LOWER SAUCON TOWNSHIP, Pa. – A forest over Lower Saucon Township covers a slice of Len Bilous’ 95 acres of serenity.<\/p>\n
Where hacking vines is part of what’s he calls ‘forest bathing’.<\/p>\n
“All these ions coming off the trees that are really healthy for you. Feel my body decompress, so it’s just a real joy,” he said of his land.<\/p>\n
Len bought the property in 1986.<\/p>\n
“Len, what is the value of this to you?” 69 News reporter Bo Koltnow asked.<\/p>\n
“To me, you can’t put a dollar value on it,” he said.<\/p>\n
Nonprofit American Forest Foundation (AFF) is.<\/p>\n
It’s 22 state, 200,000-acre Family Forest Carbon Program will remove 3.5 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, generating over $50 million in payments to landowners like Len over the next 30 years.<\/p>\n
“The Lehigh Valley is under a lot of development pressure, like other areas across Pennsylvania and the other 20 states that we operate in, and you’re right, this does provide a financial incentive outside of development,” said Senior Director of Forestry, Sarah Hall.<\/p>\n
Hall says that carbon trapped in trees are bought as credits by larger companies.<\/p>\n
The AFF then passes those funds, and forest stewardship, to those like Len, one of nearly 350 Lehigh Valley landowners covering 4,000 acres.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been paid, but it’s not a lot of money,” he said.<\/p>\n
300 bucks per acre, far less than developers would offer, but as you heard earlier, the sellout cost for Len is way too high.<\/p>\n
“I watch my kids grow up here, and how much they enjoyed it. Bathing in the stream, picking berries, seeing the same pair of ducks show up every every spring, leaving in the fall. Memories that you know, I don’t think you can put a value on it,” Len said.<\/p>\n
Getting some green by staying green.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOWER SAUCON TOWNSHIP, Pa. – A forest over Lower Saucon Township covers a slice of Len Bilous’ 95…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200298,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,5523],"class_list":["post-200297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-carbon-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}