Habitat Recovery Project is a community-focused conservation movement dedicated to restoring, generating, and preserving wildlife habitats in contaminated communities, supporting and benefiting the people within them. HRP began in 2018 as a reforestation/conservation effort in the foothills of the Pocono Mountains, minutes from the Delaware River, home to fracking, coal mining, and agricultural deforestation. There, HRP helped clean and restore an abandoned junkyard and plant a small forest in its place to regenerate and preserve wild habitat through phytoremediation. Since then, HRP has expanded a replicable culture and program that creates and inspires community-based land restoration projects across the United States and beyond. This journey has taken HRP from wildfire ravaged lands in the Sierra Mountains, to gold mines and deforested areas in Kenya. Fate brought HRP to Louisiana, where they focus on environmental justice initiatives in industrialized coastal communities.
Alyssa Portero and Ocean Clark. Photo courtesy of HRP.
HRP is a volunteer-supported organization, having trained more than 90 volunteers in organic farming and wildlife restoration in the U.S. and abroad. Their headquarters in Vinton, La. offers work-trade through Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF). The organization’s founder, Alyssa Portaro, brings a wealth of experience to her work, having received two awards from the National Wildlife Foundation, earning the title of an official ‘NWF EcoLeader’ for phytoremediation, land restoration, and global community-focused conservation accomplishments through HRP. In southwest Louisiana, HRP has actively fought the LNG industry as part of a coalition that recently succeeded in challenging permits for export facilities, and has been involved in a documentary about the effects of the industry, “When Dreamers Become Heroes.” Currently, HRP has planting and conservation projects spanning over 4 million acres in 17 U.S. states, as well as in Kenya, Canada, Australia, Mexico and Pakistan.