Walking The Berkshires

"In Delaware When I Was Younger"

Loudin Wainwright III and I both attended same boarding school in what was then rural Delaware.  Rumor has it Loudin wrote "Dead Skunk" about his schoolboy experiences there, as well as the song whose title I have appropriated for this posting.  Loudin's got a couple of decades on me, but his Middletown, Delaware looked a good deal like mine; endless acres of corn and soybeans, flatland with a beechwood fringe and wooded gullies running down to long ponds and saltwater creeks.  People fished for food under bridges.  The corner store sold muskrat.    There was poverty and vestiges of segregation there for those with eyes to see, but Middletown was still more the Eastern Shore than Eastern Sprawl.

Two decades have obliterated that Delaware.  New Castle County south of the C&D canal is now a dizzying succession of subdivisions and box stores.  A toll road parallels the old Dupont Highway, making Philadelphia an easy 1 hour commute.  The farms sprout high density housing.  Open space is at a premium and one of the few large tracts of green is my old school, sitting on close to 2,300 acres surrounding Noxontown Pond in a sea of sprawl.

I'm going back to my old school tomorrow.  I'm at a place in my life when I can look at my boarding school years without the glare of teen-aged resentment.  One of my favorite English teachers is now its Headmaster, and for all its conservative past the school is no more static than its environs.  It is deeply concerned about the unchecked development of the Middletown landscape, but is also trying to engage more directly with the local community.   I am going to try and help the school explore conservation options for its holdings that would add value both to that institution and to important natural and community resources.  Its tax exemption does not mean its lands are secure from either development or eminent domain.  A conservation easement could make those unwanted outcomes increasingly unlikely.  We shall see.

I leave late tonight, heading out of the dark toward that glowing horizon.  I'll fill you in if there's still a diamond in the rough in the Diamond State.

Got Trees?

The Northeast hemorrhages open space at an astounding rate.  40 acres bleed out every day in Massachusetts, while Connecticut's rate of land conversion is 45 acres.  60% of Connecticut's losses come from its rapidly vanishing and already cleared agricultural land, often assessed at more than $10,000/acre as developable real estate.  At least 6,500 acres of forest land disappears in the Nutmeg State each year, while the reforesting trend in Massachusetts peaked more than a decade ago at about 68% of the Commonwealth's total land area and is now in decline.  The forest has stopped expanding, yet there are now twice the number of forest landowners in Massachusetts as there were just ten years ago.

Our open space faces death by a thousand cuts, and despite impressive efforts by numerous conservation organizations and government agencies, land protection is an inadequate tourniquet.  Development outpaces land protection in southern New England by at least twice the conservation rate, while exurban and rural sprawl fragment larger properties into parcels with lots of edges and smaller cores.  Meanwhile, Massachusetts has cut its funding for open space conservation so dramatically that in 2003 it ranked 48th out of the 50 states in environmental spending as a proportion of the total budget.  Federal funding resources for land protection are so curtailed that the President submitted his FY07 budget to Congress with just $2 million of the $10 million intended for the four Northeast states in the Highlands Initiative, and no Forest Legacy money at all for Connecticut's top conservation priority.  The actual homeland grows less secure by the day.

These stark realities challenge us in the Northeast to make hard but strategic choices about how to allocate our limited conservation resources.  Since becoming the Director of the Litchfield Hills Greenprint, I have not seen a land protection opportunity in Northwest Connecticut requiring less than seven figures to conserve.   We could easily blow through 10 million dollars on one or two large land deals and still see our communities transformed by unchecked growth.  Those kind of conservation dollars do not exist for the pace and quality of land protection that is required to maintain the ecological integrity of our landscapes and the character of our communities.  We need a different approach.

Some conservation organizations have concluded that the best chance to secure a viable ecological base is to influence the management of already conserved lands and expand protection around those cores.  A variant of this approach involves working with the largest private landowners- utility companies, timber interests, religious and educational non-profits, and a handful of private individuals- to place easements over their developable lands. This still requires substantial funding -often from public sources - and necessitates entry into the policy arena where, as in any complex negotiation, compromises are required to get the deal done.

This approach can produce dramatic results- particularly as measured in dollars and acres- when large areas are controlled by a single entity.  Huge forest conservation efforts in Northern New England and the Adirondacks with state, non-profit and private partners have secured the protection of 20,000-acre forest cores where there will be no commercial forestry and an extensive area covered by forestry easements.  These easements prevent development but may not represent the highest standards of silviculture.  It is hard to prescribe practices in perpetuity today that may not represent best management practices in the future, but there is a trade-off involved in preventing development now and dealing with management of the resource later.

In Massachusetts, the Commonwealth received provisional green certification from the Forest Stewardship Council on all of its forest land: nearly 500,000 acres.  One of the FSC requirements was to designate forest reserves where there would be no commercial timber harvests.  The Nature Conservancy and other conservation interests are working with the Commonwealth to designate up to 20% of these state lands are large and small reserves. The remaining 400,000 acres of forest land would be potentially available for forestry activities.

The devil, as always, is in the details.  Critics of the Commonwealth's land management record express strong reservations about the quality of silviculture and the rationale for certain forestry practices advocated by the State.  Meanwhile, forestry occurs on many unprotected forest lands without the supervision of a licensed forester and driven by the financial interests of the landowner and the logger rather than the needs of the forest resource.  Some are concerned that all the energy placed on designated forest reserves will distract attention from the real need for forestry reform across the Commonwealth.  Clearly, quality silviculture is capable of sustaining many ecological qualities of our woodlands while providing economic benefits, but it is far from the current industry standard.  The Forest Guild is in the forefront of advocating for requiring long-term forest management with cutting plans filed by licensed foresters and favoring uneven-aged management and long rotations between harvest.  If successful, this approach would dramatically improve the ecological quality of our remaining private woodlands and complement the forest reserves on state lands.

We cannot buy it all.  Directing growth away from sensitive areas through better municipal and regional planning and changing how we manage what remains must complement our land protection efforts.  We will not be able to change our behaviors, and the regulatory environment that supports these changes, unless we first value what we have.

How We Get This Way

My 5-year-old daughter wants to be an astronaut. She wants to go up into space and see for herself what it's like out there.  She and I sometimes go out to the backyard on chilly winter nights and reach toward the stars pulsing just beyond our fingertips.  On midsummer nights, the constellations vie with fireflies for our attention, but in the cold seasons we tilt our heads skyward, entranced.  Something has connected for my little girl on those evenings, with bedtime postponed and pajamas thrust in overcoats, that will lay a foundation for a lifetime of curiosity and delight in the marvels of the universe.

When I was her age, I also knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Drawing was my preferred medium for self-expression, so one day I illustrated my future profession in crayon and Manila paper for my kindergarten teacher.  I wanted to be a scientist, but there were no white lab coats and mathematical calculations in my vivid depiction of racing antelope, careening pursuit vehicles and men leaning out of helicopters with lassos and tranquilizer guns. My model and ideal type was one of my earliest heroes: Marlin Perkins.

During the first half of the 1970's, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom was a weekly ritual in our house.  Television was tightly controlled in our family - Watergate, PBS and nature programming were about the only TV fare, although I can still remember watching one of the last Apollo lunar missions splash down in 1972, when I was 4 years old.  Wild Kingdom, however, was an exception and a familiar part of our Sunday evening routine.  It's host Marlin Perkins was a comfortable and reassuring presence, more akin to Mr. Rogers than Jacques Cousteau, my other great conservationist role model, whose exotic undersea world also held a siren's appeal.  Marlin's world, not Disney world, became my fantasy.

My parents shared a love of birds, and oftentimes we would pause on family walks through the woods while Mom and Dad "bished" furtive but curious birds into closer view.  At Christmas my sister and I both looked forward to finding that candy red miracle of conservation marketing that chirps when twisted, the Audubon Bird Call, in our respective stockings.  The big picture window in my grandparents' kitchen affords a front row view of myriad bird-feeders, with framed field guide plates decorating the walls to aid in identification.

We were not big campers in my family, although before getting married my parents had individually enjoyed the back country of the Tetons and the Whites:  Our family vacationed at my grandparents' marvelous old house on Buzzard's Bay in Wareham, MA, and at my Great-grandparents' cottages on Monhegan Island, ME.  I preferred to swim underwater more than across the surface and for many happy summers spent hours with mask and snorkel before getting my diving license at 12.  Wareham especially has been the constant landscape in my life, the place where my roots are deepest, that I know best of all and to which I return.  A powerful sense of place, its seasons and its changes both subtle and profound unfolding over time, informs my approach to community and landscape.   It was my childhood wilderness, with worlds to discover beneath a log or in the shifting moods of the sea.

Yet this grounded connection to place is not a limiting or insular geography.  I am fiercely protective of my "home" place, but understanding what is around me provides an outward focus.  My first moments in Africa played out in darkness, the smell of wet grass wafting across the tarmac under strange and wild stars.  I taught myself the southern constellations, learned hundreds of birds and the sounds of the veld in the gathering dusk, and the smell of rain in the wind.

Natural History museums also played their part, along with Mass Audubon's Drumlin Farm.  It probably helped the development of my conservation consciousness that I grew up beside an accredited zoo.  The Trevor Zoo at Millbrook school was 4 acres of enchantment.  There were koatis and tamarins in my formative years, along with family pets.   One memorable afternoon, I watched our rangy calico cat staring down an enormous stork in our front yard that had wandered up the hill from the Zoo. 

Environmental education is the holy grail of the conservation movement.  There have been a few, notable successes in changing our collective behavior - recycling in a number of "blue" states comes to mind - but the values that we act on as adults are formed first and foremost at home.  The arrival of Ranger Rick was a welcome occasion in our household and it was my parents who made that possible.  Our schools have vital roles to play in exposing our children to new ideas and fresh ways of looking at their world, but the behavior we model has the greatest impact.  My daughter and son may discover their own Marlin Perkins, a merry Pied Piper to inform and inspire, but they are exploring universes on their own in the back yard.

Keystone Corpse

During the last glaciation, a band of ice-free steppe extended from northern Europe to the western edge of Greenland.  Known to paleoecologists as Berengia, this virtually treeless expanse not only formed a 500 mile wide land bridge between two great northern continents but sustained an extraordinary migration corridor above the ice sheets, much as the thin belt of the Sahel skirts across Africa below the Sahara today. 

The fossil record shows that woolly mammoth, horse and steppe bison predominated in this ecosystem: 50% of all fossil bones from the unglaciated regions of northern Yukon and Alaska in this period are from bison species.  In comparison, carnivores represent just 1-2% of fossil bones from that time:  lions, scimitar cats, short faced-bears, as well as wolves, wolverines, and Asiatic Brown bear, the last of which crossed the land bridge at about the same time as the ancestors of the mammoth hunting Clovis point people arrived in North America.

The arid steppe ecosystem of Berengia sustained and responded to the movements of large herbivores, but Woolly Mammoth appears to have played a critical role in keeping down shrubby vegetation and allowing palatable grasses to proliferate.  An alternate name for the grassland vegetation of Berengia is the Mammoth Steppe.  Scimitar cats fed almost entirely on mammoth, while its carrion sustained a host of biota, from the omnivorous short-faced bear to the huge teratorns and New World vultures, of which the California condor is a modern relict.   Mammoth have been described as Berengia's keystone species during this last, great ice age.

The keystone species hypothesis, first proposed by University of Washington professor Robert T. Paine in 1969, is now well ingrained in conservation biology.  As the architectural keystone supports an entire arch, so a keystone species sustains and upholds a functioning ecosystem through its activities.  Like the single keystone supporting the cathedral vault, the effect of such species is disproportionate to its numerical abundance.   They may dramatically modify habitat, like the beaver or prairie dog, or by their activities sustain complex ecological synergies , like migrating salmon and Grizzly Bear.  In ecosystems as in architecture, removing the keystone causes collapse.The American Chestnut is sometimes described as a keystone species for the forests of the eastern United States, and the full impact of its loss has yet to be measured in our woodlands today. 

Some combination of climate change destroying habitat and human predation brought down the Woolly Mammoth.  Its loss would have removed one of the most significant natural disturbance mechanisms keeping the willows, alders and other shrubby vegetation of the Mammoth Steppe in check.  While a moister, warmer climate may have played its part, such periods between prior glaciations did not bring on the massive extinction event of the late Pleistocene.  Mammoths survived significant fluctuations in climate from their arrival in North America 1.7 million years ago to their final extinction.  Tim Flannery writes in his extraordinary ecological history of North America, The Eternal Frontier, that the loss of the woolly mammoth would have had significant, ecosystem-wide impacts:

"(T)he extinction of the mammoth led to the destruction of the Mammoth Steppe...a ten-ton mammoth would have consumed 100 and 120 kilograms of vegetation (much of it possibly woody) each day, dumping out waste in huge bowel movements at almost hourly intervals.  The effect of such large herbivores is profound in regions, such as Alaska, where cold or drought reduces levels of primary productivity.

What happened when the mammoth finally vanished from Alaska?  Doubtless much course vegetation which otherwise would have been eaten remained untouched.  Whatever lesser megafauna remained, such as caribou, would not have been able to consume this course herbage because only the largest herbivores can profit from such poor-quality food.  This vegetation would  have eventually built up into insulating mats that inhibit nutrient flow and support the inedible vegetation that occupies Alaska today. (Flannery 2001: 208-209)"

With climate change accelerating the process, the ecology of mammoth steppe of Berengia would have rapidly proved inhospitable for many of the Pleistocene herbivores and the carnivores that stalked them.   If excessive predation by human hunters was a critical factor in the elimination of the mammoth as a keystone species, then it is hard to avoid drawing parallels to the role of our species in the current, global extinction event playing out in a time of enhanced and accelerated climate change. 

Some ecologists have recently made the controversial argument that North America's impoverished megafauna would benefit from the reintroduction of species like the lion and elephant with recently extinct evolutionary antecedents here. While this suggestion is hard to take seriously at face value, the fact remains that here in the Eastern woodlands we are missing our top carnivores (cougar, gray wolf), our signature mast bearing tree (American chestnut), and one of our major seed dispersers (passenger pigeon).  Conceivably, the boreal dwelling mastodons of the late Pleistocene that ranged the eastern half of the United States played a role similar to the mammoths of Berengia in maintaining some of the early successional habitats of this region that require periodic disturbance to retard succession and are now quite rare. Conservation land managers turn to fire, mechanical and chemical means to manage some of these threatened natural communities. 

What other keystones, known and still unexamined, sustain our present ecology?  Can we, who disproportionately modify habitat in comparison to all other biota, keep from kicking down ecological keystones and modify our behaviors to support rather than degrade ecosystem function?

Equinox

This morning, the spiles dripping from our backyard maple bear silent tongues of ice.  I sugared off the last of this nectar over the weekend: three final cups of dark syrup in the annual tally before buddy sap begins.  Maple syrup is more winter's parting gift than a herald of Spring.  Here on the cusp of the Equinox, the winds of March bear an Arctic chill. 

Spring in New England is capricious and resists a steady progression from dark to light.  On a balmy day, the cold press of earth may yield wetly underfoot only to harden in our tracks the next.  Our native skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), much maligned for the foetid aroma it gives up when bruised, is remarkably adapted to our climate. Despite ambient air temperature it maintains an inner core of 72 degrees that is capable of melting through snow to attract the hardiest of pollinators.

The Equinox is a bittersweet expectancy, as each year I greet the promise of Spring with older eyes.  The Mourning Cloak butterfly, the first of its kind we encounter in early Spring, wears its ragged wings like a shroud.  Unlike the peripatetic Monarchs -all flash and dazzle and fresh from southern skies- the Mourning Cloak overwinters in these brutal climes.  It nears the end of its days when we greet it anew in Spring.  How it must welcome a reprise of that old remembered warmth at the last!

Snowdrop, crocus, daffodil: each a welcome burst of life and cheery bloom while our native flora are still asleep.  The evergreen of Christmas Fern is a mirage, clad like the Mourning Cloak in last year's raiment. The glorious Spring ephemerals grace our woodlands in May, but only the first brave sheaths of the wild leeks emerge from the old, damp earth at the Equinox.   Some of the earliest green in Spring is now the smothering mass of barberry, a greedy sprawl beneath the leafless canopy.

Once Spring is well begun, I shake off my melancholy.  Only the hardest of hearts can remain unthawed in the glow of that riotous color, unmoved by the warbling joyful chorus.  In the gathering green the days tumble and swirl like dandelion wine into long, luxuriant Summer.  But here, balanced on the fulcrum of the vernal Equinox, we have not forgotten the bite of winter and may feel it again before the end.  We are too close to its leaden weight to skip lightly on a cold Spring day.  It takes light, and warmth, and irrepressible youth to tip the balance.  I stand on the edge of that long, quiet field, waiting for the call to step off toward Spring.

Pileated To Meet You

According to the New York Times, David Sibley, the dean of modern bird illustrators, writes in the March 17th edition of the journal Science that a key piece of evidence purporting to show an Ivory-billed woodpecker in the swamps of Arkansas is a case of mistaken identity.  According to Sibley and his co-authors, a grainy video made on April 25, 2004, by M. David Luneau Jr., an engineering professor at the University of Arkansas "almost certainly" shows a Pileated Woodpecker and not an Ivory-billed.

Luneau's film is not the only evidence, nor is this the first time members of the ornithological community have challenged the conclusions of the research team from Cornell Labs that announced the discovery of at least one ivory-billed woodpecker in central Arkansas.  Like the inconclusive evidence of mountain lions in the northeast United States, there is still disagreement as to whether a viable population of ivory-bill could still persist with the near total destruction of its required habitat, and in the absence of other, expected evidence that is still lacking, such as its characteristic drill holes in the sides of trees.  Apparently, the key area of dispute over the Luneau film is whether it shows white wing patches over black on the downbeat, or black patches over white.  To me, stopping the video frame by frame, it's a blur of white with black tips, but I am not qualified to make a determination one way or the other.

What I can address is the idea of the ivory-bill, what it represents to conservationists and land managers.  It speaks to a powerful theme of Paradise Lost and redeemed that is deeply ingrained in our modern view of the environment.  It's a parable straight from The Lorax, a truffula seed tossed to the little boy by the Once-ler.  Never mind that one seed does not a viable population make.  Otherwise, the last passenger pigeon would not have died alone in the  Cincinnati Zoo.  When we are so clearly the agents of the extinction of charismatic fauna, a second chance is like the second coming.

Why do many Modern North American bird guides (but intriguingly, not Sibley's) still show the extinct Great Auk, the Carolina Parakeet, the Passenger Pigeon?  Should safari guides in Southern Africa illustrate the Quagga and the Black-maned Lion, both hunted to extinction in relatively recent history? 

The quagga, incidentally, is thought to have been a subspecies of the wide-ranging Burchell's Zebra with pronounced stripes extending only to mid-flank.  A selective breeding program  is trying to recreate quagga-like animals with that pattern, if not quite identical DNA.  Restoring the American chestnut forest and American elms in our rural landscapes with disease resistant cultivars is another powerful motivator for some conservationists.

The dream of re-establishing lost species is not limited to selective breeding.  An embryo with cloned mammoth DNA gestated by a modern Elephant host is the goal of some researchers.   A distinctly masculine desire to create new life has deep roots in western thought.  The golum of the Hebrew Bible, Mary Shelley's monster, and even Jurassic Park are elements in a continuum of cautionary tales about the use of forbidden knowledge to mimic creation. 

We want a world that despite our rapacious consumption and ability to access its most remote reaches can still harbor surprises.  What the Dark Continent represented to Victorian discoverers is today echoed in going over old ground to find new frontiers.  We seek out the remnants of eastern old growth that somehow evaded our ancestors' axes, eagerly inventory rare species occurrences where none had been previously confirmed.  We delight in the discovery today of new species unknown to science, even as we lose unknown species by the tens of thousands to extinction before they will ever be described with scientific nomenclature.

Science must be objective, its methods clearly reasoned and subject to peer review.  But scientists are hardly dispassionate themselves.  Whether or not the Luneau film shows a Pileated woodpecker or an Ivory-bill will remain an open and hotly contested question.  Believing the ivory-bill is still out there has powerful appeal.  Whether or not there is irrefutable proof of its existence, the ivory-bill story reinforces the conservation value of ecosystem-scale habitat protection, even when all of its the beneficiaries have not been enumerated.

Catamount Dreams

A specter is haunting the eastern woodlands.  From the Smokies to the Maritimes, rumors of catamounts persist and accumulate, along with a small but growing body of tangible field evidence that a few cougars, at least, have made a reappearance here.  This second largest New World feline is part of our wilderness mythology, a symbol of our vanished frontier and emblem of redemption for our recovering woodlands.  Even the keen of the catamount is legendary; modern cougars are remarkably non-vocal and some researchers speculate that those cats that once did scream -probably females in heat - were the first to be taken by the settlers' powder and ball. 

The mountain lion had one of the largest historic ranges of any mammal, stretching throughout the Americas from the boreal Canada to Patagonia, and from coast to coast across the United States.  The eastern cougar (felis concolor cougar) was driven from the East by declining forest habitat, the near loss of the White-tailed deer, and by intensive hunting.    It was last recorded in Massachusetts in 1858, was extirpated from New York by 1908, and is now officially represented only by the remnant Florida Panther subspecies, federally listed as endangered since 1973.   

There are perhaps as many as 50,000 cougars west of the Mississippi that do not enjoy such protection, and they appear to be expanding further east.  The Cougar Network, a nonprofit conservation organization that has conducted comprehensive research on the big cat's distribution in North America for over three years, documents evidence of movement of western cougars into parts of the Midwest, including numerous confirmed sitings in Nebraska and even from Illinois. 

From a wildlife agency perspective, it is highly improbable that there are established, breeding populations of the eastern subspecies of mountain lion outside of Florida.  The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation says the following on its Eastern Cougar Fact Sheet:

We in New York receive a few reports of cougar sightings each year from throughout the state.  In many instances it is a case of mistaken identity. Other cats, fishers or dogs are the animals probably seen. Once in a great while a real cougar is sighted. Based on our experiences, it is safe to assume that these animals have been intentionally or unintentionally released by people. Contrary to some peoples beliefs, they are not part of a native, self sustaining population. Cougars are not ghosts. They leave tracks which would be regularly seen in any area frequented by them. If there were enough cougars for a population, there would be many sets of tracks readily available for people to see throughout the year.

Others disagree.  It took coyotes more than 40 years to establish viable populations in New York after they first appeared the state in the 1920s.  Now they are widespread and well established everywhere except on Long Island, and even that may not be completely beyond their grasp: a coyote turned up a couple of years ago in Central Park!  The eastern Coyote is also on Cape Cod and the Elizabeth Islands in Massachusetts, and to do that involved some combination of trotting over the Bourne or Sagamore bridges, hopping a ferry, or making a cold swim in fast water.  Given time and enough connected habitat, an expanding western mountain lion population should find sufficient deep woods and an abundance of white-tailed deer up and down the Appalachians.   Whether we can tolerate the presence of a top predator in the densely populated East is a far different matter and likely to be the ultimate limiting factor in their recolonization.

I have heard anecdotal first-hand accounts of catamount sitings from Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut to the Taconic State Parkway in Columbia County, New York.  People I know to be sane and informed naturalists have spoken with complete conviction of their encounters with big cats in western Massachusetts and northwest Connecticut.  Reports from even more populous regions of New England periodically surface, like the persistent sitings of a big cat in Beverly, MA  north of Boston a couple of years ago.  A good friend and excellent field biologist found a deer carcass that had been killed by bites to the back of the neck, dragged and partially buried: classic lion behavior.  We both saw large claw sharpening marks high on the side of a tree in that same vicinity: big bobcat, or lion?

Something very primal and embedded in my psyche wants to believe that the eastern wilderness is large enough even for this wide ranging and lamented lost carnivore.  Yet I know how much my desire to see a mountain lion colors my vision.  Every tawny blur crossing the road in the distance screams the wished-for "lion" before my eyes register "deer" or "coyote" or "bobcat" or "dog".  And if it is true that a population of mountain lions from whatever source - feral released captives or westerners moving East- does reestablish in parts of its historic eastern range, will we suffer them to remain? 

The reintroduction of the gray wolf in the Northwest has been phenomenally successful - 1,000 animals in numerous reproducing packs, half of these in Idaho alone - but so rapid that the backlash from ranchers and residents in wolf country has been intense.  We already have a robust and expanding black bear population in Eastern New York and southern New England, growing at a faster rate than available wildlife management tools can moderate, and it seems likely that their numbers will exceed our tolerance threshold before they hit their ecological limits.   In 2002 a black bear tragically killed a 5 month old girl at a campground in Fallsburg, NY, about 90 miles from New York City.  It will not matter that this was an extraordinarily rare occurrence, or that a vastly larger number of people will die as a result of collisions with deer than will ever encounter mountain lions.  What makes us fear for our children, and to a lesser degree for our livelihoods, will dictate how we respond to carnivores in our backyards.

I spent nearly four years in remote parts of southern Africa, in areas where humans were not the undisputed top of the food chain.  I walked unarmed through dense bush where breeding herds of elephants had recently passed, and heard stories of three, fatal human encounters with elephants in that area during the previous decade that were fresh in the minds of the residents.   I have seen Ju/'hoansi bushmen, the so-called "harmless people" of the Kalahari, light the veld on fire after spying a venomous snake near their settlements.  Leopards preying on livestock can mean the difference between survival and starvation for those trying to subsist in non-equilibrium environments.  For some rural Africans, in ways reminiscent to narcotics dealing in other communities, poaching became one of the few perceived ways to break the cycle of poverty. 

The conflict between people and wildlife in rural Africa was, if anything, more acute than even in the western United States.  Here in New England, rural livelihoods affected by the deprecations of large carnivores are a small percentage of the regional economy and farmers are already adjusting their husbandry practices to account for predation from coyotes and the occasional bear.  Yet those very Africans most affected by competition for shared resources with wildlife also began to embrace conservation as a means of additional security and livelihood diversification. 

I have written about Community-based Conservation success in Namibia, and it offers hope that conservation threats can become opportunities.  We in the Litchfield Hills, and wherever our large predators are making a comeback, might find there is much to emulate in the Namibian example of local people making informed management decisions, becoming active stewards as well as direct beneficiaries of wildlife conservation.  Let me be clear; I do not advocate that we simply abandon federal oversight, wash our hands like Pontius Pilate and let the states manage our natural resources as they see fit.  Too much has been squandered, pandered, and sacrificed with that approach.  But I continue to believe that those who live closest to the resources need to be directly involved in making informed conservation decisions, and are unlikely to change their behaviors or throw their support behind policies imposed from outside.  That old "taxation without representation" thorn still sits uncomfortably under the American saddle.

And the catamounts that roam our restless dreams?  Perhaps we will have to accept an eastern wilderness without cougars, just as our skies no longer darken with the birds of passage, the heath hen no longer drums in our sand plains, and salmon may one day may fail for the last time to return the wide Connecticut.  Are they our own Lord God Bird, holding out undetected like the ivory bill,  waiting in the wings only to to step back  on stage once more?  For now, I believe the occassional sitings will continue to accumulate, settling like chestnut leaves from a long vanished canopy, until at some time in the not too distant future the question will no longer be "are they here", but "how can they remain with us?"

Welling Up From the Roots

Last year - one of profound personal transition, as it turned out - I made the choice to attune to the seasons and seek out their transient, annual offerings.  This lead to some wonderful and previously unknown pleasures, such as a shad bake on the Hudson in Catskill, out on a point by the river where the old Day Liner used to call, where we feasted on planked fillets nailed to seasoned oak and barded before the coals with strips of bacon.  It also brought my past and my children's present into marvelous alignment in the drip of maple sap in our backyard.

Our home sits on a 1/4 acre lot among century-old residences in a working class town.   We have one, large sugar maple behind the house, probably as old as the chestnut planks we discovered under the dark walnut stain in our interior trim.  In fall, its leaves turn a deep amber gold, warmer than the bilious yellow of Norway Maple, but neither do they achieve the flaming orange of another sugar maple down at the corner of Prospect and Bragg.  Soil, sun and moisture give each sugar maple its distinctive palette, and my children love the vast golden leaf piles that accumulate beneath its autumn branches.

In winter winds the old tree sheds a few, minor branches but is otherwise strong and sound.  Yet before we moved here, no one had tasted its sap.  There was an orchard behind the house, and wild apples still grow in the field beyond our garden gate, but the sugar bush lies outside the village on the slopes of Canaan Mountain, not here in our streets and sideyards.

I am so desperate for a hint of Spring's coming by this time of year that I find myself drifting back to the Marches of my youth.  I grew up at a rural boarding school in Dutchess county and attended another in distant Delaware.  Our three week Spring vacation coincided with sugaring at home and my mother and I took over for the absent students to collect sap and boil syrup.  Mom had tapped a few trees on her own before the school got into syrup production on a larger scale, and blew out several sets of electric stove burners before buying a second hand evaporator.  By the time I could drive the school tractor down the muddy lane that lead to the school, there were sap buckets on every maple on either side of the road and up the slopes of the "ski hill".  An old skate hut by the pond that once served as the school's first rink was jacked up and moved to behind the maintenance buildings to serve as the sugar shack, and I would pour each galvanized pail into a huge plastic garbage bucket lashed behind the tractor.  There would be mason jars of syrup filling an entire refrigerator in our home by the time I returned to school.

I decided last year to tap our tree, figuring that a good run of sap might give us a quart of syrup for each of the two pails I planned to employ.  It was not easy to find a hardware store selling the old spiles and sap buckets of my youth - not in this age of plastic tubes and gravity feeds.  Our tree was large enough for three taps- one for the first 12 inches of diameter at breast height and one for every 6 thereafter - but I settled for two on the southern exposure.  Daffodil shoots poked through the mulch at my feet and my children and I drilled a 7/16 inch hole on a 20 degree angle and watched the sweet nectar well and drop into our pail. 

That year was a short but ideal season stretching from March 11th to 23rd, and we boiled off the sugar in a huge 3 gallon pressure canning cauldron on our propane stove.  It worked surprisingly well, and as we have no wallpaper to yellow in that heady steam, the only unwanted impact was that it made our kitchen surfaces beckon like glazed donuts to convoys of emerging ants. 

I wrote recently about the transporting power of our senses.  Breathing in the maple steam draws the wellspring of my boyhood up from its dormant roots.  I had a similar experience passing a brewery in Seattle, where hop-laced vapor mingled with the salted fog of the Sound.  I felt myself once again standing on the strand in Swakopmund by that cold, upwelling Benguela Current. It was the smell of the Hansa Brauerei in my nostrils, venting its intoxicating cloud into the desert fog with the South Atlantic breakers scouring the shore.

Many other trees can be tapped for their sweet sap. Surprisingly, the sugar maple is not the only tree in its family with 3% sugar.  Norway, Red and Silver maples can each be tapped and boiled for syrup, each uniquely and distinctively flavored.  The sweetest of all northeastern trees, the hickory, produces small quantities of sap that reportedly will reward a patient collector with sugar of unsurpassed quality.  Yellow and black birch will yield a brew from boiled twigs or sap.  Unlike these renewable pleasures, extensive extraction of sap by fermentors of palm wine kills the donor tree. I recall many of these forlorn snags in Africa, standing topless above the Mopani veld, with pegs driven into their sides to serve as ladders for sap collectors.

This year I resisted the unnatural urge to tap with the first, premature sap run in January's thaw. Last Sunday, though, when the midweek snow melted away in a few short hours, my children and I set out once again to our old maple tree.  We carefully sited the new taps six inches from the old scars and hung our new, galvanized pails with their sheet metal covers in the afternoon sun.  Yesterday, I sugared off the first four gallons of sap on our stove, but like the first, sacrificial pancake before cook, batter and iron work in harmony, I walked away at the crucial moment and returned to find, instead of 10 ounces of amber syrup, caramelized cakes of sweet maple sugar instead.  Of such happy accidents are wonders made.

The incipient Spring awaits with other pleasures.  The herring run up the Agawam near my Grandmother's home in Wareham, MA is another long anticipated event that grounds me in the wheel of the seasons.  The chorus of vernal pools, the warblers in the orchard, the ramps and - yes - the morels of May woodlands will arrive in procession.  But hope springs first in the culm of maples - it is manna and ambrosia for body and soul.

Values Beyond Price

I was over at Gristmill today and inspired to respond to David Roberts' March 6th post on Environmental Ethics.  As our Representatives reserve the right to revise and extend their remarks in the Congressional Record, so shall I avail myself of the same opportunity in my own forum.

The discussion at Grist juxtaposed two philosophical views of the environment: biocentrism, the belief that nature has intrinsic value, and anthropocentrism, the idea that it is we who ascribe value to nature.  Taken to reductive extremes that few adherents of either viewpoint actually approach, one side might argue that human influence on nature is at all times undesirable, while the other may hold that a falling tree is soundless without a human ear to apprehend it.   The more interesting question is whether we can discuss nature and humanity apart from each other, or whether the very nature of the question is about the impacts of the behaviors that our values inform.

There is not a square inch of planet Earth - air, land or sea - that is not affected by human values and the choices we make as their outward expression.  That is different from saying that the existence of the planet and all the organisms it sustains matters only to the extent that humans place some worth on them.  Nor do I subscribe to the value system that believes in a divinely reordered New Earth regardless of human intention.  However, treating humanity as somehow separate from and distinct from the environment is neither ecologically sound nor sustainable.   

To take but one example from East Africa, David Western recounts in his exploration of the relationship between Kenya's people and their environment, In The Dust of Kilimanjaro, that removing pastoralists from nature preserves resulted in an overall decline in wildlife health.  In the absense of Masai cattle which had been grazing among the antelope and elephants of Amboseli National Park for millennia, unpalatable grasses proliferated.  Only a return of cattle to this system reestablished a mutually beneficial grazing regime. 

Human behavior reflects our values, and this is true for the choices we make as individuals and as groups.  The range of constraints and resources available to us defines our arena of choice.  If we wish to change our behaviors, and the repetitive patterns of behavior that comprise our institutions, then we need both to understand the values that inform our problematic actions and broaden our arena of choice. To transform an institution and the values that support it requires an informed act of social change.  Anything less merely replaces the gargoyle squatting atop the capital and leaves the rest of the column on the same, shaky foundation as before.  So it's "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" or, if you prefer the proverbial French to lyrics by The Who, then "Plus ça change...plus c'est la même chose" makes the same observation.

Conservation is entirely about values.  One of these is a belief that we can and should take responsibility for the consequences of our actions for the rest of the environment.  Another is that simply letting "nature take its course"  will nonetheless result in human-influenced outcomes.  Conservation is about making informed choices and recognizing the value in maintaining and promoting value-laden attributes of our environment: wilderness, biodiversity, the view from the back porch, sustainable rural economies, dark skies, community character, finite resources.

Quantifying ecosystem services, while statistically interesting, has not been a universally convincing argument for conservation.  The invisible hand of the market has neither created just and equitable human societies nor safeguarded shared environmental resources.  It takes intentionality to achieve these values-based ends.   

How resource users feel about their environment, their relationship with it and to other stakeholders in its conservation, is a critical determinant in how they perceive their arena of choice and what outcomes they will support.  The broader lesson of the Intelligent Design controversy may be that values can trump science, but values can change: physical laws of cause and effect are far more immutable.  Finding our place in the universe means valuing the place we have.

"I'd Rather Be in Some Dark Hollow..."

I have the best half-hour commute in the Northeast.  I slip through North Canaan after the school buses make their rounds at the highly civilized hour of 8:30 a.m. I turn right on red in the village of Canaan's small historic district and over the Blackberry River beneath the escarpment of Canaan Mountain.  I cruise down toward Falls Village along the largest inland wetland in the State: the extraordinary Robbin's Swamp.  Then over the Hollenbeck, passing Gallows Hill, and down across the Housatonic and into the most glorious "wild and scenic " stretch of river and road in our region.

Between Sharon Mountain and Cornwall Bridge, steep ridges and dark forests flank the Housatonic River for nearly 8 miles.  The twisting road mirrors the curves of the river, at times without a shoulder to cushion its serpentine path against the rocky flanks of the mountain.  On the opposite bank, a single line of track carries freight along the Berkshire Hills route, perhaps hauling hoppers of lime from Specialty Minerals or flatcars of southern lumber. The red covered bridge at West Cornwall is a regional icon and an image used by the Litchfield Hills Greenprint.  Along Housatonic Meadows and out in the riffles of the river lies one of the best cool water stretches on the main stem for fly-fishing trout and bass.  Bald Eagles pass the winter in the Housatonic gorge, and mergansers ride out the storms in its current.

All is not pristine along the river, however.  Across the river, one hillside bears the scars of wildfire, while a high levee protects the Church at Cornwall Bridge from the wrath of the river in flood.  There are some small home sites in the dark hollows of the river, one at least that appears to be well within the hundred year floodplain.  I pass a few, jarring reminders that there is still rural poverty in these gentrified hills before arriving at my office at the Calhoun Corners section of Cornwall Bridge.

Despite the extensive areas of conserved open space- including the longest stretch of riverside trail to be found on the AT - mansions squat on unprotected ridge tops like the castles of petty lords on the cliffs of the Rhine.  One in particular dominates the skyline as I pass under Sharon Mountain, an eyesore of such deliberate hubris that one almost fails to notice the cellular tower just up the road masquerading as some unnatural tree and obscured even in winter by maturing forest.  I count at least four of these mountainside homes along my commute, but some of these are well screened and set below the ridgeline, betrayed by their lighting at night but otherwise more discreetly integrated into the landscape, at least from a distance.  The access roads and utilities that make these commanding building sites possible can still cause considerable forest fragmentation and have other ecological consequences, but in this market, $200,000 for an access road is no longer a deterrent for a high end home builder.

There is a stretch of riparian forest on the Sharon side of the river north of West Cornwall that has seen some recent timbering.  The land is owned by the power company and has a deeply invaded understory of shrub honeysuckle, bittersweet and barberry.  It looks like a fairly heavy cut as I drive by, but I need to get out one of these days and have a closer look before I pass judgment on the quality of the logging job or the cutting plan.  It does make me nervous, though, to see a long strip of riparian buffer managed for timber.  There are generally economic motivations behind timber harvest on utility company land, and such cutting plans do not tend to put the forest first.

I arrive at work 19 miles and 30 minutes after I began, energized by the journey and what I have observed on the landscape.  The return trip offers new perspectives, and on an April night a few weeks from now, the chorus of tree frogs and spring peepers in South Canaan by Robbin's Swamp will prompt me to pull over and roll down the window in the gathering dusk, "when the world is mud-luscious and the little lame balloon man whistles far and wee."