(crunching leaves and indistinct voices)
Join us.
(upbeat music)
Hello, my name is Benny Braden and
today we're here celebrating with
the Great Smoky Mountains National Park,
National Public Lands Day.
We set up our tent.
This is where people come and volunteer
and our focus is removing litter
as well as removing graffiti.
Some folks feel like they
need to leave their mark.
And we're here to remove that mark.
National Public Lands Day
is really important to me,
working to mobilize volunteers across
the country to help restore and protect
and revitalize our public lands,
places that we can all enjoy, to relax,
recharge, and learn about our communities and each other.
Have a good time!
We have established a garden
at Cherokee High School.
It's called sochan and it is a plant
of resilience and we do a study because
it's sensitive to ground level ozone.
Our 60 national parks, large national parks,
are really about environmental education,
and I'm so very excited and so very
appreciative of the work that the National Environmental Education Foundation does.
We take interest in this special day
because enjoying the parks, and also
the public lands, is good medicine.
To unite people and to give them
an ever-existing natural healing
resource and it's for all of us. The
nation needs healing, to disconnect
from our devices and to connect
to one another as human beings.
Reconnect with nature.
You know, the Great Smoky Mountains,
it serves as a sanctuary for healing.
Where are we as a country when it
comes to race and race relations?
And so that's what prompted
Smokies Hikes for Healing,
and those participants work with a highly
skilled and highly trained facilitator,
give us new tools and new perspectives on
how we deal with race and race relations,
because we all deal with that.
When you hike in the Smokies,
you always come out better than
when you went in.
For me,
I was a first responder, struggle
with post-traumatic stress,
and I've spent a lot of time in
the outdoors and that's helped me
kick-start my healing.
Our public lands allows folks
to get to a spot where they can
get away from the noise and just
feel the benefits of nature, both physically and mentally.
(fading music)