Of Tree I Sing

Nearly 2 million people live in and near the wildlands, and their communities are having a hard time. The region is losing a lot of its best-paying jobs -- many in the paper industry -- as manufacturers cut costs in order to remain competitive in what has become a global industry. Lack of economic opportunity had led, in many instances, to strong local opposition to conservation, which some people view as "locking up" land that represents the only tangible economic opportunity.

I founded the Northern Forest Center eight years ago to help the region focus as much time and attention on addressing social and economic needs as protecting land. Achieving landscape-scale conservation depends as much on building sustainable communities as it does on saving land. And making a better life for people depends in large part on living in and around healthy ecosystems, including wild places.

We are changing our view from protecting the "environment" -- some abstract thing out there -- to caring for the places that people live in and love. Our fundamental premise is that if we can connect people's love of the landscape with their aspirations for themselves, their families, and their communities, we can build a much broader and stronger movement to care for the places we all love.

It is amazing how much goodwill and cooperation we have been able to create by asking people what they care about, and listening to their answers -- an opportunity for a good, living-wage job; good education; an active cultural life; vibrant communities with high levels of civic engagement and good health; and healthy ecosystems with wildness, clean air and water, and public access. Our reasoning has been that if we could identify a core set of values held by a wide cross-section of people, we could begin to break down the barriers that so often have separated people who want decent jobs, for example, from people who want to conserve land. And that has been working.

But the next challenge -- which we are deep into right now -- is to come up with actual programs that can help improve both the economy and the land. We've received funding from the federal Economic Development Administration to develop a blueprint for a sustainable, conservation-based economy. How to actually do this, of course, isn't so clear, so along with other NFC staff, partners, and advisers, I am spending a lot of time working on this.

I found my way back to New Hampshire and a job as policy director of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, a statewide conservation group. While I was there, it became clear that the conservation community needed a broader regional approach. I took advantage of an opportunity to join the staff of the Appalachian Mountain Club in order to pursue this emerging vision of a regional coalition and campaign to conserve the Northern Forest. With other leaders across the region, I organized the Northern Forest Alliance -- a coalition of conservation groups advocating for protected wildlands, sustainable forestry, and sustainable communities and economies across the Northern Forest. I took on the role of chair of the alliance and, with many others, gradually built an effective coalition and strategy that has spurred protection of about 3 million acres.

After nearly a decade of organizing the alliance -- wonderful, rewarding, but also a burnout experience -- I turned my attention to the next piece of the puzzle: the people of the Northern Forest. We did not yet have the ability to address the third element of the alliance's agenda: sustainable communities and economies. So I left the Alliance and AMC to found the Northern Forest Center in 1997.

Could I ever have predicted the path? Of course not. Does it make perfect sense and fit who I am? Absolutely.