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Conservation is a family affair in Montana

April 28, 2011

Alex and Avalanche - Photo: Deb Love

As promised, above is a final photo of Alex Love that we considered for Jason D.B. Kaufmann’s upcoming piece in Land&People magazine about the Montana Legacy Project. The photo was taken at Lindbergh Lake* in the Swan Valley during a celebratory outing to honor and reward the children of three sets of parents who had been away from home for many hours working on one of the largest conservation projects in U.S. history.

The photo, taken by Alex’s mother, Deb Love, shows Alex with Avalanche, the Loves’ puppy. Deb is TPL’s Northern Rockies director; and her husband, Eric, was TPL’s lead project manager on the Montana Legacy Project.  Deb’s daughter, Sabine, eight, was also at the gathering.

The woman in red in the background of the photo is Flo Williams, wife of Jamie Williams, director of the Northern Rockies Initiative for The Nature Conservancy, which partnered with TPL on the Montana Legacy Project. Eric and Jamie were all but joined at the hip during the project. The Williamses were at Lindbergh lake with their kids, Ben and Annabelle.

The third family on the Lindbergh Lake outing was Swan Valley residents Tom and Melanie Parker with their children, Kyra and John. The couple founded Northwest Connections, a community-based conservation organization.  And Melanie helped create the Swan Valley Coordinating Committee, which brings together stakeholders to create a shared vision of the valley’s future. With the Loves, the Williamses, and dozens of other valley residents and conservationists, the Parkers devoted many hours to accomplishing an ambitious conservation goal.

Tom and Melanie Parker with their children, Kyra and John - Photo: Flo Williams

One of the constant struggles in telling conservation stories is to avoid getting bogged down in awestruck descriptions of pretty landscapes and mind-numbing project details—to instead try to capture some of the excitement and satisfaction involved in doing the work.

This is a particular danger when telling the story of a project as large (310,000 acres) and as expensive ($500 million) as the Montana Legacy Project. That’s a breathtaking amount of two kinds of green—enough to overshadow some of the human stories involved.

We’ve tried not to let that happen in this case.

Links for you:

Enjoy.

*About Lindbergh Lake

Charles Lindbergh at Lindbergh Lake, 1927 - Photo: courtesy Montana Historical Society, Helena

You will probably not be surprised to learn that Lindbergh Lake is named after pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh, who spotted the lake from the air in 1927. Perhaps weary of celebrity aeronautics, he asked folks in Butte, Montana, how he could find the lake, which he had marked on a map.

Lindbergh spent two weeks camping along the shore of what was then named Elbow Lake. A boulder there still bears a worn, hand-carved inscription that reads, “Lindy ’27.”

How do I know all this? Because, back in the 1990s, Lindbergh Lake was the first property TPL helped to protect in the Swan Valley, kicking off an effort that would culminate in the Montana Legacy Project more than a decade later. Recalling this, I looked up the details in an old issue of Land&People. Handy magazine.

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Project Revisited – A Park for Dunedin

March 29, 2011

Dunedin park location - Becky Nielsen/TPL

I have remarked before on how  TPL sometimes loses track of projects after we complete them: problem solved, land conserved, on to the next park or conservation effort.

So it’s always a treat to learn that the public is beginning to enjoy a park we helped to create—that people are, as we like to say, beginning to “walk on our work.”

Exhibit A this morning is Joshia Cephas Weaver Park in Dunedin, Florida. The first I heard of Dunedin was when I edited a 2005 Land&People story about the Pinellas Trail, a 33-mile biking and walking path that runs through that city and that TPL was working to extend. Then we learned that TPL was helping acquire land for a five-acre waterfront park along the trail in Dunedin.  The project was on the books for years, as we helped the city apply for and ultimately win state and county grants to acquire the land.

Illustration - Willis S. Blatchley

Now, with the park’s grand opening, we have  learned fascinating details about the history of the parkland from a piece by Drew Harwell in the St. Petersburg Times.

After 1913, the property in what was then called Skinner’s Hammock was the winter home of naturalist Dr. Willis Stanley Blatchley, who wrote and illustrated books about the plants and creatures he found there.  A historic marker near the park commemorates the  27 winters that Blatchley devoted “to the highly skillful exploration of the world of nature around Dunedin and elsewhere in southern Florida.”

Later the land became the home of country singer and businessman Joshia Cephas Weaver, who was so determined to see the land protected that he offered the city a bargain price for it and ended up with his name on the park.

Josiah Cephus Weaver

Weaver, a country singer reared in the Virginia foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, had moved to Dunedin in 1960 and earned his millions leasing warehouse space. The land on Bayshore Boulevard became his home. He built a long dock into the sound and, in the 1930s-era “Stone House,” opened his first recording studio.

By 2004, when he moved to a mansion in Dunedin Isles, he had rebuffed hundreds of developers pushing to pave over his waterfront land with condo complexes. Instead, he offered it to the city, as one of Dunedin’s last undeveloped vistas of the coast.

“The people should enjoy this land,” he told the Times in 2006. “We don’t need a city with black pavement.”

The city dedicated the park last month, a perfect time for that sort of thing in Florida. A 1920s bungalow has become an art center and new railings have been erected on Weaver’s 725-foot dock. You can go here to view a short video of dignitaries at the park opening, including an ebullient Weaver.

The St. Petersburg Times story continues:

The park is not quite complete. . . . [P]ublic restrooms, picnic pavilions and a floating dock will be built over the next two years . . .  .

But on Friday it seemed very much alive. Many of the park’s new parking spaces were filled. Dogwalkers and joggers coursed along the shell walking trail. The spin of cyclists’ freewheels mixed with the putter of choppers. Scents from Eli’s Bar-B-Que, between the park and downtown, wafted on the breeze.

Blatchley marker - Becky Nielsen/TPL

Congratulations to the people of Dunedin, who have saved a place of their past that will give them pleasure long into the future.

Go here for more information about TPL’s work in Florida.

You can read Land&People online, or sign up here to receive a free paper copy of the magazine.

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TPL’s Rose Harvey joins New York state team

February 2, 2011

Photo_Troy Farmer

I am a few days late in noting the nomination of former TPLer Rose Harvey to be New York’s Commissioner of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation.

Newly elected Governor Andrew Cuomo made the announcement last week, but it took me a while to track down these photos of Rose playing basketball with staff and students at the dedication of the new playground at New York City’s P.S. 15 back in 2008.

Congratulations are definitely in order—to Rose, of course, but also to the people of New York.  They have   signed a seasoned player who knows how to inspire a team, call defenses and offenses, and go for the score.

Rose joined TPL when the organization was little more than a decade old and helped shape its mission for nearly 30 years. Her influence was most felt in the mid-Atlantic states, where she ran TPL’s programs during crucial years.

From the governor’s press release:

[At TPL] she oversaw all real estate acquisitions, urban park design and developments, managed the finances of a $20 million annual operating budget, and closed between $50 and $75 million worth of land and parks transactions each year across 8 states – a total of nearly $1 billion and more than a thousand new and enhanced parks, gardens and playgrounds in underserved neighborhoods in New York City, Newark, N.J. and Baltimore. She has also established large landscape woodlands and natural areas throughout New York State and the Mid-Atlantic region.

Rose Harvey at the groundbreaking for Nat Turner Park, Newark Photo: Seth Sherman

One interesting commentary on Rose’s appointment comes from Henry Stern, who served 15 years as New York City’s commissioner of parks and recreation and now writes the entertaining and informative New York Civic newsletter about state and local policy matters.

I had the pleasure of working with Rose Harvey . . . and she is first-rate. Governor Cuomo deserves praise for appointing her. Too often in the past, parks commissioners have been chosen on the bases of celebrity, campaign contributions or cronyism.

Stern then goes on to introduce a note of reality about the job ahead, going into some detail about the role of New York’s park s department within state government.

The state parks system has never received the attention or funding it deserves. This is not the year to expect more government money, so achievements are likely to result from the kind of partnerships Ms. Harvey has pioneered.

By selecting Ms. Harvey, Governor Cuomo has taken a great step forward. Now comes the hard part: achieving significant results for a neglected system in an era of scarcity.

Photo: Yola Manakhov

What more can we say about Rose, except that she is an inspiration to work with.  Also that she’s a good person to have on your team when you need to go for the basket.

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Solution moves forward for Maine’s north woods

December 17, 2010

Millinocket, Maine - Photo: George Weurthner/Lighthawk

The Bangor Daily News is carrying a story this morning about the progress toward conservation solutions in Maine’s north woods around Baxter State Park and Mount Katahdin.

Since 2007, TPL has been working with the state, sporting interests, local officials around Millinocket (the region’s largest community), and major landowner and conservationist Roxanne Quimby on agreements that would, among other results, open some Quimby land for such traditional backwoods pursuits and hunting, fishing, and snowmobiling. Now that work is beginning to yield fruit, as deals are finalized.

The story, by Kevin Miller, is very clear on a complicated set of  transactions, and is worth a read for anyone interested in the tensions that emerge as the owners of large private forest dispose of lands that they have owned for years.

After three years of negotiations, Quimby has agreed to sell slightly more than 5,000 acres north of Millinocket Lake to the state for $2.1 million. The land will be maintained as a working forest with public access for recreation.

Additionally, the state has secured conservation easements on roughly 2,850 acres near Whetstone Bridge at a cost of $500,000. That deal also guarantees public access to the land for hunting, snowmobiling and other mechanized recreation.

“As town manager and as someone who has been working on this for three years, I’m very pleased,” said Eugene Conlogue, town manager of Millinocket.

Quimby, the founder of the Burt’s Bees cosmetics empire, is a controversial figure in Northern Maine, in large part because she has used her not-insignificant resources to acquire tens of thousands of acres of former private forestlands. And while the deals announced yesterday are giving many residents the access to the land that they say they want, suspicions of Quimby among some locals will not be tamped down easily, as comments to Miller’s story make clear.

For a less heated opinion and a view inside the negotiations that led to the agreements, I would recommend a piece by sporting columnist George Smith on DownEast.com, also published this week.

I sat in on the Department of Conservation meeting, as one of several participants in a remarkable dialogue that Quimby initiated with some of her fiercest opponents in September of 2006. Over the past four years, Quimby has hosted meetings that included Bob Meyers of the Maine Snowmobile Association, Millinocket’s Town Manager Gene Conlogue, and me, representing the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine. At times other participants included Representative Paul Davis and Millinocket town council members and snowmobile club officers, as well as members of Quimby’s staff. Jim Page of Sewall Company facilitated most of the meetings.

Thanks, also to Smith, for the tip-of-the-hat he gave to TPL’s work in the process.

The Trust for Public Land has played a key role in the project, from preparation of legal documents to raising of the money. The Trust’s Regional Director Wolf Tone was a key participant in the December 13 meeting that ironed out the details that will allow this sale to proceed on the two parcels.

For background on land issues and conservation efforts around Millinocket, you might want to look at our 2008 Land&People story called “The Maine Way.”

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Bud Moore, 1917-2010

December 1, 2010

Photo of Bud Moore by Ted Woods

Even as the current issue of Land&People arrives in mailboxes and is posted to the web, we have begun thinking about the next issue.

Last month, I assigned a story for the spring issue on TPL’s partnership with The Nature Conservancy to protect more  310,000 acres in northwestern Montana. TPL started working in the Swan Valley, in the heart of this region, in the mid-1990s, and our work there helped lay the groundwork for the current effort, the Montana Legacy Project.

“It would be really great if you could get Bud Moore in the story,” Deb Love, TPL’s Montana state director, told me as we were planning the piece. “He really epitomizes the Swan Valley community.”

Sadly, we never got a chance to interview William R. “Bud” Moore, who died last week at 93 years old after a life closely tied to his home ground. According to an obituary and longer profile in the Missoulian, Moore served three years in the South Pacific during World War II, the only time he left Montana. Which left nine full decades to amass experience and wisdom from the mountains he loved.

Bud Moore was a trapper, a hunter, a logger, a district ranger with the U.S. Forest Service, a youthful fire fighter who became a leading expert on backcountry fires, an author, a cofounder of a local environmental education center, a speaker and tour leader, and a pioneer in planning what is now called “whole landscape” conservation. He graduated from elementary school in the 1920s and received, as his next degree, an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Montana in 1974, for his contributions to natural resource conservation.

From the Missoulian:

Bud was in some respects a contradictory conservationist: a great hunter who was dedicated to wildlife conservation and management, a trapper who never set a trap inside his trap-line circle to maintain a sustainable population, and an ecological forestry practitioner who was a logger and sawmill owner. He believed that resource harvest did not have to sacrifice sustainability.

But TPL’s Deb Love doesn’t see this as particularly “contradictory,” and this is why she believes that Bud Moore is emblematic of the Swan Valley community. “That for me is the beauty of that community,” she says. “The recognition that we are all part of the natural landscape, that we need to live in that balance.”

TPL expects to complete the final phase of the Montana Legacy Project within a few days. “It would have been nice for Bud to see the final acreage of the Swan Valley protected forever,” Love says. “He would have liked that.”

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Artists inhabit TPL project

October 27, 2010

The New York Observer

Here is a long story from The New York Observer about artists moving in to do a “project” amid the abandoned homes of a former summer beach colony in Stratford, Connecticut. TPL has been working for years to help transfer this land and its important wildlife habitat to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“We don’t have a lot of this habitat left,” said Sharon Marino, project leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Southern New England-New York Bight Coastal Program . . . . “It’s an opportunity to take a barrier beach that was developed and bring it back to the way it was.”

Located on a narrow peninsula, the beach colony was long linked to the mainland by a single bridge, which burned in 1996. The subsequent history of abandonment is well detailed in the Observer story. Suffice it to say that transfer to the Fish and Wildlife Service would bring down the curtain on a long drama in which the conservation project is only the last act. The remaining homes on the peninsula are in ruin and now being demolished and removed using federal economic stimulus funds.

But in the month before the backhoes and bulldozers arrived to scrape the peninsula clean and restore it to its natural state, a group of Brooklyn artists, seeing an opportunity for creation amid the dilapidation, took up residence on the peninsula in a transient artists’ commune and repurposed the detritus to their own ends: large-scale sculptures, massive murals and collages, elaborate installations of found objects. . .

They would go up for three-to-seven-day stints, camping amid the post-apocalyptic beachscape, sleeping in the sand, cooking in pots scavenged from the homes and working in the fresh air, the million-dollar views all their own. Much of the work had a clear street-art pedigree, massive spray-painted murals and large paper works pasted to walls. All of it responded in some way to the place.

It should be noted that this guerilla occupation was illegal, perhaps dangerous, and a headache for Stratford police. Opinions vary on the value of the public art and the reasons behind it. But from the artists’ point of view, it sounds like the doing was more important than the result.

A worthwhile read for those interested in guerilla art, the environment, or both.

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The “tail” end of Land&People

October 8, 2010

Photo: Darcy Kiefel

One of the last tasks in putting together Land&People magazine is to choose a cover photo. Not every image will work. The important content needs to fall in the right place, and there must be an appropriate location for type. We try to find an image that expresses some feeling about the relationship between land and people—most often this feeling is playfulness or joy.

Usually, this process can take a week. We mock up an assortment of cover options and I tape them to the glass door of my office so people can vote for a favorite. Gradually, a winner emerges.

But not for this issue. The minute we saw the photo of Fido (not his real name) waiting for three runners on Chattanooga’s Stringer’s Ridge, we knew we had to find a way to make it work. This is the only cover option we considered. We imagine the dog sprinting up the hill and turning as if to say, “what’s keeping you.”

The photo emerged from a shoot by Darcy Kiefel, one of our favorite photographers, who made a trip to Chattanooga for us earlier this year. When we began working with Darcy a few years ago, I told her that our work was not just about stunning landscapes but about the importance of land to people, and that we wanted to see a lot of people in the pictures. To which she responded, “that’s just what I wanted to hear.” We have also noticed that dogs turn up in her photos a lot. We have no argument with that.

While she was in Chattanooga, Darcy photographed the city’s world-class greenway system, which TPL has helped to build, as well as Stringer’s Ridge, the green backdrop to downtown. A few years ago, there was a plan afoot to slice-off the crests of the ridge and top them with six-story buildings. Residents protested and stopped the project. TPL organized a campaign to raise $2.5 million to acquire the land and create a park, keeping the ridge open to joggers and their dogs.

More information about TPL’s work in Chattanooga can be found here. To get your own free printed copy of the Land&People cover, go here.  (The cover will arrive attached to the magazine, which we hope will inspire you to protect your own local landscape.)

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Conserved: Where skinny fellows carried the mail

August 27, 2010

Frederic Remington: The Coming and Going of the Pony Express, 1900

Between 1860 and 1861, before it was put out of business by the transcontinental telegraph, the Pony Express bragged that it could carry the mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, in ten days. It took somewhat longer than that for TPL to help protect a section of the route east of Lake Tahoe in Nevada—but it is great to hear that the project is now complete.

The Record-Courier, a local Carson Valley newspaper, carried a short story on the project yesterday.

A 123-acre site near the top of Kingsbury Grade has been purchased for $750,000 and added to the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, according to the Trust for Public Land.

The Daggett Pass property connects Carson Valley with the Lake Tahoe Basin along the old Vansickle Toll Road, which includes a section of the Pony Express trail.

During the years that I roamed California and northern Nevada writing about the outdoors and the environment for the San Francisco Chronicle, one of my favorite story techniques was to trace a historic trail.  I have traveled quite a bit of the Pony Express route in the Silver State.

This was often hot and dusty work. One requirement of the original Pony Express riders was that they be “skinny fellows”—probably to spare the horses, but this must have also been an advantage to the riders themselves in crossing baking expanses of the West. How relieved they must have been to climb this section of the trail, out of the desert and into Lake Tahoe’s sparkling realm, with only 90 miles left to Sacramento.

Money for the purchase came from the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act, which permits money from lands sold by the BLM to be used to acquire private lands within national parks, national forests, and BLM conservation areas.

The land will be managed by Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in conjunction with Douglas County, which is turning part of the route into a formal segment of the Pony Express National Historic Trail.

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Solved: The mystery of the marble columns

August 20, 2010

Photo: Alexa Garbine

Some students at the Delbarton School in Morristown, New Jersey, called it “The Lost City.” The moss-covered, carved marble columns had reposed in a forest on the school’s grounds at St. Mary’s Abbey as long as anyone could remember, and no one really knew where they had come from.

In 2008, TPL began the process of acquiring the forestland from the Order of St. Benedict for addition to the adjacent Lewis Morris County Park. In preparation for the sale, the 74 fluted column shafts, 14 Corinthian capitals, and associated marble bits were hauled from the woods to a school parking lot, their origin still unidentified.

You can read the rest of the story on NJ.com in a piece written for The Star-Ledger by Thomas Diges.

Now, the debates can stop. The decades-old mystery of the columns has been revealed, thanks to a set of chance encounters involving an architecture historian, a Benedictine monk and a Chatham master gardener.

It is a fascinating story touching on John Jacob Astor and Philadelphia department-store magnate John Wanamaker. You have to wonder if the mystery would have ever been solved if the columns had remained in the forest, visited only by students in search of solace or a place to sneak a smoke.

“It was a wonderfully mysterious place,” said Brian Regan, of the class of 1973. “It looked like some great temple that had been taken down, or torn down.”

You can read TPL press releases on the original protection effort here and here.

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For the birds

August 6, 2010

Barn swallows - Photo: Mila Zinkova / Wikipedia Commons

I do not tweet on Twitter, but I do know something about our feathered tweeting friends. My first piece of published writing was a slim and self-conscious essay about birdwatching, and the day after it appeared in a San Francisco newspaper, a publisher phoned me to ask if I wanted to contribute to a book about birds. So while I don’t spend a lot of time afield with binoculars these days, I understand this particular urge to touch nature.

Still it came as a surprise to discover that The Cleveland Plain Dealer publishes a weekly column on birding in northeast Ohio. Its author, James F. McCarty, covers the local port authority and general news, and once a week he writes about the birds. It tickles me that a major metro newspaper would devote space to birding.

His topic last Tuesday: good birding at former golf courses, specifically the recently closed Oakwood Club in Cleveland Heights—the focus of a TPL conservation effort.

The club is combining memberships with the Mayfield Sand Ridge Club, and the property is for sale. Area residents have banded together in an attempt to preserve the 144-acre golf course as an oasis in a sea of suburban development for generations to enjoy.

The Oakwood property possesses unlimited potential as a park . . . . The place is teeming with birds. . . . The first things you notice at Oakwood are the barn swallows — hundreds of them coursing over the tees and down the fairways. So many, in fact, that they left me wondering how golfers at the club could have played 18 holes without winging a few during the round.

The swallows were joined in their flycatching pursuits by Eastern wood-pewees, Eastern phoebes and chimney swifts.

Before closing the column, McCarty also endorses the birding at Liberty Park in nearby Twinsburg, to which TPL recently added 52 acres.

My son Bret and I hiked the park’s Meadow Trail on Sunday, and found fields bursting with birdlife. At least three Henslow’s sparrows were singing from goldenrod perches. About 20 bobolinks in their fall yellow-and-brown plumages were flocking in preparation for departure to South America for the winter. Also there: Eastern meadowlarks, song sparrows, indigo buntings, house wrens, and a colorful array of butterflies and dragonflies.

The more I read from and about northeast Ohio, the more I think that it must be a great place to live. You can read more about TPL’s work there in the Ohio pages of our website.

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