Wandering Home by Bill McKibben

Author:Bill McKibben [McKibben, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-54897-9
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2005-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

This idea of a reconciliation between the wild and the pastoral is not something I’ve just worked out. In the last decade or so, conservationists have become more and more aware of the need to work with, not against, traditional users of the land. Partly that’s a response to the antienvironmental political mood in Washington, which requires making allies instead of enemies; partly it comes from a growing scientific understanding that, say, good forestry and wolf habitat can overlap. Part of it, too, comes from an increasingly sophisticated sense of the scale of our environmental problems—that protecting wilderness in Vermont is not really an “answer” if it leads directly to the destruction of forests somewhere else for a paper-hungry world. And in some measure it comes, I think, from the sense of pleasure at working at the very human tasks of food and shelter—and community. It’s not surprising, anymore, to find some of the nation’s most innovative farming and ranching being done on land owned by the Nature Conservancy, whose brief never used to extend past saving endangered species.

But there are very few regions that illustrate the possibilities in as close proximity as this region I am trying to construct across the New York–Vermont border. The two sides of the lake are different—the Adirondacks are higher, with a different geology and hydrology, and a harsher climate. Not a lot harsher, but enough so that most attempts at farming didn’t last more than a generation. Vermont is famously pastoral—pick up any calendar. And yet Vermont has some real wildlands. I’d begun my hike in the Breadloaf Wilderness, the state’s largest; if a new wilderness bill passes this year, as it should, 2 percent of the state will be designated wilderness, and considerably more is wilderness of the de facto sort. Meanwhile, the Adirondack Park has plenty of honest-to-God residents, who are trying to figure out how they can make their living at the same time and in pretty much the same place as the rest of creation. The line between these places is really more of a blur.

It reminded me of something John Davis had said as we rowed away from the Vermont side, looking back at the broad farmlands of the eastern shore. “There’s a lot of little patches of trees there, you know. Just by strategically allowing a few of those fields to grow back to forest, you could link a lot of those shards.” You could, that is, Abbeyize a little of the domesticated valley floor, just as preserving Black Kettle Farm will Berry a patch of this Split Rock wildway. Blur, not line.

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