Celebrating 25 years of the Monadnock Conservancy
Peterborough, New Hampshire
Peter Forbes
August 23, 2014
First and foremost thank you for all that you do. I want to invite you now to begin thinking now
beyond 25 years. If 100 years from now there are wild places for kids to roam, and black bear
and fisher cat, and our towns still have rural character and rural characters, and there are still
people who cling to the land, it will be because of conservation. It will be because of your work,
and the new relationships you sought to create in the years ahead.
You are the stewards, defenders of, one of the most beautiful places in New England. Your
commitment to this place matches its beauty, and I honor that in you.
And it’s not just the natural world alone that creates beauty here in New Hampshire. What also
creates beauty here is the relationship between humans and this place.
I am s student of that relationship between people and place: Nepal, Homesteaders on the coast
of Maine, Ranchers, Urban gardeners. And I am myself a farmer.
How will Monadnock Conservancy need to innovate in the next 25 years in service to your
mission, how might that be different from the previous 25 years?
Your success arose from addressing and solving one generation’s problem. That was
courageous, and what is this generation’s problem? How is that problem different, might
you need to evolve and innovate to focus on this generations’ problem?
I want to share some stories that may help you to answer these two really important questions.
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I want to introduce you to one of my most important elders, the most important public figure in
New England who didn’t have a telephone and who lived at the very end of a 1.5 mile trail out in
the pucker brush: Bill Coperthwaite.
More than anyone, Bill taught me about the possibilities of a healthy human relationship to land
and nature. And he took me from a boy born deep in the consumer culture and helped me grow
into a man living in a maker culture.
Let me read you a letter that Bill wrote to his sister when Bill was just 25. Take this in: Bill was
the first in his family to go to college and he had just scored a perfect 500 of the navy Reserve
test and Annapolis had given him a full scholarship and all his sisters were married to miliatry6
men, and it was the eve of the Korean war and Bill was telling his sister why he was claiming
contentious objector status and turning Annapolis down and refusing to fight in the war.
Dear Viv,
This is a hard letter to write but I will do my best. You seem to feel that I am acting
rashly and without having thought this through. Believe me this is not the case. My duty
in this situation has been considered and thought on almost constantly for many months.
More thought has gone into this decision than any other in my life. –So it hurts to have
you, who understand me better than most, think I have acted irresponsibly.
Some think this is a position of cowardice. I do not think you feel I am a coward. For it is
much more difficult to do what you feel is right when your family and friends do not
understand and believe you are acting wrongly than it is to go as a soldier.
Most strongly you feel that I have been selfish – holding to my ideals when they cause
pain to Mom and others. You may be right, but I have thought about this a great
deal. This thought has bothered me more than all the others. I cannot bring myself to
feel that Mom would want me to do what I believe to be wrong, dishonest or unjust. To
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do so would be to negate all that she has done and taught me. In due reverence to her I
cannot do other that what I believe to be right and good.
I wanted you to hear Bill’s words because of the really important question it raises for all of us:
What do we care about enough today to take such a stand for?
My answer, personally, is this: (pictures of dolphins and whales).
I don’t mean dolphins and whales specifically. I mean the great diversity of life. I mean the
beauty of all the creatures, including humans, with whom we share this earth. This diversity of
life is what shapes us, makes us who we are. This diversity of life is our true wealth.
This is what I take a stand for. This is what I believe you take a stand for.
Put aside every nice thing Ryan said and consider these things that I stand for.
This is also who I am: Bull Run Farm, Sages Ravine, Spruce Knob, Dickinson’s Reach,
Heron’s Rip, Moosilauke, Arun River Valley, Central Harlem, Cedar Mesa, Chama River, Arch
Rock, Drake’s Beach, Lake Atitlan, Knoll Farm.
That’s me. These words, these places, tell my story. These places are the waters, the food, the
wood, the dreams, and the memories that literally make up this body. These places define me.
I’m that alchemy of land, people and story.
And this is also my story: I’m youngest son of a Jewish immigrant who came here from poverty
and a city in the Ukraine. He arrived with a different name and a different language. This was
his first experience of America … but he instilled in me a love of land and wilderness. His
“sense of place” is different from my own: he had Brooklyn’s gritty and polluted East River and
he gave me a love of the wild. I am forever privileged by all that he had to do for himself and for
me to make a home in America.
His legacy makes it impossible for me to think about place without also thinking about “Place for
whom?”
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And I can’t think about that without also thinking about this word: Querencia. Show of hands,
how many of you have heard of this word?
It’s a mestizo word, defined for me by Estavan Arrellano:
The place where the animal lives
The tendency of humans to return to where they were born
Affection, Responsibility
The space where one feels secure
The place of one’s memories
The tendency to love and be loved
This word, and many others like it in other languages, suggests that our affection and
responsibility to one another, to community, has always been intimately connected to our
relationship to place.
And this is what I stand for: Querencia doesn’t just exist for some people, it exists for all
people.
The land and Nature welcomes bankers and farmers, people in business suits and people in torn
Carhardts. The land doesn’t care if you’re young or old, brown or white, year-round resident or
second-homer. Our biology is hard-wired to it. And to care about land and nature is not
Republican or Democrat, conservative or radical. To care is not reserved for environmentalists or
even conservationsist. To care is simply human. The caring is what I take a stand for.
The interconnectedness between respect of nature and respect of eachother is the most important
and least understood story our conservation movement.
The guy with the notebook is Aldo Leopold, the author of Sand County Almanac, one of the
fathers of our modern conservation movement and the guy who really understood health of land
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and health of people. He was part biologist, part sociologist. But he died much too early to help
us understand how the pieces fit together he did.
This was his central idea: (Bonnie chart)
He saw one system: people and nature together. The health of one is directly connected to the
health and wellbeing of the other. Part is easy to understand: people need healthy land, healthy
forests, and healthy oceans to be healthy themselves. Richard Louv got us to consider how much
children need nature to grow up into healthy adults.
But the other part of what he’s saying is difficult and provocative: When we are disconnected
from nature, we will hurt ourselves and hurt nature itself.
Because we are the keystone species, we’re the dominant dog, when we are disconnected from
this whole, it’s not just bad for us, it’s bad for the entire system.
This is how we hurt ourselves: we become greedy, fearful of the other, forgetful of reality,
susceptible to spells, lies and myths, and we always hurt ourselves as much as we hurt the land.
Every time.
When we are fearful of each other and put up walls between neighborhoods or walls between
nations, the land suffers.
When we oppress each other, we feel more licenses to oppress the land.
When we are at war, nature dies too.
In a much less dramatic and more everyday sense, the more disconnected we are from nature, the
more we struggle to find meaning from money and consumption and that, too, hurts the land.
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We use it, tear it up, we put chemicals into it, and then we lie to ourselves and say it doesn’t
matter.
There’s no sign or law big enough or strong enough that’s going to stop people who don’t care
from hurting the land.
So, it’s the “caring” part that we must focus on. How do we help and encourage a great diversity
of New Hampshire folks to care about this land? We have to help them feel that they belong,
that they are welcome here. I take a stand for this.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m no simpleton advocating “thou shalt not post your land or love thy
neighbor.” You can’t always love your neighbor, and sometimes land ought to be posted no
trespassing. What I’m trying to say is that our relationship to nature and place ought to be like a
marriage.
And few marriages that exist only on paper last very long, right.
My marriage has long moments of love and it has long moments of misunderstanding and hurt,
but I’m committed to it for the long haul. I want us to be committed to the relationship between
people and land for the long haul.
Let me tell you a story. Remember Michael Pollan, the food writer?
Leading up to the millennium in 2000, the New York Times spent several years creating a 1,000
year time capsule to be opened in the year 3,000. They spent years deciding what should go into
this time capsule, but their toughest decision was where to place the time capsule. What would
really protect it best over a thousand years?
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Do they bury it in the ground like a dog bone? Do they create a law from Congress that legislates
future generations to protect it? Do they raise a ton of money to endow 20 generations of
stewards to stand guard beside it and to check on it every few years or so? Each one of these
plausible solutions was examined thoroughly and tossed out for being insufficient to actually
protect this time capsule over 1,000 years.
Then the New York Times asked themselves a very helpful question, what’s still here today that
was here in 1,000 AD? They could come up with only two answers: the Catholic Church and
several examples of beautiful art. So, they decided that they very, very best way to truly protect
this time capsule for 1,000 years was to make it as beautiful as possible and to place it in an
obvious and very visible public place so that people would love it, cherish it, and call it their
own.
The best way to protect something for 1,000 years is to help people to feel connected to it, to
belong to it, to love it.
I don’t think I’m being niave. I know what the problems are: we humans have transformed
between 1/3 and ½ of the earth’s surface. Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed,
¼ of all mammals are headed to extinction, climate change is driving tree species north at the
rate of 8 feet per hour.
So, how do we make this profound work of conservation last?
Do you believe that laws will make it last 1000 years or even 200 years?
I do not. Our laws, alone, aren’t sufficient. I believe the primary force that will protect into the
distant future what I value today is our efforts to help future generations to connect to what we
love in their own way.
What will get us to perpetuity is not laws, but relationships.
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And here’s the really hard part: future generations won’t look like us or think like us. And that’s
OK; it’s the only way it could be. I want to involve them, welcome them, trust them, not simply
try to write a damn tight conservation easement that they can’t get out of.
If, over the next two decades, we can put our greatest energies into connecting people to this
landscape through how they live, work and play, then I’m willing to pass the baton to someone I
don’t know and who won’t look like me and say to her: I trust that you will care for this as I have
cared for this.
This is scary because it is out of our control, but it’s unbelievably exciting too because there are
successful efforts doing just this all around our country and here in New Hampshire too.
Imagine this:
Imagine there’s a land trust that does all the traditional conservation you’re familiar with, but
also owns and operates a 400 acre working farm, which feeds –year round—700 families, takes
food stamps for 1/3 of those families, and is responsible for growing the land trust membership
by 300% over the last decade. Those families, they will care for that farm.
Imagine there’s another land trust that gets 25% of its 1.2 million dollar operating budget from a
group of hospitals who believe that its recreational trails and public programming are medicine
for their patients. Those patients, they will take a stand for conservation.
Imagine there’s a land trust with such a strong public vision for the use of their land that it’s
designated by the public school as the lead community partner in helping to educate that
community’s young and old. Those kids, they will take a stand for conservation.
Imagine there’s a land trust that gets why some in their community think they are elitist, and in
response sells portions of their conserved timberlands to cooperatives of low-income people who
needed the firewood and the benefits of land ownership.
Imagine, there’s a group of land trust that pool their money and their smarts to conserve 20,000
acres while simultaneously co-creating with the community a “rural recovery plan” to endow a
local school, do job training, and create a small-business loan fund.
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You don’t have to imagine any of this, right? All of that is real. Everything I’ve described is
already happening.
This is land trusts becoming larger public citizens. And when you own or control 30% of the
state as conservationists due here in NH, of course public expects you to be a caring, public
citizen.
Imagine these possibilities for New Hampshire:
Imagine a 9 year old girl in elementary school who walks up to the milk dispenser in the
cafeteria and pours into her glass milk that her own family produced.
Imagine if all the public schools in New Hampshire were serving locally grown food and heated
by local wood, that you had mapped your forests to know how you could heat half of all the
homes in this state forever.
Better than that, imagine you’d figured out how to use your sun, wind and water to become a net
producer of energy. Imagine your land trust was so connected to the community that you
maintained one tract of land just to grow firewood for low-income townspeople.
Imagine that you had worked together with NOFA and the farm bureau to figure out how much
land would be needed to produce one-third of all the food you eat here.
Imagine every kid growing up in New Hampshire went to a great public school that got them
outside, gave them space to build forts, and made it common knowledge when the robins would
return, when the sap was flowing and what phase of the moon we were in.
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Imagine that every logger, fisherman, carpenter knew their kid had the option of doing the same
work if they wanted to because the forest was healthy, the community was healthy, and the work
was respected.
Efforts like this, even more than a tight conservation easement, are what will keep conservation
alive 200 years from now.
Here in New Hampshire, I see efforts by land trusts to make new allies and to listen to their
community, and those efforts are transformative.
I showed you this picture of Classie Parker because she’s one of the people in my life who
helped me to stretch my thinking about what conservation means to different people.
Who might this person be for in your community?
For Jeanne Thieme in Swanzy, it was Mike Johnson, and old fashioned farmer with lots of skills
and abilities who Jeanne connected with and came to respect a great deal. I could feel Mike’s
influence on Jeanne when she told me, “If people feel connected, they’ll protect the land without
anyone telling them to do it.”
Jeanne calls her way of building new allies “Back door conservation” because neighbors who
trust one another use the backdoor, or the kitchen door, not the front door.
For Ryan Owens it’s about getting the widest possible cast of characters carrying conservation in
their own way using their own tools.
And what results from finding new allies is the possibility for much bigger, more successful
work. Because we don’t have to do it all on our own.
Ken Jue, who works on mental health issues in Keene, asks “What’s your land trusts role in
improving children’s emotional health? This sounds so grandiose and unanswerable and off our
mission, but it can actually be answered if you find the right partners. Let us work with you.”
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So, Community conservation is about finding a role you can feel good about in helping your
community.
And to say yes shows that we have empathy that we care about what someone else cares about,
not just what we care about.
All of these examples boil down to one thing: Listening not selling.
When you own or control 30% of a state, the graceful thing to do is listen a great deal.
Great community conservation is about listening to hear what a community needs, and then
finding the sweet spot where their need and your goals overlap.
Here’s one approach: “I believe deeply in conservation. I have a conservation plan that will
enrich your life. Allow me to try to convince you of what I believe in.”
Here’s the alternative conversation: “What do you believe in and need? How can what
Monadnock conservancy does so well fulfill what you care about? Let’s do this together.”
What’s working really well is: Meeting people on their turf, leaving your assumptions at the door
about what they want and what you need, being open to new ground being discovered. Thinking
about the relationship not just the transaction, honoring the other side.
We’re making really good progress as a community of conservationsits, but what worries me is
our reliance on a set of tools that are so much more about the power of the stick and that the
sweet taste of the carrot.
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We have to be for things to make real progress. And we have to tell a story that others in New
Hampshire folks can clearly see themselves within. And it needs to be a story that excites them
and draws them in.
Maybe the place to start can be this simple: regularly sit down with someone you don’t know
and have a cup of coffee. As them what do you care about and how can we help? At the core of
what I’m talking about is simple effort of helping very different people to take their best step
toward one another. Conservation has a big role to play in this.
I believe more than ever in what you do. What you can do … provide people with a relationship
to land and nature … is still medicine for which most ails our culture. Our healthy relationship to
land is the means by which we all generate, re-create, and renew the big transcendent values such
as beauty, responsibility, and love.
I want you to think of that letter that Bill wrote to his family and consider what you are willing to
take a stand for. You may be very surprised to learn that there are others who share your feelings
though they do not use the same words.
There are many, many thousands of New Hampshire folks, who love the land and may now be –
or have forever been- at the edges of town or mainstream culture, there by choice or not, but who
feel strangers in their own community, left out of economic progress for whatever reason, folks
who were here first, or came last, people who work with their hands in a world that works with
their heads, or folks simply on the losing end of a demographic trend. It’s not that I hope to do
conservation just for them, but I will not do conservation that forgets them. To do so is to forget
my father.
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