David Dobbs, New England environmental author

David Dobbs writes about the environment, community, and science from his home in Vermont. A contributor to Audubon, Sierra, Vermont Life, Popular Science, and other magazines, he is co-author of The Northern Forest and is now writing a book on the New England fishery, to be published next year.

Looking over my entries the last few days, I realize it may appear I'm rather lazy -- all these fishing outings and garden walks. Let me assure you, dear reader, that while I feel lazy, I've actually been much too busy, doing much too much. (Here's one to ponder: Which causes more environmental problems: Being lazy, or doing too much? You get the answer, let me know.) I suppose Wednesday is the classic day for realizing you've signed on to an overstuffed work week, and such was the case for me today.

Fortunately, most of it is work I'm intensely interested in, which is more than many people can say (and more than I could say for many, many years). Along with the fisheries book, I'm working right now on articles about the return of predators to the Northeast, whether seals are depressing the return of cod in the northwest Atlantic, and how clashes between different ways of enjoying nature can sabotage both our experience of the outdoors and political efforts to protect it; reviews of Jay Parini's biography of Robert Frost (a tortured, often very unpleasant man) and of a new CD-ROM guide to environmentally kosher remodeling and design; and a how-to on soundproofing your home cheaply. Plus writing this diary.

Meanwhile, away from my desk, I've been helping to coach my eight-year-old son's baseball team (a gas -- plus I get to pitch batting practice) and, last but not least, helping to plan the annual meeting for the Friends of Montpelier Parks, of which I'm secretary.

FOMP, as we call it (we were going to name it Friends of the Parks until we realized that acronym was FOP), is both pleasure and pain. A pleasure because our parks are lovely; a pain because ... well, it's organizational stuff, and that doesn't really blow my hair. FOMP started a couple years ago when the park manager, a great guy named Geoff Beyer who lives in a cabin in our biggest and oldest park, 170-acre Hubbard (just up the hill from me), recruited me and a few other frequent park users to start the group. They're good folks (the meetings are actually pretty fun -- one new attendee said, "Your meetings are a lot looser than the conservation commission's") and we've got lots of great ideas, but we've had trouble getting the thing really rolling. We're no good at publicity, for one thing, and none of us is into the nitty-gritty membership chores that make these organizations grow -- working the phones, stealing mailing lists, handing out brochures, pressing members into service, that sort of thing. We do publish an occasional newsletter, we put together a little website, we post a flyer now and then, and doing all that we've recruited about 65 members from the several hundreds who use the park frequently. But only a few of these people attend the monthly meetings, and three or four of us do most of the work. Which I suppose is how most of these things go.

Despite failing to hit warp speed, however, we've done some good work. We held a really good, large meeting early on to come up with a "vision" (stinky word) of how people would like to see Montpelier's parks in 20 years, and that has helped us pass those ideas on to other groups working up a new downtown plan and such. We helped establish a new Peace Park along the river. Geoff is putting together a winter ski-trail network that sends spokes out of the park into surrounding areas. Chris and Tony are working with the conservation commission to form an open-space study group to document the contributions parks and other open space make to the town. And we're going to sponsor a Keeping Track course, a program this amazing woman, Sue Morse, of Richmond, Vt., puts on to teach local groups how to use animal signs to assess wildlife habitat.

We've done much of this in connection with a year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of Hubbard Park, which was donated to the town in 1899 by George Hubbard, then one of the town's leading lights. His gift was a gesture of considerable vision, given that the park was basically chewed-over sheep pasture and Montpelier was surrounded by plenty of what we now would call open space. It short, it seemed nothing special. Now the park is a rich forest full of birds and visited by moose and even bear; the surrounding towns, meanwhile, are being slowly but steadily suburbanized. The park is becoming a protected core among land feeling pressure. So all millennial silliness aside, I think it appropriate that we're using this centennial to jumpstart some new thinking about our town's open space. After a century of letting this park recover, it's time to ponder how it might serve as a sort of hub, a node in a lacework of green space that can help bind both nature and our community together. We're lucky to have a town and a countryside where this is possible; hopefully we're smart enough to make it happen.