Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., whose district includes parts of the new 624,000 acre Chuckwalla National Monument, said the lands will now be protected from mining, drilling and development.

"This is one of these unique examples where you have both the conservation and tribal leaders, as well as the renewable energy and utility companies all endorsing this enormous monument," Ruiz explained.

The area south of Joshua Tree National Park is crucial habitat for the Chuckwalla lizard, bighorn sheep and the endangered desert tortoise.

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said although President-elect Trump rescinded protections for some monument lands during his first administration, he hopes the two new monuments will endure.

"If the President-elect talks to the parties who really span the spectrum of interests, he will learn how this was a really well-thought-out effort to conserve this land but also make it possible to generate energy," Schiff asserted. "It's a win-win."

Thomas Tortez, former chairman of the Torres Martinez Tribe, noted his ancestral lands will now gain protections.

"The next step is to strategically develop a co-stewardship plan, put all those resources together and then, start to protect the land," Tortez added.

The White House also intends to designate the new Sátíttla Highlands National Monument, which covers 224,000 acres near Shasta Lake in northern California and contains the headwaters for California's entire watershed.

Brandy McDaniels, a member of the Pit River Tribe, said they have been fighting development in the area for decades.

"As social, economically suppressed communities, having to fight against people with deep pockets and have all the money in the world to come in and destroy our lands," McDaniels observed. "That's what we've been fighting to protect for a very long time."


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The 640-acre Kelly parcel has been in limbo for decades. It sits within the bounds of Grand Teton National Park but has long been owned by the state of Wyoming.

Now, $100 million and years of work later, the parcel now belongs to the park. The sale, which closed Dec. 27, was a slow process because the parcel was part of state-owned school trust lands which, according to the state Constitution, must benefit Wyoming students.

A 2003 law made it possible for the sale of such lands to count. Monies came from the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Grand Teton National Park Foundation.

Leslie Mattson, president of the foundation, said the deal has huge benefits.

"It's kind of a 'twofer' property," Mattson explained. "Not only are we benefiting future students here in Wyoming but this property is a very, very important wildlife habitat and has migration corridors for a number of species on it."

The parcel nearly went to auction in 2023, she said, when it could have gone to private developers. Its protection also conserves critical wildlife habitat and migration corridors for elk, pronghorn and mule deer, including the longest land migration corridor in the lower 48, according to the National Park Service.

Mattson pointed out donations came from people across 46 states, and more 10,000 Wyomingites wrote letters or attended public meetings to prevent the parcel from being sold to developers.

"There was a period of time we were getting dozens of gifts a day with emails saying, 'the wildlife need to be preserved,'" Mattson recounted. "It was amazing to see just the interest across the country in this project."

The parcel was the final state-owned school trust inholding in the park, following the purchase of Antelope Flats for $46 million in 2016.


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The Biden-Harris administration is taking another step to protect northeast Nevada's Ruby Mountains - by putting them temporarily off-limits to oil, gas and geothermal development.

The U.S. Forest Service submitted the petition and application to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.

If approved, it would initiate a two-year halt on new oil, gas and geothermal development on about 264,000 acres. Mining and commercial operations would continue.

Russell Kuhlman, executive director of the Nevada Wildlife Federation, said this mandatory pause would help researchers determine why wildlife populations - like mule deer, bighorn sheep, and sage grouse - have been declining in the region.

"That is what, in my opinion, is textbook sound scientific wildlife management," said Kuhlman. "The first step you need to do is limit variables - and one of those variables, over the last five or 10 years, has been the threat of oil and gas companies wanting to do exploratory drilling."

When the petition is approved and published in the Federal Register, it will initiate the two-year moratorium in what's called Nevada's Swiss Alps.

A 90 day public comment period will then follow on a proposed longer withdrawal.

Federal agencies will consult with Tribes on an environmental analysis to decide if the moratorium should be extended up to 20 years.

Kuhlman said the state does a good job of not only hearing everyone's concerns, but building coalitions and rallying behind solutions to protect public lands for future generations.

But he said those who may not know much about the state's oil and gas history could hold misconceptions.

"When I talk to people not engaged in this space, they believe that just because oil and gas is banned somewhere that there is a motherlode of oil and gas ready to be tapped, and then someone is not allowing that to happen," said Kuhlman. "That is not the case for the Ruby Mountains. It's really trying to find water in sand."

Kuhlman added that putting a stop to oil and gas development in the Rubies can help determine how it's affecting the ecosystem, and whether it should be part of the "multiple use" doctrine for public lands.



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