SALISBURY — The good news, although it shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention, is that the Northwest Corner has not passed the point of no return. There is still a healthy balance between nature and civilization, and the balance is being fortified and preserved through the efforts of local planners and environmentalists.
Some credit for this should go to a new generation of town planners who are also environmental and animal experts.
Michael Klemens is one such planner. He falls into both those categories, and has even won an award this month for his efforts from a state planning agency.
A renowned expert on turtles and other amphibians, he has devoted much of his time and energy in recent years to working as an intermediary between towns, developers and preservationists to ensure that new housing and commercial developments protect the interests of the environment, while ensuring healthy economic growth.
The honor just bestowed on him comes from the Connecticut Chapter of the American Planning Association.
"It’s a planning award for the last 10 years of work we’ve done in taking complex ecological information and working it into local decisions," Klemens explained.
The award was bestowed on Klemens in particular but also on the organization he founded, the Metropolitan Conservation Alliance, which until this year was funded by the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York.
Until a new benefactor can be found for the MCA, Klemens has plenty of other projects to keep himself busy at his new office on Main Street in Falls Village (the former Town Hall). He’s working on a book, is consulting with Scenic Hudson, is a frequent lecturer and consults with numerous area towns (including Amenia) and was also recently returned to his seat on the Salisbury Planning and Zoning Commission.
From turtles to town plans
Although he considers himself first and foremost an environmentalist, Klemens realized early on that it wasn’t enough for him to simply study animals and the world they live in. To help protect them, it was imperative that he also take his findings to the creatures that had the most power to damage that world: humans.
His first inklings of this came while he was working at New York’s Museum of Natural History in the 1990s. Although he still consults with the museum, he stopped working there full time in part because he realized "their work is to document extinction, but not to intervene."
He left to take part in an innovative program of study in Kent, England, whose goal was to take the findings of modern science and incorporate them into local planning decisions. It combined the study of conservation and ecology with work in areas such as economics, public policy, law and ethics.
The idea behind it, he explained, is to "bridge the gap between scientific information and practice and local decisions."
From England, he made a move that might seem odd for an expert in amphibian life: He moved to Africa, where he worked with tribal groups in Tanzania, Chad and the Sahara desert. It made him wonder, he said, "why the wealthiest country in the world was making less progress in conservation than the poorest countries."
One reason, he discovered, was simple: "People are ingredients for conservation."
A democratic society might be better for humans, but it might not necessarily be so for animals. There are inherent conflicts that come up because of the way that government is structured.
Turtles: a federalist approach
On the simplest level, animals and humans have a very different attitude toward property lines. Turtles, snakes and salamanders tend to take a more federalist approach to the landscape. They wander where they need to wander, without regard to borders created by states, towns and backyard fences.
Klemens works with developers and public officials to help them understand this quirk of the natural world. When it comes to preservation, everyone has to work together to plan development, preferably in clusters that allow animals to migrate from the places where they are born to the places where they live, with a return trip to their breeding ground when they reach maturity.
Americans, and especially New England yankees, tend not to like being told what they can and cannot do with their property, however, and this can lead to conflicts. Mostly, Klemens has found, the conflicts arise between developers and preservationists. Ideally, town government acts as a mediator in disputes over who can build what, and where and how they can build it.
"Public policy is like making sausage. It’s messy. You have different personalities and you have prejudices about whether animal species or humans are more important. We all depend on having a healthy ecosystem, and we have to start looking at that as the basis for our own lives."
Klemens has found over the years that he prefers working for the towns and villages when these conversations arise. Conservationists, he says frankly, too often end up trying to freeze the landscape instead of helping it to evolve in a healthy and productive manner.
"I consider myself an environmentalist, but environmentalists are good at saying ‘no,’" he said. "They’re not as good at saying, ‘That won’t work here but here’s someplace it can work, and here’s how we can make it work.’
"Land use law is by nature confrontational," he explained. "It encourages people to oppose and oppose until eventually they kill the plan. Do you always oppose everything in the hope that nothing will happen? Or do you say, ‘If it’s going to happen, how do we do it so it maximizes the ecological benefits and minimizes the ecological damage.’ "
As for developers, he finds that often they make the mistake of coming in after they’ve spent many years (and lots of money) developing a plan, which they then spring upon the public. That creates a panic, and then the two sides begin to push themselves farther and farther apart.
Town government can help manage the process, he believes, so that interest groups don’t devolve to the point where applications take years (and countless billable lawyer hours) to resolve. The Yale Farm golf community is an example. The developer and a group of community opponents have been struggling for years to either move forward or squash a plan to put a golf course and several houses on the old Yale Farm, owned by the Mead family.
Klemens was hired by the developer to consult on what he calls a small portion of the plan — which he said looked environmentally responsible. But he is clearly ill at ease with his connection to the corporate interest.
"It shows the difficulties of working for one side or the other," he said. "I would have preferred to work with the town of Norfolk. The problem is that the minute you assume the mantel of working for either the developer or the community coalition, everything you say is suspect and discounted."
Protecting rare species
In the end, if town boards can mediate effectively, everyone will benefit. An ideal plan allows for economic growth, protects personal property and privacy and allows rare species to continue to flourish.
"We have some of the most important amphibian and reptile habitats in the state," he said of the Northwest Corner, and mentioned, in particular, Robbins Swamp in Falls Village (his work at the swamp many years ago led to the state decision to protect and acquire it) and Sage’s Ravine in Salisbury.
Some of the unusual species that live here include the federally protected bog turtle and other creatures, including leopard frogs, pickerel snakes and a type of lizard known as the skink.
The region was blessed with a combination of calcareous limestone valleys and high surrounding ridges. And it was blessed with a population that is keen on protecting the landscape and the animals that call it home. Many of those fecund wetlands have not been fragmented yet. Klemens hopes that those habitats and species will be protected into the future with the help of planners like himself and organizations such as his Metropolitan Conservation Alliance.
The award the alliance just received comes at what he calls a bittersweet moment. The alliance had been funded by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which has just announced that it can no longer provide financial backing. Though he has many other projects and clients, Klemens remains passionate about the alliance, which he founded in 1997. His hope is that the award will bring attention — and new financial backing — to an organization and cause that he thinks can do important conservation work.
He remains upbeat.
"I have tremendous faith and optimism that we can create a more sustainable world," he said.
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