TAYLOR JAMES
Citizen Staff
The Foundation for Regeneration is working to restore the Heart of America Forest near Kansas City International Airport.
The first trees of the forest were planted in 1990. The forest is now eight acres with around 2,500 trees planted that are over 50 feet tall. The shape of the forest can be seen from an airplane window. President and Co-Founder Bob Berkebile said that hundreds of volunteers planted the trees every year for about a decade.
Berkebile said that he and Rick McDermott, an architect, met UN Official Robert Mueller and Chief Leon Shenandoah, leader of the Onondaga Nation at a world peace event in 1987. Berkebile said a friend of his, Fred Culver who was a philosopher in Kansas City, read a concept that Mueller and Margaret Mead created. The concept was about gathering the whole planet once a year at noon, Greenwich Mean Time to think about peace and to celebrate it with meditation and prayer. Berkebile said Culver was fascinated with the idea and called Mueller at the UN about having this peace event. Berkebile said Culver called Mueller at the UN and asked about why a world meditation event hadn’t taken place yet. Mueller told Culver that he was traveling all over the world and Mead had died and no city had ever volunteered to be the first for a world meditation event. Culver volunteered Kansas City and he rented out the Municipal Auditorium for people to come interested in an event about world peace.
It was at a breakfast that Berkebile found the inspiration to go out and plant the forest. He said at the breakfast when he was welcoming everyone Shenandoah began talking to people about symbols in America such as the Arch in St. Louis and the Big Apple in New York City. The conversation led to them talking about creating a symbol in Kansas City. Berkebile said Shenandoah told people that he traveled all over the world and his heart grew weary, but when he was in Kansas City his heart grew strong and spirit soars like an eagle. Berkebile said Shenadoah the heart spirit is the most important resource on the planet and that people needed to do something to remind themselves and teach their children about it. Berkebile said Mueller went up to speak after Shenandoah finished and suggested Berkebile plant a row of trees around the city in a heart shape big enough to be seen from outer space.
The tree space didn’t become that big and Berkebile scaled it down to the eight acre forest that people can see from the airplane window today. Executive Director Brian Weinberg said the group is in phase one of restoring the forest. Phase one is going to build a welcome gateway to the forest and support restoration work. The foundation is partnering with JE Dunn Construction to reshape the forest and establish new pathways through the landscape with the hopes to improve visibility from the air and experience on the ground. The foundation has two other phases planned in the near future, but they expect phase one to be completed by the end of August.
“There’s a lot of places in the city where you stop at a stoplight (and) you see a Taco Bell, and you see a shopping center. It’s like I could be anywhere in the United States, but the Heart Forest, there’s no other place like it in the world,” said Weinberg.
The foundation has raised $250,000 for phase one. Weinberg said the foundation is looking for volunteers to help them with the restoration process and donations all of which can be found on their website at heartforest.org. Visits to the forest are currently by appointment only, but the foundation hopes to open the forest to the public in the near future.