For Sara Velazquez and her husband, purchasing the 22 acres behind their rural Pennsylvania home was the start of a lengthy effort to preserve and resuscitate the hilly forestland.
The question was how to pay for that work.
“A nice, healthy oak forest that’s what I want,” Velazquez, 28, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in June, sweeping her arm across the property’s shadowed valleys and mixed tree stands.
“We have a lot of invasive species in here, so dealing with that is part of our plan over time,” said her husband, Dan Nelson, 37.
However, just after they purchased the land in 2019,