Walking the Berkshires

Walking the Berkshires is 1 Year Old

The introductory post of Walking the Berkshires happened without fanfare a year ago today, when my good friend Charlie gave me guest author privileges and set me off on this grand Blogessy.   A year is like seven years to a dog, but blog years must be longer, and 160 posts and two URLs later it feels like high school graduation at least. 

I love this medium.  It has given me the discipline of writing regularly that I had long ago forsaken, and a forum for exploring the myriad connections between past and present, land and people that occupy my thoughts, as well as a community of readers and correspondents with whom to engage.  I like to think that this is a place for unexpected discoveries for author and reader alike, and where folks of very different backgrounds and orientations may find areas of common ground and interest.

I am deeply grateful for the encouragement and support of those who regularly read and comment here.  I'd especially like to extend my thanks to my friends at Whorled Leaves , and also my second cousins at Tigerhawk who have found numerous reasons to link here despite the very different foci of our respective blogs.  TH in particular has been extremely generous, and a number of his generally right-of-center readers have stuck around Walking the Berkshires after being directed here from his blog.  It takes some serious huevos, or an open mind, or perhaps both for a conservative blogger to praise the writing of someone who goes by the handle of GreenmanTim.

I've discovered some extraordinary blogs through the process of blogging.  Many of these appear in the blog rolls at the sidebar and I encourage you to explore there and see what strikes your fancy.  I also find blog carnivals a marvelous way to reach new people and find new favorites.

So on to year two, and wherever it may lead.  It's been a grand ride so far...

Gould Farm Honored with Model Forest Designation

Gould Farm, a residential treatment community serving those recovering from mental illness in the hills of Monterey, Massachusetts, has been honored by the Forest Guild with designation as a model forest.  On Friday, September 22, over sixty people gathered at Gould Farm to celebrate this remarkable achievement.  Across the entire United States, the Forest Guild has recognized only 22 model forests, each exemplifying "high quality, regionally or locally outstanding silvicultural practices and thoughtful logging techniques that make excellent silviculture possible."

Guild certified model forests do more than just focus on best management practices for timber production.  The ecological complexity of the forest, not simply its capacity to generate timber, is highly valued by the Guild and a requirement of model forest designation.  Model forest management supports and encourages many attributes of the ecologic function of healthy woodlands, among them:

Soil integrity and productivity - including structure and composition as well as soil organisms, by such means as providing adequate return time, utilizing site sensitive harvesting equipment under appropriate conditions, and appropriate silviculture, as opposed to artificial inputs.

Hydrological quality - including aquatic habitat and nutrient loads, by such means as riparian buffers, harvesting network design, and appropriate harvest levels.

Diversity - including a range of non-game species-types such as songbirds, small mammals, soil organisms, and pollinators, and with emphasis on the natural biological richness of the forest, by maintaining or promoting a range of site-appropriate structures and processes through silvicultural and other techniques, as well as through avoidance of approaches such as chemical applications and plantation monoculture where they tend to minimize diversity.

Gould Farm has many ingredients that make it a superior example of the finest kind of ecologically responsible and sustainable silviculture.  The facility itself has been in existence for nearly a century and is America's oldest therapeutic community for people with mental illness.  The farm includes over 650 acres of woodlands and farm fields and guests are actively engaged in caring for the land as they care for themselves.  Farm products include maple sugar - the woodlands include an excellent sugar bush - cheese, herbs and vegetables.  Some of the facilities heat with wood and include timber cut and milled from the property.

A guest at the Farm wrote of his experience living in this community in New York City Voices:

"Here, there are forty guests. That's what we call ourselves having manageable mental afflictions. This place is a very special place. It's a self-sustaining farm. We make our own furniture, we drink our own milk, we eat our own vegetables and we eat our own meat. We are in a sense an American kibbutz. The only difference is that we pay to come here. We pay and we work for free. I once asked a guest how he feels about these working conditions. He said: "It just gives us a certain unique view on work...

It's beautiful up here. I mean it's awesome (by the way the farm is one square mile). It's so pretty up here it's unfathomable. Sometimes I think that since some of our inner selves are horrific, we deserve this outer beauty. A good trade-off I guess."

This ethic of caring for people and stewardship of land is demonstrated in how Gould Farm manages its natural resources.  It has a property manager with 28 years of tenure who knows every inch of this square mile of land.  They have placed agricultural preservation restriction easements on much of their farmland to ensure that it remains available for agricultural use in perpetuity.  Their consulting forester, Joe Zorzin, was a Guild Forester for many years and still does conscientious, Guild-style forest management.  They have one of Massachusetts' few certified master Loggers implementing the plan.  They are in this for the long term, and managing in forest time rather than for the quick return.

Walking through the woodlands of Gould Farm reveals a healthy mosaic of forest communities, multiple age classes and rich species diversity.  There are nurse logs and standing snags as wildlife habitat and sources of forest nutrients.  There are beautiful cherry, oak and maple stands that another forester would likely have marked heavily for harvest but which here are encouraged to grow larger instead.  There are areas when millions of board feet have been logged and the forest is still ecologically rich and healthy.  Gould Farm deserves this honor and clearly can be a regional model for  silviculture of the very highest quality.

Cunning Clever Linguists

A reader of Walking the Berkshires in Italy has used Google's translation software to render my blog in Italian.  I am speechless.  I have no way of gaging whether this makes my prose any more intelligible to my Italian audience, as the only Italian I know (besides a few obviously hackneyed and cliched phrases and gestures) comes from a bawdy medieval ballad of cuckoldry - So Ben Mi Ca Bon Tempo - delivered with furious acoustic attack by the great Richard Thompson as part of his Thousand Years of Popular Music CD and DVD.  I imagine it comes across to a native reader of Italian rather like having baseball play-by-play transcribed into Middle English for a pub full of Yorkshiremen.

Which is a clever segue to my next astonishing linguistic discovery, a devastating critique by no less than Lowys, the child of Geoffrey Chaucer, in the aforementioned Middle English and seasoned with Hip Hop Cant, of the video game Blade Storm: Hundred Year's War  Verily, I swive thee not.  I laughed so hard I burst my doublet.  Lowys declares it "a salt-herring of a game" even though it has yet to be released, and it is worth the price of admission just to hear his pixelated battle cry "“IT IS ST SWITHUNZ DAY AND FOR XL MORE DAYS IT WILL BE RAINING THE BLOOD OF NOOBS.”

Best of many great moments in the post: 

"And while were listing the SORE LACKITUDE of this fugazy Bladestorm situation, scire facias this:
'You'll be able to choose from 10 playable characters at the outset, and more will become available as you progress through the game.'

Only X? Thats like having only three characterz in the romance of the rose. Theyre totally going to choose the basix, and they’ll do up all the outfits stupid like in those other koei games, like give Le Prince Noir some stupid all black costume (for real Prince Ed always dressed up like swamp thing, he was CRAZY about imitating a woodwose. Dad says at parties the Prince was always like doing woodwose stuff and people were like “enough with the woodwosery” and he was like 'eff you all, I’m the black prince.')"

Clearly Lowys Chaucer has a great career in letters ahead of him and it is instructive to see how the English language evolves in the space of a single generation.  Read the whole, mirthful thing here. 

Lastly, and incredibly, the Bard himself has been translated into Klingon.  The Klingon Hamlet is the longest work in existance in the warrior language of the foes of Captain Kirk.  The mind boggles.

Peace out, milords and ladies, and enough with the woodwosery.

James Tinker on Fast Day: September 26, 1861

Two weeks after the disastrous Union defeat at 1st Bull Run, Congress requested and Lincoln proclaimed a national Fast Day.   Fast Days had been declared from time to time since the early colonial times, especially in New England, where a Fast Day in April remained a legal Holiday in New Hampshire until the early 1990s.   The predecessor of our Thanksgiving holiday, Fast Days were meant to be solemn, distinctly religious affairs and were often called in times of great crisis and trial.   Much of what you will find about it on-line comes from those not unduly troubled by the separation of church and state.

The 36th Congress requested that Lincoln establish this Fast Day as "a day of public humiliation, prayer and fasting, to be observed by the people of the United States with religious solemnities, and the offering of fervent supplications to Almighty God for the safety and welfare of these States, His blessings on their arms, and a speedy restoration of peace."

At school in Blue Hill Maine, James Elijah Tinker set down his thoughts about the institution of Fast Day and the significance of this one in particular.

"Fast Day  26 Sept. 1861

Fast Day is a time-honored custom; in truth, it has grown to be an established institution.  It generally comes regularly, after stated intervals, and has become so customary that the Governor who should fail to appoint and request the observance of it would be considered negligent and insensible to his duties. 

Perhaps it might be so.  But when it comes, who thinks of observing the true principles of the day by fasting?  We may say in truth there is scarcely any one.  'Tis true, they may humble themselves before God in prayer, or chant to Him their songs of praise, and thus perform the high duties devolving to upon them as Christians and citizens of an enlightened nation, bu they fail to recognize the day as particularly a day of fasting and prayer, yes fasting with prayer, and rather make it a day of thanksgiving and feasting."

It is an intriguing distinction that Tinker makes between the "harvest home" and consumption of Thanksgiving and the devout and prayerful act of fasting.  That other great secularized religious holiday, Christmas, was not observed in Puritan New England and one can only wonder what this pious youth from Maine made of Victorian America's embrace of Father Christmas and all the rest of the trappings of the season with which Christmas was henceforth festooned.

In a breathless and uninterrupted paragraph, Tinker then lays out what is at stake, and also lays blame for the great calamity which has befallen the nation.  He is unsparing in his condemnation of the rebellion but also alludes to the North's complicity in allowing slavery to continue; "And when we come out of the trial, may we be cleansed from that sin of which we have been so long guilty, and which is the loathing of all civilized and Christianized nations."

"A nation, looked to by the civilized world as the embodiment of happiness and prosperity, a government founded on the principles of justice and freedom - though it proved but partial freedom - and considered the best on earth; a country which, when other empires had risen and stood for centuries, and then fallen - when monarchies were crumbling to dust with rottenness and age - was undiscovered by the eyes, and uncultivated by the hands of the civilized world; a land of untold wealth and resources, capable of sustaining a countless multitudes of happy and prosperous people; a republic based on the will of the people, which in its weakness and infancy had defied the most powerful nation on the globe, and now, in an almost incredibly short period of time, having risen to the proud preeminence herself; so suddenly hurled upon the brink of destruction, and plunged into a frightful civil war, as revengeful and vindictive as was that of ancient Peloponnesus (sp).  Brother is fighting against brother, and kindred against kindred - who can behold the spectacle and not blush with shame that this should have been in the nineteenth century, an age of the world never before surpassed in intelligence, or by a more enlightened and Christianized people.

But surely Christianity has forsaken them, and even humanity, who will thus wage a cruel warfare without cause, without reason, upon a nation which had hitherto enjoyed, they in common with all, that boon of which we can never be too proud, the blessing of peace.  A more wicked, more causeless war, could scarcely be imagined, and most certainly will the wrath of a just God be visited upon them, if they do not turn back to their allegiance, and cease their iniquitous purposes."

It outraged this frugal New Englander that the South would sacrifice all the gains which American civilization had made and pull down the roof that sheltered them all, yet Tinker saw the crisis in religious as well as material terms.  He was not alone in these sentiments, and it is instructive for modern critics of Federal war policy during the early stages of the conflict to realize how powerful the desire for re-Union was for many in the North.  One does not wage total war when there is hope, however misplaced, for reconciliation.

There is something sad and sweet in the image of a nation at war asking for forgiveness as well as deliverance.  Bull Run, rather than Fort Sumter, was the Civil War's Pearl Harbor, or 9/11 if you will: a wake up call that the rebellion would not be put down quickly, that the volunteer regiments and Union army commanders were woefully unprepared to meet the challenges they would be required to face to see the thing through.   

Lincoln's 1861 Fast Day was a familiar comfort and source of strength in that religious age for a nation in peril.  He declared another Fast Day in March 1863, but fortunes changed and later that year he declared a  National day of Thanksgiving instead, setting the precedent for our modern celebration of the blessings of the season on the 4th Thursday in November.  Fast Days faded from fashion in the decades after the Civil War, lingering on in New England as secular holidays,  which doubtless would have irked James Tinker had he lived.  As it was, James Tinker did not celebrate Lincoln's National Day of Thanksgiving.  The earnest scholar from Maine died of disease in September, 1863 in the Washington defenses with the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery.

The Stockbridge-Munsee Community Receives Repatriated Communion Set

Until just a few years ago, museums in Britain, France and Germany still had the stuffed trophy heads of Khoisan people in their collections, the remains of indigenous people slaughtered by 19th-century colonists on "bushman hunts".  There was no valid educational or historic justification for these macabre "Victorian curiousities" to remain in these museums, yet it took Great Britain until 2004 to empower all of its museums to deaccession human remains, and while the British museum now has a procedure for making repatriation claims for ancestral remains, it is its stated policy that its collection should remain intact.

This situation is not unique to European museums.  In the United States, however, The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 reversed a centuries-old trend of locking away the looted cultural heritage of native peoples in museum collections.

"NAGPRA provides a process for museums and Federal agencies to return certain Native American cultural items -- human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony - to lineal descendants, culturally affiliated Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations."

Under NAGPRA, federal agencies and museums must inventory their holdings and identify which items in their collections are subject to the Act, consult with lineal descendants, Indian tribes and native Hawai'ians concerning the identification and cultural affiliation of the items, and send notice to these groups describing items in their collections which may be repatriated.  Only federally recognized tribes are eligible for repatriation under this law, and proving that the items or remains in question belong to a particular group is a long and difficult process for both claimants and the institutions that control or possess them in their collections.

To date, only a handful of Christian religious items have been repatriated under NAGPRA, yet there were many native American communities where missionaries were active and where Christianity was practiced.  In 17th-century New England before King Phillip's War there were many "Praying Towns."  In the Berkshires, the settlement of Stockbridge was long the home of a Christian band of the Mahican confederacy, whose village of Wnahktukuk had previously occupied the site.  The Stockbridge Indians served in the French and Indian War with the British and in the Revolution on the side of the colonists and suffered great losses in both, so by 1785 the remnants of the tribe moved West and settled first with the Oneida and then in 1833 at the head of Green Bay Wisconsin where they merged with another tribe to become the Stockbridge-Munsee. 

In 1991, the The Trustees of Reservations, a Massachusetts conservation non-profit which owns and oversees the Colonial-era home in Stockbridge of missionary John Sergeant, returned two bibles Bible to the Stockbridge-Munsee community. Efforts had been underway since the 1970s to repatriate these items.  According to the Berkshire Eagle:

"F. Sydney Smithers, chairman of the Trustees of Reservations, said the Bible issue was far more contentious. At first, there was some indifference, but later, as the Stockbridge-Munsees pushed the issue, resistance became more pronounced, and he was among the resisters, he said.

After several meetings among trustees, he was convinced he had been wrong.

'We had only one choice, we had to give them back, and they were entitled. And they have turned out to be better custodians than we had,' he said. 'We had a duty to return the Bibles to the people to whom they meant most, more than to us as an organization, even though they were an attribute in the house. Sergeant preached from those Bibles.'

The return of the Bibles in 1991 was only coincidental with passage of the Native American Graves Protection Act of 1990, said Smithers, since the Bible matter had been decided by then."

In February, 2006, the Federal Register gazetted a formal notice of intent to repatriate another Christian "item of cultural patrimony" to the Stockbridge-Munsee community.  This time it was a pewter Communion service, acquired by the tribe's mission church when they were living in upstate New York in the early 1800s.  It later passed in 1930 to Mabel Choate, who donated it to the Trustees of Reservations for display in at the John Sergeant Mission House Museum in Stockbridge and as an outright gift in 1948.  According to the Berkshire Eagle, Choate:

"made it her life's work to create a museum to the memory of the Rev. John Sergeant, and she paid to relocate the house from its original 1739 spot on Eden Hill to Main Street in Stockbridge during the 1920s. She also went about identifying items and objects related to the mission of Sergeant and discovered the Bible and Communion set on a Mahican reservation. In 1930, she paid $500 for each item and brought them to Stockbridge."

Choate's agent purchased the set from the John Sergeant Memorial Presbyterian church in Wisconsin, which had for many years been caretaker of cultural objects for the Stockbridge-Munsee community. After a two year review process under NAGPRA that began in 2004, it was determined that the Wisconsin Church did not have the right to dispose of the communion set and that the Stockbridge-Munsee were entitled to its repatriation. 

On Saturday, September 23rd, the four piece set was handed over to Sherry White, repatriation officer for the tribe, and Lorraine Welch, chairwoman of the tribe's historic preservation committee. It is an appropriate outcome that strengthens the ties between the Stockbridge-Munsee community and their heritage, as well as their place of origin.

As of January, 2005, the Federal Register had published information on the following items and objects subject to NAGPRA:

Human remains: 30,261 individuals
Associated funerary objects: 581,679 (includes many small items, such as beads)
Unassociated funerary objects: 92,298 (includes many small items, such as beads)
Sacred objects: 1,222
Objects of cultural patrimony: 275
Objects that are both sacred and patrimonial: 657

Runaway Inflation in Zimbabwe: Things Fall Apart

An IMF official predicts inflation in Zimbabwe will rise 4,200% next year.  It is running at about 1,200% today.  The official exchange rate vs the US Dollar is 250 (ZBD) to 1 (USD).  This afternoon on foreign currency markets 1 US Dollar = 260,230 Zimbabwe dollars, or if you prefer, 1 Zim dollar is worth 0.00000384 $US. 

The first time I was in Zimbabwe in 1991, 1 US Dollar was worth about 6 Zimbabwe dollars. The last time was in 1997, when 1 (USD) was worth 12 (ZBD).  The situation is made even more catastrophic when the government recalls its old currency and issues new notes.There were no banknotes above $20 in the early 1990s.  Lord knows what they do with their coins, now.

People can endure a great deal, but  the burden on Zimbabwe is crushing.  There are about 13,000,000 Zimbabweans and the population is growing by just 0.83% because of AIDS.  In 2003 the life expectancy for men was just 40, but this was two years longer than for women. The estimated GDP in 2003 was $3.6 billion US.  That is just $600 million more than was just pledged by the owner of Virgin Atlantic Airways to fight global warming.

There are numerous reasons for the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy, a perfect storm with domestic and international causes with colonial antecedents, yet the lion's share of responsibility must fall to the thoroughly despotic Mugabe regime, which has presided over this collapse since the country's Independence in 1980.  It is utterly tragic, and just when it seems things cannot get worse, they do. Bread prices have increased to between $350-400 (ZBD), if you can get it.  Petrol sells for $700 (ZBD/liter).  Cheap if you are exchanging US dollars, but crippling if you are paid in the local currency.

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold." - Chinua Achebe

11 Years After: "I Like Your Style"

It was the Equinox then, too, when we gathered on that Vermont hillside and gave our hearts and hands to each other.  I still marvel that we found each other in Africa in 1991, and still these many years later have stuck through thick and thin.  Growing older with you is never old, beloved.  Happy 11th Anniversary!

What babes in the bush we were, still in our 20s and mad in love!

Took you home to meet the clan. You returned the favor but had many more for me to meet!  In-laws and outlaws abounding could not dissuade us from planning to throw our own wedding.  Engaged in 1992, wed in 1995, with over 100 wined, dined and serenaded for the price of what I earned in 6 weeks of summer teaching!

I defer to your editor's eye, but we do clean up well, you and I.  Our dancing days may be behind us - come to think of it I don't recall us ever going dancing - but we make a good team.

"We're out of step, we disagree / What's right for you, is wrong for me. / Together we're apart a country mile/ but I like your style...I like your style."

Each blessed day, we sweetly fill / with no I won't, and yes I will. / You wonder how we  made it down the aisle / Well I liked your style...I liked your style."

One of the things that I know is absolute bedrock in our relationship is that the smaller things may put one or the other's back's up but we have each other's back when the big winds start to blow.  I could never have made it through the really hard times without you, my darling.  As one of your songs goes, "That's how life should be."

Without question the greatest gifts you have given me are our two children.  I am in awe of these utterly unique, extraordinary little people, and your care and encouragement of them is of the finest kind.  You are a terrific Mom and I learn so much from the patient and loving way you parent Emily and Elias. 

So, Omuholike, here it is 11 years after, another First Day of Fall and another reason to be thankful that we met. 

And I like your style.

I like your style.

Senate Passes New England Wilderness Act

On September 19th, the US Senate unanimously passed The New England Wilderness Act, designating new wilderness areas within the Green Mountain and White Mountain National Forests.  The House has its own wilderness bill pending.  If enacted into law, this would be the first wilderness expansion in Vermont and New Hampshire's national forests since the Wilderness Act of 1984.  According to a press advisory issued by Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who jointly sponsored the legislation with colleagues Jim Jeffords (I-VT), Judd Gregg (R-VT) and John Sununu (R-NH):

"The legislation closely tracks the Forest Service’s Management Plan for the Green Mountain National Forest (GMNF), with proposed additions in the Breadloaf, Big Branch & Peru Peak areas that are nearly identical to the Forest Service plan.  In addition, the legislation adds two new wilderness areas in the Glastonbury and [the Battell Wilderness] Romance/Monastery Mountain areas.  Finally, the Act would establish the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area, which has the strong support of the various communities and local partners in the area.  The New England Wilderness Act now goes to the House of Representatives for consideration."

In New Hampshire, the Senate legislation would designate approximately 34,500 acres of White Mountain National Forest land in the Sandwich Range and Wild River areas as “wilderness.”

Wilderness areas must be approved by Act of Congress.  They consist of federal lands that are permanently closed to such activities as mining, logging, road construction, vehicular traffic, and building construction.  It is remarkable that this legislation received unanimous bi-partisan support in the Senate and strong local endorsement from communities and constituencies beyond those who usually advocate for wilderness preservation.  In fact, some in the conservation community have qualified their praise, saying the increase in acreage with wilderness status is inadequate to conserve the wilderness resources of the Green and White Mountains. 

In a time where federal funding for conservation has been dramatically curtailed - the US House included just $9 million dollars in its most recent  appropriation for the Forest Legacy Program, while the President's budget requested $62 million for this national conservation fund to conserve woodlands and promote forestry - enhancing the conservation status of federal and state lands through wilderness and forest reserve designations is a vital conservation tool.

In a related story, on the same day the New England Wilderness Act unanimously passed the Senate, a US District court judge in San Fransisco ruled to reinstate The USDA Roadless Rules first put into effect by executive order in the final month of the Clinton Administration and then set aside under the Bush administration in May 2005.   These roadless areas affect nearly 60 million acres of federal forest land, about 1/3 of the total.  They curtail new road construction, logging, industrial development and vehicular recreational uses, but provide for new roads to protect public health and safety and fire forest fires.  The ruling was harshly critical of the Bush administration's policy on roadless areas, and one would anticipate that the Justice department will appeal this decision.

"Everything Being a Constant Carnival..."

Several notable blog carnivals to highlight this week.  I am pleased to have posts of mine selected to appear in each of the following: 

History Carnival XXXIX is hosted at Cliopatra this month. 

The Carnival of Liberty, filled with a potpourri of offerings predominantly by those of a libertarian persuasion, includes a very difficult Constitution quiz posted by Matt Barr of Socratic Rhythm Method.

Finally, the Carnival of Bad History #9 at World History Blog includes all sorts of revisionist heresy, including A. Lincoln Blog's deconstruction of #43's recent references to #16 and Sayaka Chatani's fascinating post on Japanese denial after WWII that thousands of its soldiers had been ordered to remain in China after 1945 to fight with the nationalists against the Red Army.

Check out these and other blog carnivals for some great new material on a wide range of topics.

Massachusetts Forest Reserves: The Devil's in the Details

Yesterday, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and The Nature Conservancy held an event at Jug End Reservation in the southern Berkshires to announce the designation of 9 large forest reserves within state agency woodlands where there will not be commercial forestry.   Massachusetts sought and received provisional "green certification" from the Forest Stewardship Council for all of its state forest lands in 2004, and the designation of reserves for biological legacies are among its requirements. 

According to the brief AP report on the ceremony, "the reserves will allow hiking and non-motorized recreation and focus on removing invasive species and restoring any lost habitats."  Other press reports were surprisingly few and far between and thin on details.  None of the Berkshire County papers had the story.  The Boston Globe ran it buried in today's City and Region section. You can listen to the three minute story on WAMC Northeast Public Radio here. 

Something is not right, here.  The large reserves were supposed to be the crowning conservation achievement of a coalition of state agencies and major conservation organizations, a key ingredient in an integrated and sustainable approach to forest conservation and forestry on state lands.  The Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs website does not even have a press release posted.  While The Nature Conservancy's press advisory has more details than any other media source, nowhere on-line or in the print media can one find precisely which areas and acres make up the final slate of large reserves.  All the existing data comes from the preliminary recommendations, on which public comment concluded nearly a year ago last October. 

One thing that definitely changed since the initial reserve proposals is the addition of a large reserve in Mohawk State Forest in northern Berkshire County.  Mohawk is an extraordinary forest and has some of the largest areas of genuine old growth remaining in the state.  It absolutely qualified for inclusion as a large reserve, but not all stakeholders agreed on the ideal size and number of acres to be set aside as non-extraction reserves.  Harvard Forest in its Wildlands and Woodlands paper recommended 250,000 acres of "wildland reserves", predominantly on state forest lands.  Some wood producers wanted no more than 50,000 large and small reserves and were unhappy even with that number.  The Commonwealth was firm that it wanted no more than 50,000 large and 50,000 small reserves, or 20% of its forest holdings set aside without commercial timber harvest. 

Furthermore, FSC certification does not specify the size of forest reserves, but only mandated their creation.  It was The Nature Conservancy that took the lead in making the case for designating reserves in large forested landscapes that were relatively intact and able to support wide-ranging species and those dependent on large areas of unbroken forest cover, such as interior nesting birds.  In order to act as course filters for conserving the natural range of forest diversity, these reserves needed to be large; 15,000 acres at minimum with only natural disturbance regimes is considered appropriate in southern New England.  There are very few places in Massachusetts with that much contiguous forest land in permanent conservation, without major roads and other fragmenting features.  TNC saw the chance to help the Commonwealth establish large reserves that could become the core forests in landscape-scale conservation areas.

There could only be a small number of large reserves - 22 were evaluated in all - so the selection criteria included evaluating potential reserves against others in Massachusetts ecoregions with similar bedrock geology: a key determinant in the kinds of plant communities which can be supported at a given site.  Initially, only one large reserve was anticipated in each of these so-called Ecological Land Units.  However, when two of the top three sites in the entire Commonwealth - Greylock and Mt Washington - each occurred in the same category, a decision was made to accept them both.

The same issue arose with Mohawk and the Chalet forest to its south.  Chalet was ultimately selected over Mohawk - it has a very large Division of Fish and Game holding - but a number of citizens (including myself) and organizations that provided comment on the proposals called for the inclusion of Mohawk forest as a large reserve as well.  That is ultimately what happened, yet the number of acres within the 9 large reserves remains at 50,000, meaning there was some paring down of some of the 8 originally proposed large reserves to keep the total acres the same as before. I understand this may have happened at Greylock, the largest reserve overall, and perhaps at some of the others.  Since none of the reserves is within even a couple thousand acres of the 15,000 acre recommended minimum to conserve regional forest biodiversity- some are hardly larger than small patch communities of less than 2,000 acres - this cannot be called an ecologically driven position but rather one governed, and not surprisingly, by political considerations.

I believe in the concept of large and small forest reserves and have a personal interest in the conservation of the forests of the Taconic Plateau that include the Mt. Washington forest reserve.  I will be quite disturbed to learn that the 8,900 acres originally slated for inclusion in the proposed large reserve on the Plateau have been scaled back further with the addition of Mohawk to keep to the administratively determined maximum acreage for these reserves.  Had I known that my advocacy to include Mohawk would diminish the remaining reserves, I would not have called for it, and I suspect others with a greater stake in Massachusetts conservation may feel the same.  Then again, it may be easier for some to accept somewhat less than a full loaf to get the deal done.

I am a member of the Forest Guild and support ecologically sustainable, high quality silvaculture where appropriate. There are many forest parcels, some of considerable size, that should be under the management of a licensed Guild forester or one whose approach to forestry puts the health of the forest first.  It is clear that the Commonwealth wants to increase the amount of forestry that occurs on state lands outside the reserves.  It is also clear that the state has a poor track record of stewardship and the forestry profession as a whole falls far short of the standard the Guild advocates and the forest requires.   

The challenge and opportunity now before the Commonwealth is making green certification of state forest lands ecologically meaningful, particularly in the 80% that fall outside the reserves.  Unless pressure is brought to bear to demand the highest quality forestry wherever it occurs on the remaining 400,000 acres of state forest land, the war for the forest may be lost even though the reserves are gained. One hopes those conservation organizations that supported and promoted the forest reserves will fight just as hard for the best standards of forestry and hold the Commonwealth accountable.  Anything less starts to take on the appearance of back room quid pro quo.