From the Director, Summer 2024: Thinking Continentally & Acting Locally on Large-Scale Landscape Conservation & Habitat Connectivity
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In June I joined over 170 participants from the U.S., Canada, and Indigenous nations for the first Northeastern North America/Turtle Island Landscape Connectivity Summit to discuss collaboration towards conserving and connecting habitat blocks across northern Appalachia. This incredibly inspiring and productive gathering was co-hosted by the Quebec Labrador Foundation and the Center for Large Landscape Conservation on behalf of the Staying Connected Initiative partnership. One of the challenges that kept coming up was local capacity; local in this case being at the county/regional and municipal scales in both the U.S. and Canada. What I have found in this setting and others including the Staying Connected Initiative, the Connecticut River Watershed Partnership, and Berkshire Wildlife Linkage is that while there is broad recognition among federal and state agencies and non-profit conservation organizations that local capacity is a challenge, understanding the exact nature of the challenges – as well as the responsibilities and opportunities – needs definition to develop actionable solutions. To this end, I’m proposing that county/regional-scale and municipal governments from the states and provinces, as well as Indigenous nations, be convened to describe the contexts in which they are, and are not, able to effectively engage in conservation discussions and actions. I’m optimistic this will happen!
Why does this matter? The flip-side of the planning for compact settlement coin – the primary land use planning policy in Vermont – is planning for conservation. We want to direct and incentivize development where it is best suited and discourage development outside of these areas. Towns can establish policies and choose to regulate development within their boundaries. Regions can establish policies and define growth areas in collaboration with towns to have effect in state land use regulatory frameworks. There are also opportunities to collect and refine conservation, habitat, and connector data at the local level to inform planning, regulation, and implementation – if we have the resources to do this work. There are opportunities to build aquatic and terrestrial connectivity into public works and hazard mitigation projects, especially when it comes to culverts and bridges, but we need to identify those opportunities and work them into project scopes, designs, and funding. This is just scratching the surface of what’s possible, but operational and political capacity to do this work varies greatly. This needs to be understood by state, federal, and non-profit conservation partners so we can foster more effective collaboration and action.
But there’s a larger existential reason to build more robust partnerships to plan and act. To be sure there is intrinsic value in landscape and habitat conservation for the sake of the lives of the flora and fauna and ecological communities with which we share this place and of which we ourselves are a part. But if we must take the “what’s in it for us” approach, it’s this: our ability to endure in the face of climate change. We need forest canopy, understory, and forest soils to buffer the effects of both flood and drought. We need healthy meadow and wetland ecosystems. We need protected and restored stream, river, and lake buffers. The health of all of these have a direct impact on our ability to remain here in communities that are safer in the face of flood and drought, and to mitigate the trauma of experiencing these events by reducing the severity with which they impact our communities, homes, businesses, and lives. I often quote Wendell Berry’s reframing of the golden rule as it applies to life in a watershed: “Do unto those downstream as you’d have those upstream do unto you.” I’ll leave you with his thoughts on our stakes in being good stewards of this place as a whole:
“The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as ‘the environment’ -- that is, what surrounds us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding -- dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought -- that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other.” (The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture)
