We are excited about some new TreeShirt designs coming your way. This shirt was designed and printed locally by Andy at Friendly Arctic. Super cool! We have three designs coming your way. The picture below shows one of the designs which is printed in four different shirt colors with different art color options. Every Tee helps plant a tree. These are available at Cumberland Transit in Nashville and we are working on getting an online store back up and running! 

Hey everyone! We have been hard at work planting street trees in the Belmont-Hillsboro Neighborhood of Nashville. Over the past few years we have planted over 600 trees that now line the streets! Our primary focus has been planting trees in the planting-strip between the sidewalk and street. These trees help shade the sidewalk and provide an added buffer between pedestrians and cars. Much of the space has power-lines located overhead so we alway choose the proper tree for the space. We are super excited about the three block stretch of 18th Ave. South  between Portland and Blair. Here, the city installed a new sidewalk with a planting strip. We planted over 40 trees including 25 rudbud trees and three types of maples. 

Super excited about the BHN "Wood for the Hood" fundraiser on Earthday. We love Belmont-Hillsboro's enthusiasm for planting trees. We set up some potted redbuds to line the entrance to the party! 

Check it out! We have a temporary traffic calming circle set up in Nashville. Over the past several years we have been working with many groups to get this project going. Many thanks to Berkley Allen the District 18 Representative, TURBO, and Joe Wooley from the BHN traffic committee. The city has been gathering data prior to the installation as well as during the installation of the temporary circle. We have had great feedback and we are excited to see this move in a positive direction! Also looking forward to planting trees as these get installed throughout the city. 

The last couple of weeks we have focused on planting "traffic calming" street trees. We planted in Wedgewood-Houston, East Nashville, 12 South, and Belmont-Hillsboro Neighborhoods. We're excited for these trees to take root and take to the sky!

Each year as the trees grow, the benefits the trees provide will grow.  These trees will help provide  the following benefits:

1. Create safer walking environments - By forming and framing visual walls and providing distinct edges to sidewalks so that motorists better distinguish between their environment and one shared with people. If a motorist were to significantly err in their urban driving task, street trees help deflect or fully stop the motorist from taking a human life

2. Rain, sun, heat and skin protection - For light or moderate rains, pedestrians find less need for rain protection. In cities with good tree coverage there is less need for chemical sun blocking agents. Temperature differentials fall 5 to 15 degrees and are felt when walking under tree canopied streets. 

3. Reduced harm from tailpipe emissions - Automobile and truck exhaust is a major public health concern and contains significant pollutants, including carbon monoxide (CO), volatile organic compounds (VOC), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and particulate matter (PM). Tailpipe emissions are adding to asthma, ozone and other health impacts. Impacts are reduced significantly from proximity to trees. 

4. Gas transformation efficiency - Trees in street proximity absorb 9 times more pollutants than more distant trees, converting harmful gasses back into oxygen and other useful and natural gasses. 

5. Lower urban air temperatures -  A properly shaded neighborhood, mostly from urban street trees, can reduce energy bills for a household from 15-35% lowering energy costs to homeowners and consumers by shading homes from setting sun.

6. Time in travel perception- Other research and observations confirm that motorists perceive the time it takes to get through treed versus non-treed environments has a significant differential. A treeless environment trip is perceived to be longer than one that is treed (Walter Kulash, P.E.; speech circa 1994, Glatting Jackson).

7. Reduced road rage incidents - Although this may at first seem a stretch, there is strong, compelling research that motorist road rage is less in green urban versus stark suburban areas. Trees and aesthetics, which are known to reduce blood pressure, may handle some of this calming effect.

8. Longer pavement life - Studies conducted in a variety of California environments show that the shade of urban street trees can add from 40- 60% more life to costly asphalt. This factor is based on reduced daily heating and cooling (expansion/ contraction) of asphalt. As peak oil pricing increases roadway overlays, this will become a significant cost reduction to maintaining a more affordable roadway system. 

9. Increased security - Trees create more pleasant walking environments, bringing about increased walking, talking, pride, care of place, association and therefore actual ownership and surveillance of homes, blocks, neighborhoods plazas, businesses and other civic spaces.

​10. Connection to nature and the human senses - Urban street trees provide a canopy, root structure and setting for important insect and bacterial life below the surface.  They act as essential lofty environments for song birds, seeds, nuts, squirrels and other urban life. We will most likely never see any advertisement for a marketed urban product, including cars, to be featured without street trees making the ultimate dominant, bold visual statement about place. 

There are no words to describe the sorrow in our hearts. Life will not be the same without you Rowan. You were with SoundForest from day one and helped plant over 25,000 trees. Thank you for all of the joy, smiles, and laughter you brought to the world. I will miss having you by my side.
​God bless you my friend.  

SoundForest.org is partnering up with Blackstone Brewing Co. to help make their brewing facility as Earth Friendly as possible. We have plans to make every thing planted on the property edible! 

We recently started planting fruit trees to create what we're calling the SoundStone orchard.  We hired Willie to bush hog the space that will be our future orchard. We have marked out the spacing and can't wait to get things planted later this fall. 

We started by planting Five Pear trees at the entrance and are using money from a donation made by Jack Johnson, All At Once, and the Ohana Foundation to purchase more fruit trees.  We have plans to plant 100 trees in the orchard including Pear, Peach, Plum, and Fig. We will also plant blackberry and raspberry rows as well!  The 100 trees will produce approximately 17,500 lbs of fruit each year and will yield about 175,000 lbs of fruit in a 10 year span once they get established (That will be 350,000 pounds of food in 20 years!)   Not to mention this industrial looking space void of vegetation will look much more beautiful with these flowering trees as we convert it to urban farmland!

As a side note we are also using this space for our composting site. We collect produce drops kitchen prep stations from 10 local restaurants diverting 1000lbs of waste each week and converting it to garden soil. We also collect spent coffee grounds from a coffee shop Frothy Monkey that adds to the compost mix. 

SoundForest.org is partnering up with Jack Johnson and the All At Once social action network. We are looking forward to the upcoming show at the Ryman on October 2nd!  

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All At Once is featuring innovative plastic free initiatives to educate and inspire people to take personal action to reduce the use of single-use disposable plastics. A generation ago, products were packaged in reusable or recyclable materials. Today, plastic pollution is a growing problem with plastic trash from land flowing into our waterways and ending up in our oceans and the marine food web. This page provides resources and tools so that you can educate yourself, choose plastic free alternatives, get involved in clean-up efforts, and support the growing movement to reduce single-use plastics.