My most recent "Nature Notes" piece in the Lakeville Journal can be read here with free registration.
"...Proximity to major metropolitan centers in New York, and to a lesser degree Hartford, has made our land valuable as residential real estate. A renewed interest in locally produced food and concern about the loss of our remaining farmland to nonagricultural uses runs up against the hard fact that the land is worth more in a developed state than as farmland, and is too expensive for new farmers to obtain.
Meanwhile, Berkshire County is losing population. Connecticut is losing young people at one of the highest rates in the nation.
We have saved many significant lands from development but are unable to maintain them in a condition that will ensure that the very qualities that made them special will persist over time. Without the resources to care for and steward our fields and forests, they are vulnerable to fresh degradation from invasive species and to loss of ecological productivity..."
In other news, I wrote a magazine story for the latest issue of Massachusetts Main Streets and Back Roads, a free publication and not yet readable on-line, about The Mammoth Cheese of Cheshire. Big as a millstone and a month in transit from the Berkshires to Thomas Jefferson's innaugeral. I'll link to it once it makes it to the electronic media stream.
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