How world's biggest green group plans to reverse conservation's retreat

Fred Bunch, a ranger with the US National Park Service, is guiding visitors through a grove of stately ponderosa pines in the lee of the towering Great Sand Dunes in western Colorado.

Fred Bunch, a ranger at the Great Sand Dunes National
Park Service in Colorado state, takes in the vanilla
fragrance of a ponderosa pine tree, that was peeled
for food and medicine by Native American tribes.

The avuncular veteran, who has worked in eight national parks over four decades stops by one pine, not for a hug, but rather to inhale the fragrance of its exposed trunk.

The bark, once peeled back by Native American tribes such as the Navajos and the Southern Utes for its medicinal and food values, gives off a sweet scent.

"Smell that vanilla?" Mr Bunch said, leaning close. "This tree has to be hundreds of years old."

Read the story from The Age by Peter Hannam - “How world's biggest green group plans to reverse conservation's retreat.”