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.

Plan B

Our family's conservation efforts for saving "Windrock" screeched to a halt on Tuesday night, with the Wareham Massachusetts Board of Selectmen voting 5-0 not to accept our conservation restriction (easement) and to put it back before Town Voters in the Fall.  To say that this is a disappointment would be gross understatement.  The Town voters have already voted to release Wareham's designated Community Preservation Act funds to purchase this conservation restriction, and now the Town will almost certainly forgo a Massachusetts Self Help Grant that would have reimbursed 56% of the purchase price. 

The Selectmen were upset about the process by which the project was brought forward by the Town Community Preservation Committee and the Wareham Land Trust, rather than the merits of the project itself (though they still had unanswered questions about some of the fine print).  In Massachusetts, unlike every other state, Mayors or Selectmen must sign off on a conservation restriction or it cannot go forward.  There is no way to override them, even if the merits of a project are beyond dispute and the Commonwealth reviewer is prepared to certify that it meets the test for being in the public interest.  For that reason, it is absolutely critical to understand local politics and not to anagonize Selectmen or back them into a corner with external deadlines or incomplete understanding.  Tragically, that situation has occurred with our project in Wareham.

Yet we are not, as one email I received yesterday claimed, "dead and buried."  You would think, from the amount of post-event email and phone communication we have been engaged with in the last 48 hours, that we were very much still in the race even if we lost the primaries.  And unlike the subject of my allusion, you would be right.  There are several options, including conservation outcomes, that could develop even with this setback.  The obvious one is to work to satisfy the Selectmen's outstanding concerns about the project between now and October's Town Meeting and seek what assurance we can from them that at least a majority of the BoS will support the project if the voters do. Or we could try and restructure the deal with different partners and funding sources.  Or we could start carving out and selling house lots (there are 4 Approval Not Required lots possible at the far end of the property).  Other possibilities may present themselves.  We do not have a great deal of time to sail an altered course, but we do have options.   

Conservation transactions are intensely complicated: far more so than straight real estate sales.  There are lessons to be learned here, but please forgive me if I decline to air them at this time.  The Fat Lady has laryngitis, after all.

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. 

Morgan Bulkeley's Berkshires

Morgan Bulkeley, Sr. is one of the Berkshires' greatest treasures.  During the 1960s and 1970s, his "My Berkshires" column in the Berkshire Eagle animated the land, people, history and ecology of this special place with the keen eye of the naturalist and the sensitivity of a writer who studied with Robert Frost.  In 2004, the cream of more than 750 of these articles was lovingly edited by another great local writer Jon Swan and illustrated by local artist Morgan Bulkeley, Jr.   Published as Berkshire Stories, it abounds in exquisite story-telling and fascinating details about the history, nature, people and conservation of our region. 

"Have you ever held a spark of life in your palm?  One ten-year old boy will never forget it.  He was plying a butterfly net about the honey-suckled lattice of the summer cottage when all at once he had 'the tiny, pulsing, burnished green-gold gem' that is a ruby-throated hummingbird.  He rushed to show it to the one who had given him his own spark.  Little fingers opened gingerly, and the mystery, held for a moment, vanished into summer air, gone but not forgotten..."

I highly recommend you purchase a copy.  This blog can only aspire to write as evocatively about the topics that Bulkeley so masterfully reveals.

2008 Farm Bill Conservation Provisions

The $307 billion 2008 Federal Farm Bill is heading for the President's desk with veto proof majorities in the House (318-106) and Senate (85-15).  More than 2/3 of this amount ($209 billion) is for food stamps and other nutrition programs, compared with $35 billion for agricultural commodities.   Others will parse the wisdom or folly of this pile of pork and priorities, but here is what it holds for conservationists:

Conservation program spending increased by $6.6 billion;

Extends for 2 years the tax incentive for conservation easement donations retroactive to Jan 1, 2008 (which generally means a 50% reduction in AGI tax liability with up to 15 years to carry over the balance of the gift or bargain sale of a conservation easement).

Doubles funding for Farm and Ranchland Protection Program (more than $1 billion over 5 years, an increase of $560 million over the previous Farm Bill) to protect agricultural lands from urban and suburban development pressure;

Increases funding for Environmental Quality Incentives Program and Conservation Stewardship Program to enhance and protect our natural resources;

Continues funding for Grassland Reserve and Wetlands Reserve programs, increasing by 1.22 million acres the authorization for enrollment in the Grassland program with increased rolls for non-profits;

Creates an Open Fields Program to encourage public access to private land for hunting and fishing as well as a Chesapeake Bay program to help restore and protect the Bay watershed;

Creates a Community Forest and Open Space Conservation Program that will provide federal 50/50 matching grants to local governments and qualified non-profit organizations across the country to acquire forests and open spaces for local ownership and management.

A new qualified forest bond provision that would protect large forest ownerships near national forests.

None of the three senators running for president voted.  Nor did Ted Kennedy. If Congress votes to override the President's expected veto, it would be just the second time in his presidency that it has chosen to do so.

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.   

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.

"I Sincerely Doubt That Ct. DEP Has More 'Substantial Experience' in Obtaining Easements Than The Nature Conservancy." : The NWCCOG Calls for "Some Semblance of Credibility and Fairness"

Connecticut Public Radio WNPR aired this story yesterday during "Morning Edition."  It concerned a letter from the the Executive Director of Northwestern Connecticut Council of Governments to Gina McCarthy, the Commissioner of the CT Department of Environmental Protection, calling for her to intervene "to restore some semblance of credibility and fairness" to the process used by the State to select projects to fund under the Natural Resources Damages Fund, established back in 2000 to mitigate GE's contamination of the Housatonic River with PCBs.  Thought to contain more than $9 million, none of these funds have been disbursed for projects to date.   

The following is the text of Executive Director Dan McGuinness's letter, reproduced here as a public service with permission of the author.  This may also be of interest to those of you who do not live in the Litchfield Hills or further downstream along the lower reaches of the Housatonic.

                                       January 4, 2008

Dear Commissioner McCarthy:

My purpose in writing to you is to express my concerns regarding the "short list" of projects for the Housatonic River Natural Resources Restoration project.

I will state at the outset that my agency, the Northwestern Ct. Council of Governments, in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy submitted  a proposal that did not make the "short list".  My comments, therefore, can be - and undoubtedly will be by some - considered as "sour grapes".  Nonetheless, having both watched, and been involved in, this process for more than seven years, I feel compelled to express my concerns.

Comment Period  The applications, referred to as "requests for supplemental information", were due June 20, 2007.  The schedule, at that time, was for the short list to be announced in mid-September 2007.  Instead, the "short list" was announced by the Ct. Trustee Sub-Council on December 17, 2007.  At that time, the Sub-Council stated that they would accept written comments only up until January 4th.  Their contention was that to extend the time for written comments would delay the process.

Over a seventeen day period that included Christmas Day and New Years Day, the organizations involved were expected to meet and prepare written comments.  For the Council to be three months late in developing the "short list" and then provide only seventeen days for written comments is an insult to all those who submitted applications as well [as] those who would like to comment on the proposed projects.

It should also be noted that, because of the short time period, the Ct. Trustee Advisory Group, that was set up by Ct. DEP, did not meet and comment on the projects or the process.

Scoring System  Over a period of more than for months, the Sub-Council, working with consultants, developed a set of evaluation criteria to be used in reviewing projects.  The adopted evaluation criteria contain five categories that are further subdivided into twenty-one subcategories.  Seventeen of the subcategories are assigned specific numerical scores.

Given the time and expense that went into developing this elaborate scoring system, one would expect to see a final score sheet for each project showing how many points the project received in each of the seventeen sub-categories.  Instead, the Sub-Council released a narrative "project evaluation summary" for the five major categories for each project and a conclusion of whether or not to "short list" the project.  The narratives, while admirably succinct, do not provide much guidance to an applicant as to their application's shortcomings.  The applicant, therefore, is left in a quandary as to how they should respond in the short period available for public comment.

Responding to comments made at the Sub-Council meeting on December 18th, I have received a "summary table" showing Trustee Ken Finkelstein's rankings.  His table simply shows the total score he assigned to each project.  I have also received Rick Jacobson's detailed raw scores for each project.  No scoring information has been received from the third Trustee, Veronica Varela from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  As far as I can tell, the scoring information has not been posted on the Sub-Council's website.

Results  According to the eligibility criteria adopted by the Sub-Council, all projects had to enhance or restore the natural resources that were damaged by the release of the PCBs. More specifically, to be eligible for funding, a project had to either:

• restore or enhance aquatic natural resources,
• restore or enhance riparian and floodplain natural resources and/or
• restore or enhance recreational use of natural resources

At several meetings, Sub-Council Trustees and DEP employees stated that they expected the funds to be distributed fairly evenly between projects that addressed each of the three natural resources that were damaged.

Instead, 58.5% of these funds are to go to recreational projects, 26.1% to riparian and floodplain projects, and 15.4% to aquatic projects.  this is hardly the distribution of funds that applicants were lead to believe would occur.

Of the fifty-three projects that were submitted in the second phase, seven were submitted by Ct. DEP.  Of these seven, five are included on the short list.  These five projects account for $5,610,893 - or 44.5% of the total project funds on the short list.

The NWCCOG and The Nature Conservancy's Project (P-10) resembles a project proposed by Ct. DEP (P-37).  Both projects call for the acquisition of easements along the Housatonic River.  The NWCCOG/ The Nature Conservancy Project would be solely for conservation easements.  The Ct. DEP project would be primarily for easements to provide recreational access to the River.  The NWCCOG/ The Nature Conservancy project requested $2,000,000; the entire $2,000,000 was to go to the purchase of easements.  The Ct. DEP project requested $2,812,580 of which $1,440,000 (51.2%) is to go for the purchase of easements and the remaining $1,372,580 is to Ct. DEP for salaries, benefits, supplies, materials and travel.

Needless to say, the Ct. DEP project was included in the "short list".

The Project Evaluation Summary for the NWCCOG / The Nature Conservancy project contained some rather curious statements.  The Applicant Implement Capacity section states: "The organizations and the representatives from them appear to be qualified and have the necessary technical and administrative experience."  But, the Conclusion Section gives as a reason for not including the NWCCOG / The Nature Conservancy project the claim that other unnamed applicants have "substantial experience in this work".  I sincerely doubt that Ct. DEP has more "substantial experience" in obtaining easements than The Nature Conservancy.

When the agency hires consultants, staffs the Sub-Council and has a vote on the Sub-Council makes decisions that heavily favor that agency, it is not surprising that people question the fairness of the outcomes.  The failure to provide adequate time for written public comments and the failure to release the complete results of the elaborate scoring system only raises more questions.

I am requesting that you intervene in this process in order to restore some semblance of credibility and fairness to the entire Housatonic River Natural Resources Restoration Project.  Thank you.

Sincerely,

Dan McGuinness, Executive Director