Using the land as a way to keep it healthy

NORFOLK — Hans Carlson, the new director of the Great Mountain Forest (GNF), which covers some 6,300 acres in Falls Village and Norfolk, talked about how GMF developed in the context of conservation history, and the difference between GMF the institution and GMF the physical forest at the Norfolk Library on Saturday, Jan. 17.

Carlson began by saying the institution and the forest have distinct identities, and exist in what amounts to a symbiotic relationship.

Both have changed over time and both affect each other.

“A pathogen that kills trees does not affect the institution directly,” he said. “Something like tax policy or a shift in legal status has no direct ecological effect on trees.

“But the forest will be affected by how these shape the institution.”

Carlson said he believes that “we must engage with the land for our physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing.

“The responsibility in that engagement is stewardship.”

He said good stewardship, in a nutshell, means “leaving the forest as healthy or healthier than we found it.”

It requires a willingness to learn and to share knowledge.

GMF became a nonprofit in 2009, and part of that change means an increase in education and outreach for the wider community.

This fits in with Carlson’s notion of good stewardship, as do opportunities in recreation and research.

GMF is also a working forest. “One byproduct of good stewardship is sustainable forest products, which strengthen local and regional economies.”

Carlson said a good understanding of GMF requires some ecological background.

GMF was formed at the end of the last Ice Age. The glacier left behind thin and rocky soil in the northeast United States, and the familiar landscape of river valleys.

The soil was never much good for growing crops, but it was good for growing trees, he said.

He said that the landscape was not a pristine wilderness, untouched by human hands, when the first Europeans arrived.

“Native people shaped the land with fire, horticulture and by selecting for wild plants.”

The Native Americans also hunted, which had a significant impact on the forest: “the large effects of a relatively small number of top predators in an ecosystem — what is called ‘trophic cascading.’”

He said he was not arguing for an “Edenic native past.”

“Natives made mistakes, just like all humans do, but their actions were shaped by an understanding of land stewardship that yielded some pretty impressive results.

“The forest here was diverse, abundant and productive.”

The iron industry effect

Carlson said the deforestation of New England, for agriculture and pasturage, had an industrial variation in the Northwest Corner — the iron industry.

He said blast furnaces such as Beckley Furnace in North Canaan used hundreds of trees annually, and the region was cut and cut again from before the Revolutionary War era until the iron industry finally died out in the early 20th century.

“Once you know what to look for, it’s hard to walk anywhere in the Great Mountain Forest without seeing the hearths where colliers smoldered wood down into charcoal.

“So when you look out on the Northwest Corner, as seen in the tourist literature, remember that you are looking at a post-industrial landscape.”

Which is what Starling W. Childs and Frederick C. Walcott were looking at when they were contemplating buying what was to become GMF.

Carlson had a 1910 description of GMF land:

“The general impression one gets … is of great desolation and waste. There are lots of tops where Buckley has taken the lumber and on the old mill sites there is nothing but sumac and briars. Fire has run through the place and it shows badly …

“I think if we can get $5 an acre for this part of the proposition, we will be doing very well.”

Childs and Walcott did buy the parcel so-described, and began putting together what became GMF as a game preserve.

Both men were wealthy city dwellers and belonged to a class that began to build country homes and go hunting and fishing for recreation after the Civil War. Trains opened up the countryside and made it possible to be away from the cities in a matter of hours.

Era of preservation

Carlson said this was also the “height of Progressive Era conservation.” National parks and forests were established, and a new group of wildlife and forestry experts was trained.

Both Childs and Walcott were avid hunters, Carlson said, and believed the GMF land to be admirably suited for wildlife.

The duo did not mean to keep it all for themselves, either. Walcott “believed that all preservation should benefit the public in creating open space for people, protecting watersheds and water supplies, and providing food.”

Walcott and Childs hired gamekeepers and worked to breed birds and other “useful” animals.

The establishment of the Yale Forestry School at GMF was part of the second wave of conservation. Starling Childs’ son Ted, who graduated from the school in 1932, took over his father’s interest and bought out the Walcott interest in 1948.

Ted Childs expanded the forest in the 1930s and 40s, and with Darrell Russ “moved GMF fully into forestry, and expanded the mission” from the game preserve model to a working conservation forest, “where the primary purpose is one of forest management for the production of wood for industrial use.”

Carlson said those words “ring a little ominously maybe, given what we know about the post-war boom and the nation’s use of resources” after World War II.

He said the modern environmental movement began as a negative reaction to the post-war boom, and this is where GMF “diverges from the mainstream of environmental history.”

In contrast to the “leave it completely alone” school of environmental thought, “the idea that you can use the forest and care for the forest at the same time has really worked here.”

Carlson concluded that,“Ted Childs subsidized the continuation of a set of ideas about conservation that most of the country left behind.

“These were ideas developed in the early 20th century, focusing on the belief that people could work and engage with the land, and if they did it with intelligence and caring, then they could make something for themselves and make the land better too.”