Walking the Berkshires

Interview with a Blogger

I am flattered to be profiled with an interview today at a blog and environmental forum called My Greenpeace Buddies.  I was approached to share my thoughts as a blogger who writes about ecological matters, among other things, and was happy to oblige. 

Given my strong preference to focus on areas of common interest rather than positions - except in those cases where reason is clearly out of the question, such as where a certain southern African dictator is concerned - the interview goes strongly down the path of being "occasionally nettlesome" but "fairly non-partisan".  I talked about how individuals and institutions change their behavior and some of what is and is not helpful in that regard. 

I suspect this may be the only time that my right-of-center cousin Tigerhawk gets an acknowledgment in this or indeed any environmental forum.  Anything for bilateral relations, dear readers. And yes, I do know the difference between "affect" and "effect"...just not when I wrote out my responses.  Plus, I found an opportunity to quote from The Last of the Mohicans and it wasn't anything about noble savages.  Fellow English Majors can rest easy that my undergraduate degree is in no immediate danger of revocation.  Mugabe's, however, is another question.

Drop in if you like and check it out.

Getting Close

For more than 2 years, our family has been working to negotiate the sale of a conservation easement (called Conservation Restrictions or CRs in MA and CT) on +/- 19.55 acres of our beloved "Windrock"  in Wareham, MA.   This is what I do professionally, but this time it is on behalf of my children, parents, sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  Saving land takes time, and getting agreement on the terms of a CR on behalf of so many when there are two co-holders and a host of reviewers is a tall order.  There are many ups and downs and you learn to hold a steady course and respond in a timely fashion to whatever challenge arises.

I don't want to jinx it.  But we are now within three weeks of a tentative closing data and we are feverishly working through the conservation transaction punch list. Our family has come together in an extraordinary way to do what is right for the property and honor the love and conservation vision of my grandparents Robert and Athalia Barker, who bought the place more than 61 years ago and wanted it to remain in the family and as intact and unspoilt as possible.   Selling this CR allows us to retain title to the entire property and helps ensure that we can maintain it as we have loved it for future generations to enjoy.

We can see the runway and are preparing to land.  When it is over and we all can exhale, I'll share the details. 

Don't Got Milk

Here's a swell idea. Tax dairy farmers for the methane produced by flatulent cows.  Now it is true that cows produce more greenhouse gas than any other source, including vehicle emissions.  Yes, livestock are major resource consumers and yes, overgrazing, deforestation and a host of other ills can be pinned on unsustainable farming practices.  But taxing the farmer for cow farts is a bit like punishing the prostitute and not the Johns.  Estonians must not like milk.  The Kiwis made a stink about a similar measure in 2003.

Giving a Fig For Newts

This is the kind of news story that makes it hard to be a conservationist.

"I know it's the law, but it's very frustrating and bordering on the ridiculous that the fate of newts takes precedence over humans."

The British couple in this story from Dauntsey, Wiltshire  are understandably frustrated that they are unable to return to their flood-damaged home until the blocked drainage ditch on their property that handles run-off from a nearby motorway is surveyed for rare great crested newts this summer.  Rare species legislation generally focuses on species occurrences, regardless of how marginal or human altered the habitat.   If you've got newts, you've got issues.  This tends to set up an adversarial relationship between critters and people.  What incentive is there to provide a safe harbor for rare species on private property when there are no benefits for the landowner to doing so? 

This particular case looks like it will resolve itself in a few months, since relocation of any newts that are found is possible under applicable law and the landowners have another suitable site on their property where the newts occur.  But as I have said in this space on previous occasions, when human beings are given a choice between our health and well-being and that of other creatures, we generally side with our own species.  When we are given no choice, even in compliance we take our own side.  There are other options.  Community-based conservation is applicable in the developed world as well as the developing.

Bury Me Not...

When you "shuffle off this mortal coil, turn your body back to soil" as Loudin Wainwright III acidly puts it in the lyrics to "Suicide Song", will you still have a carbon footprint?  How green is your cemetery?   The Funeral Consumers Alliance of Eastern Massachusetts is a strong believer in going out the natural way and according to the March 12th Berkshire Environmental Action Team newsletter is seeking a partnership to establish a "green cemetery" in Massachusetts.

"A green cemetery is a natural burial ground that conserves land while providing an alternative to standard burial. It is a cemetery that encourages sustainable and ethical practices by banning the use of toxins and non-biodegradable materials. Green burial is interment without embalming, metal or hardwood caskets, casket vaults or cement liners, and often without permanent markers (although in some cemeteries, natural stone markers are permitted). An un-embalmed body may be wrapped in a shroud and placed in the ground or buried in a biodegradable casket. Typically, family and friends of the deceased have the opportunity to be more directly involved in the burial.

The FCAEM is looking for a conservation group to partner with on this effort.  As a conservationist who spends a good deal of time thinking about land use and management questions, I confess I had not been paying close attention to the green cemetery movement.  The Litchfield Hills Greenprint considers rural cemeteries to be permanently protected open space, since a change of use is highly unlikely and there are demonstrated habitat and recreational values provided by these spaces.  I have written here about America's rural cemetery movement and the rare species and habitats that persist in old pioneer graveyards where the prairie has never been plowed, or where frequent mowing has mimicked the natural disturbance of suppressed fire regimes.  The conservation benefits of these places has not been a question for me, but their management and the actual burial practices associated with them is a new angle.

There are protocols for green golf courses that I'd imagine would be applicable to rural cemeteries.  My friends at the Ecological Landscaping Association could doubtless offer some pointers and best management practices for these spaces.  I believe the main challenge besides changing consumer expectations and behaviors would be in local zoning and public health ordinances that might not be aligned with winding shrouds, and biodegradable caskets.  Coincidentally, there was a piece on a UK manufacturer of Ecopod coffins on Marketplace this morning that raised this point, as well as questioned whether importing these things from Britain really resulted in a reduced carbon footprint when compared to wooden caskets made locally.  As for how all this compares to cremation, there is certainly an immediate carbon release into the atmosphere but less land required for burial and decomposition. 

If you have an opinion on which is the greener option, you can jump into this thread at Live Earth where they had a fine old time getting down and dirty on this topic.  I would caution those who advocate a tilt over the side to Davey Jones, however, that burial at sea is not always forever.

Mapping The Woodlands: GIS Wonkery in the Litchfield Hills

The landscape of the Litchfield Hills is 75% trees.  Connecticut as a whole is about 60% forested, and actually loses more forest cover now than it replaces through natural succession.  We still have forested uplands in Northwest Connecticut that are of sufficient size to sustain a broad array of animals that depend on contiguous, intact forest habitats for their survival.

The Litchfield Hills Greenprint has developed a novel way of defining these areas and is using it to help its conservation partners set regional priorities for conserving large forest habitats.  We did so because we were not satisfied with existing data sources for this resource of regional significance.

Both The National Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy recognize exceptionally large blocks of relatively intact forest habitat in Northwest Connecticut.  In TNC's case, its Lower New England / Northern Piedmont Ecoregion Conservation Plan (2000) emphasized predominantly forested areas bounded by roads encompassing at least 15,000 acres, which TNC considered the minimum area needed to withstand the impacts of major natural disturbance events.  TNC believes conserving these forest blocks can serve as a "coarse filter" for most of the region's terrestrial biodiversity. 

It is a very coarse filter, however.  There are very few of these places and TNC had to ignore a number of smaller roads and fragmenting features to define the areas.  It is hard to explain why some roads were considered fragmenting while others are overlooked.  I remember one fragmentation metric that did not consider roads where two people could stand and toss a Frisbee for five minutes without having to step out of the way of an oncoming car.   I give them points for creativity, but it is still an imprecise means of determining traffic volume and more than a tad subjective. 

Merely buffering a digital road layer and selecting larger patches of interior forest as the Greenprint had initially done also proved inadequate, since Connecticut's Geographic Information Systems (GIS) road layer is a real mess and lumps together private driveways, trails, and roads digitized from old topo maps.  This makes it exceedingly difficult to select as "fragmenting" a set of roads of a specific width, surface, and traffic volume using digital data.

We needed to be able to account for the impacts of habitat fragmentation as we defined core forest habitat. We decided not to consider roads when defining boundaries, but instead to use the 2002 remote land cover data: the most current available for Connecticut.  These data layers recognize 12 land cover types, 11 of which occur across this landscape.  The results are shown on the map above in pale green. 

Here is how we did it:

• We selected altered land cover types - grass and turf, agricultural fields, barren land, utility lines, and developed areas (buildings and associated road infrastructure).
• We buffered them by 300 ft.  We chose this distance to account for some of the significant edge impacts on core forest habitat, which include the spread of invasive exotic plant species from disturbed areas and invasion by brood parasites that threaten interior forest nesting birds. 
• We then selected the remaining terrestrial land cover types (coniferous and deciduous forest, forested and non-forested wetlands) and made a single shape file. 
• We clipped the buffered areas from the habitat shape file, and eliminated patches of contiguous habitat that were <190 acres in size.   What remained represented our region's predominantly forested core habitat. 
• We added the lake cover layer , which we did not want to buffer or to count toward the computation of overall terrestrial habitat.  Nothing more resembles egg on one's face than standing up before a commission or land trust and pointing to a purposed forest habitat that is 90% below the surface of a lake.

This is what it looks like close up.  Permanently protected open space shows up in dark green, while the habitat is pale green.  You can see that small roads that had closed canopies were not detected by the satellite, but houses in clearings and large open fields were identified and buffered.  The remote data looks at 100' pixels and classifies them by their dominant land cover type. 

These forest habitats cross jurisdictional boundaries and occur across many ownerships.  The number of forest landowners in southern New England doubled in the last decade, but the overall area of forest declined.  The inescapable conclusion is that forest parcels have been divided and are managed - if managed at all - in lots of ever diminishing size and often without regard for the larger forest system in which they occur. 

This kind of resource mapping offers landowners, land managers, land trusts, municipalities and regional planners a new way of understanding the distribution and protected status of our larger forest habitats.  If you overlay these data with actual parcels of land, you start to see opportunities to locate development so that it creates less habitat fragmentation, or identify large forest parcels to try and conserve.  We believe that we in the Litchfield Hills need to conserve at least 20,000 additional acres of this forest habitat where it expands cores and connects corridors, and do so in the next dozen years. 

These maps do not tell us whether there is a willing landowner, or how the forest is managed.  That sort of data comes from those most closely connected to the resource and the communities in which it occurs.  The maps help focus attention on the resource and structure that discussion.

I Sense a Disturbance in the Forest

We've left our forest at Windrock largely to its own devices.  Our family still takes a small amount of cord wood from standing dead trees or blow down, but by and large the wind and the deer and the Hemlock woolly adelgid are the primary influences on the current condition of the woods.  When I walk through these woodlands, as I had occasion to do this past weekend, I carry with me the long view afforded by nearly four decades of personal connection, coupled with a naturalist's eye for the patterns and processes at work here.  The trees and the stones and the thick layers of duff on the forest floor have stories to tell and hold clues to the future.

Everything that grows, thrives or fades away in a  terrestrial habitat or ecosystem can be understood as the result of three powerful influences: geology, climate, and disturbance.  My grandparents' property in Wareham lies on a great smear of glacial overburden laid down during the last ice age.  There are granite erratics like the one that gives the place its name "Windrock", and poor, well drained soils that perk well and feed groundwater to the regional Plymouth-Carver Sole Source Aquifer. 

The woods run down to within sight of the bluff and the bay and tree species change as the wind and the salt air determine which ones can endure and which must remain further back in the company of their taller brethren.  Here you will find Atlantic white cedar and pitch pine and scrub oak and green brier, and in recent decades tangles of oriental bittersweet and Japanese honeysuckle vine, but not the white pines that shun the salt and require a bulwark against the wind.  Here, too, are Doug fir and jack pine and even an English oak, for this is not a landscape devoid of human impact. 

While the hurricane and the ice storm and the long suppressed but still feared wildfire have great effect, the forest is neither primeval nor is the best ecological option to blithely let "nature take its course."  Nature does not work in a vacuum anymore.  The legacy of human land use alters everything.

There are stone walls running through the woods.  One of these clearly marks a property line, though the division of  land likely came after the stone fence was laid and not before.  This was open pasture in the 1800s, and sheep grazed the broom sedge that now clumps in the openings near the shore but not in the shade of the trees.  When my Grandparents acquired the property in 1947 the forest was younger, the trees lower, and the species composition different than one finds today. There were many more pitch pines back then: early successional species that require periodic fire to germinate and reduce competition from oaks and other species.  Those few that remain in the woods today have stretched to their maximum heights to find space in the canopy, and none are regenerating. The slow growing oaks - black, scarlet and white - are nowhere a significant component of the forest except in the scrub near the bluff, for they are subject to the predation of deer and are shaded out by fast growing white pine.  The hemlock stands in the forest have suffered under the invasive adelgid onslaught and most of these trees are dead or dying now.  A few sassafras, the odd birch near the barn, a clone or two of invasive locust and some wild holly may been seen, but the rest of the forest is single-aged white pine, and when it goes down in a big wind the blow down can be extensive.

There are places in the forest where there are distinctive mounds and depressions in the soil: cups and pillows that mark where giants fell.  You can tell by their orientation the direction of the wind that brought the shallow rooted trees down, and whether it was a winter nor'easter or an onshore hurricane.  White pine seedlings sprout in these canopy openings.

There are many deer in the woods, and heavy browse lines crop the rhododendrons. There are Cooper's hawks and foxes and eastern box turtles near the forest edge.  There is a vernal pool with polliwogs in spring.  There is room for 4 approval not required house lots on the road at the end of the property if we are unable to conserve it through a conservation transaction with the town and local land trust.  Currently we are hung up on the limited forest management rights we wish to retain.  Hopefully we will navigate this as we have other obstacles and have something to celebrate this summer.   

Island in Winter

It is going to dive down toward negative territory tonight in the Litchfield Hills.  I remember cold like that on a Christmas morning when it got so bad we seriously thought about bringing my sister's pony up from the empty barn and into the back wood room of our house. 32 degrees below zero is downright unfriendly weather and one tends to have uncharitable thoughts about the season.

Back in 1990 I spent New Years week on Monhegan Island out in the Gulf of Maine, and got to see that familiar island in winter.  The little summer cottages on Dead Man's Cove were dark and empty, and the rising tide sucked the snow from the rocky shore.  We stayed in a heated apartment and pitched in with the Islanders as they prepared for Trap Day, the traditional launch of Monhegan's lobster season, now established by law but then enforced by custom.  I rode out that morning with Doug Boynton and my friend Chris Koerber who was Dougie's stern-man and the swells and the stench of the bait were beyond description and I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

Monhegan still had deer back then, before they got too numerous and were removed to protect the island ecology.  The parasitic dwarf mistletoe infestation  was starting to spread in the spruce forest but had not yet had the impact that it would in the coming decade.  I skated with my Mom on the Ice Pond which I had never seen in its frozen form before.  As always in winter, the human population shrinks to a few dozen year-rounders and a handful of others like ourselves with warm homes to return to elsewhere. 

When the sun came out, the low angle light on the long grass of the cemetery was breathtaking with the whitecaps and blue water beyond.  I loved the days that were leached of color, all gray skies and steely water and white frosting on the dark shore.  To endure a winter out here takes more than most would hazard, but to sojourn for a time was to see with fresh eyes.  I will try to see with them again on this cold winter night in Connecticut when the marrow in my very bones wants to curse the cold and dark.

White-nose Syndrome Threatens Northeastern Bats

One of the scary things about the emergence of a virulent new epidemic that is new is how little we know about its causes and how little time there is to act to contain its spread.  Even with outbreaks where the causes and treatments are understood by science, it is generally true that the longer the lag between detection and response, the more costly the remedy and the less likely it will lead to complete eradication. 

This is true not only for the diseases of humans but also those pests and pathogens that affect plants and animals.  The spread of what is being called "White-Nose Syndrome" to more than a dozen bat caves in three northeastern states is a current case in point.

"White-nose syndrome was first discovered last January in caves in eastern New York. Last year, between 8000-11,000 bats died in New York-- the largest die-off of bats due to disease documented in North America."

Thousands of bats have sicked this year as the disease has been detected in an additional cave in the eastern Berkshires, and two more in the southern Green Mountains of Vermont.  Bats overwinter in large communal groups, sometimes numbers tens of thousands of individuals, but in relatively few places around the northeast.  Mortality rates have exceeded 90% in some of the affected caves.  Four species are known to be affected, including the endangered Indian Bat which had been making a comeback in the Northeast.   Little brown bats seem to be taking the hardest hit.

The implications of a massive bat die off could be substantial, given their role in insect control.  Moths and beetles in particular could have a greater impact on crop damage without the predation provided by bats.

The problem is that so little is known about what is causing the die-off.  The Boston Globe reports; "Scientists do not yet know if the fungus is a cause of the illness or an effect. Some of the sick bats behaved oddly, clustering near the entrance of New York caves, flying in winter when they should have been sleeping and crashing into snow banks."  Many but not all of the caves where the disease has been found are popular with cavers, and State and Federal wildlife agencies have called for spelunkers to avoid caves where bats hibernate ti prevent possible contamination.  The Northeast Cave Conservancy has responded by closing all its caves to visitation until May 15th.

Fungi of the genus Fusarium that are widely distributed in soil and associated with plants have been identified with the bat disease.  New York DEC wildlife pathologist Ward Stone hypothesizes that affected bats have weakened immune systems due in part to climate change.  This is by no means a certainty, as the counter argument provided in this thread posted on a caving forum illustrates.  It is possible that there is a combination of stressors at work, as many bats appear to die of dehydration after using up their fat reserves in unusual winter activity. 

In the second year of a new outbreak, hard data is difficult to find and it is prudent to err on the side of caution.   

More:  Welcome Oekologie XV readers!

Gray Lady Down With Greenprint

The Litchfield Hills Greenprint Program got some very high profile press last Sunday in the New York Times regarding the regional importance of Farmland Preservation in New Milford, Connecticut.  Fair use excerpt:

(An) ethic of self-reliance is behind the mayor’s desire to hold onto a sizable chunk of New Milford’s remaining farmland. Much of the land that used to support dairy cows and tobacco here is these days turning out jumbo colonials. Before housing spreads over the remaining pastures, the mayor says, she would like to set aside a reserve of agricultural land as a guarantee that the town will always have a local source for food or, possibly, renewable energy.

“For me,” she said, “it’s a sustainability issue.”

...Totaling nearly 1,000 acres, the five farms represent one of the largest contiguous stretches with prime agricultural soils left in Litchfield County, said Tim Abbott, program director of the Litchfield Hills Greenprint, a project organized by the Housatonic Valley Association and the Trust For Public Land.

Maintaining such large tracts of agricultural land, as opposed to single farms surrounded by housing, is vital to sustaining farming, Mr. Abbott said, because a greater amount of land will allow for more adaptability over time.

“This is New Milford’s last, best hope to keep farming intact the way they know and love it,” he said.

I must confess that ever since the Wall Street Journal included me as a representative Luddite Birder in a front page story about technology and bird watching, I've been secretly hoping for the other wing to fly.  With the NYT story, I now appear to occupy the radical conservation center, though hopefully not in the same way as Spinal Tap bass player Derek Smalls, who described himself as the "lukewarm water" between two lead guitarists.