HVA honors Hechts

CORNWALL — At its annual meeting Dec. 15, the Housatonic Valley Association honored Lou and Elaine Hecht of Salisbury with the organization’s Lifetime Environmental Champion award for their tireless environmental leadership, support, and contributions to protecting the land, waters, and wildlife of the Housatonic River Valley.   

Their decades of leadership with HVA as well as the Salisbury Conservation Commission, Salisbury Association Land Trust and Sharon Audubon Center, among others, helped build the Litchfield Hills Greenprint Collaborative of land trusts in Northwest Connecticut; shelter birds; shape and lead HVA’s Follow the Forest initiative; and create exhibits like Birds in Crisis and Come into the Forest to invite public understanding and action.

Guest speaker Scott Jackson, Extension Professor in the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, received the Conservation Champion of the Year award for his expertise in wetland ecology, biodiversity and conservation that has helped guide the work of HVA and many others over the past 12 years. His landscape ecology research and the assessment and decision-making tools he and his team developed have helped transform land and water conservation across the region by guiding it to the most impactful places.

Jackson’s presentation, “Coping with Climate Change in Your Community,” focused on personal and community-level action to safeguard our ecosystem, species, and biodiversity in the face of climate change – and help avoid climate-related disasters in the future. For example, increasing water storage in upper areas of the watershed to avoid severe flooding, or reconnecting upstream and downstream habitats in streams that are most likely to stay cool in the future.

“Our strategic focus is on protecting the most climate-resilient waters and lands across the tristate Housatonic Valley,” said Lynn Werner, HVA Executive Director. “With the benefit of Scott’s work and the help of wonderful conservation partners and supporters, this year we advanced more than a dozen projects to restore streams in about half of our targeted areas from Great Barrington, Massachusetts to Dover, New York to Watertown, Connecticut. As of this year we’ve also protected nearly 6,000 acres of key forestland and wildlife linkages that connect them, more than ten percent of our goal.”