Margaret Cheasebro

In August 2020, the CZU Complex fire burned 18,000 acres of the Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Located in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, it is the state's oldest park. It contains redwoods that are sometimes more than 2,000 years old.

Even today, almost one year after the fire, some of the park's trees still smolder, according to a June 18, 2021 article in The Guardian Weekly. Some of the challenges now are to decide how to rebuild the park to make it more accessible to visitors and how to make it more resilient.

Some huge redwoods that people saw in 1902, when the park was founded, will never be seen by visitors again, except in pictures. They perished in the fire that gobbled up 97 percent of the park. The fire also destroyed the park's headquarters building, other facilities, and a variety of structures such as foot bridges that guided visitors through the trees.

The fire's CZU abbreviation refers to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's San Mateo-Santa Cruz Unit. That unit is the administrative division for San Mateo, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco counties.

There is a concerted effort by people in California's state park system to save as many of the park's old-growth trees as possible. Many are favorites of visitors. One of them is the Auto Tree. It has been photographed at different times with horses and buggies and with trucks backed into its large opening that was created by previous fires. Though the Auto Tree suffered in the fire, green offshoots at its base indicate it is very much alive. Time will tell if is strong enough to remain standing.

When the park was founded, fewer visitors came to state parks. Today, people throng to state parks. Providing them with an enjoyable experience that is safe for the trees and for visitors requires more planning than it did more than a century ago. On top of that, climate change creates difficulties such as hotter temperatures, more drought conditions, and bigger fires.

Even so, there are glimmers of hope as wildflowers push through fire blackened remains on the forest floor in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Green sprouts emerge from fire damaged trees. Sounds of insects and chirping birds fill the air.

Eventually, people will visit the park again, though it will not look like it did earlier. In these challenging times when the changes in our climate can create catastrophic damage, the creative human spirit and the resilience of trees still give us hope.

Arbor Day is this Friday, April 30. It's a day to celebrate trees. That made me think about how I can celebrate trees. What I love to do is tell the trees in my front and back yards hello every time I walk near them. I thank them for being in my yard and for all the things they do to help make the space they occupy a better place.

During this week, I also enjoy reading about the special role some trees play in their community. There's a wonderful article in the March 12, 2021 The Guardian Weekly about how a man named Ojok Okello helped his Ugandan village of Okere Mom-Kok revive and thrive after more than a decade of war left it in ruins. He is doing it with the help of shea trees that grow in and around the village. The project is a social enterprise, and villagers work together to make their own decisions about the enterprise.

Okello told The Guardian Weekly, "I looked at the shea tree and realized that we have this important natural resource, and we were not harnessing it." The inspiration for using shea trees came to him from the Marvel block-buster movie, Black Panther. He was sitting under a shea tree outside his house one afternoon in early 2020 when the idea began to materialize. "I thought about Wakanda and Black Panther. They had vibranium. This shea tree could be our vibranium," he said. He decided to invest everything within his means to tap the resource of the shea trees, protect them, and use them to help his village come back to life and prosper.

The villagers make Okere Shea Butter and sell it in the capital, Kampala. Shea butter is made from a fatty substance that comes from nuts that grow in shea trees. It is often used in cosmetic skin preparations.

Shea trees are classed as an endangered species, which is threatened by extinction. Okello advocates for the protection and regeneration of the trees. Already the shea butter is catching on in Kampala, and Okere Mom-Kok is becoming a thriving and sustainable town of 4,000 people. Villagers have renamed their now thriving town Okere City.

Okello is the mover and shaker behind the plans that resulted in Okere City, which began in January 2019. Its 200 hectares, slightly over 494 acres, include a school, health clinic, a bank, and a community hall that also serves as a cinema, church and nightclub. The town even has a boxing team.

Electricity generated from solar energy is available to everyone, and the village now has clean water from a borehole, a deep, narrow hole made in the ground to locate water or oil. School is not free. Pupils pay cash for half of their school fees. The remainder they pay in maize, beans, sugar and firewood. Residents pay their clinic bills in installments.

The project would not have become successful if Okello had not initially funded it from his own pocket. Last year, the cost was about $54,000. Okello is a London School of Economics graduate who has worked as a development expert for several international charities and non-government organizations. He saw many projects fail because communities were not involved in decisionsabout their own future. That disillusioned him.

Okello was only a baby when he left the village of Okere Mom-Kok after his father was killed in the bush wars of the 1980s. After finding success as a development expert, he left that career and returned to the village, hoping to meet his extended family there. He wanted to use his extensive skills to create a project that was truly led by the villagers of Okere Mom-Kok.

He succeeded so well that now the village generates revenue. All of the projects, from the school and clinic to the local bar, all fund themselves. That's because the project Okello developed is not built as a charity but as a social enterprise in which every villager has a say in how the project is shaped now and into the future.

Villagers have a weekly investment club meeting in the community hall. Most of the more than 100 club members are women, many of them farmers. A few run small businesses. One woman got a loan from the club to buy shea seeds. She sold them at a profit, and she repaid her loan. Members make financial contributions before the money is redistributed as loans for members. Once they repay their loan, the money recycles back into the club so more members can get loans.

The shea tree played a vital role in this success story. Okello used his skills, the enthusiasm of the villagers, and the resource of shea trees to help his village resurrect itself from ruin to vibrant revival. Without the shea tree, that success might never have happened.