Land Protection Books

The purpose of this post is to create a single connection to several books relevant to the protection of land -- especially in New England -- that have been part of my course GEOG 332: Land Protection. I have been teaching the course since 1998, when it still had its original title of Management and Protection of the Natural Environment. I have done my best to build on the legacy of Dr. Reed Stewart, who initially developed the course as a way to convey the lessons he had learned through years of involvement with land trusts and conservation commissions.

For each title mentioned here, I provide a link to the Goodreads entry for the book and to my own Goodreads review of the book -- these are not detailed reviews, but rather brief recommendations that explain the connection of the books to this course.

I could spend an entire year teaching this class, and if I did, I would assign all of these books and more. That being unrealistic, I have always assigned the first two (Foster and Gustanski) and occasionally one additional book at a time. With this post, I am encouraging GEOG 332 students to consider these books for their own reading. 

CURRENTLY REQUIRED

Thoreau's Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape. 1997. David R. Foster 
Goodreads entry -- My review

Protecting the Land: Conservation Easements Past, Present, and Future. 2000. Julie Ann Gustanski, Roderick H. Squires, and Jean Hocker (Foreword)
Goodreads entry -- My review

PREVIOUSLY REQUIRED OR STRONGLY CONSIDERED

Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England. 2002. Diana Muir
Goodreads entry

Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England. 1997. Tom Wessels, Brian D. Cohen, and Ann H. Zwinger
Goodreads entry -- My review 

The Journeys of Trees. 2020. Zach St. George
Goodreads entry -- NPR Story 

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. 2013 Robin Wall Kimmerer
Goodreads entry -- My review 

Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources. 2005. M. Kat Anderson
Goodreads entry -- My review

LAGNIAPPE: ORGANIZATIONS AND LOCATIONS

In addition to these books, two Massachusetts organizations have been essential to this class: the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition and the Massachusetts Association of Conservation Commissioners. Both are excellent sources of continuing education for students who may have been introduced to these topics through this course.

Finally, the course has included field trips to two sites that former students tell me have been highlights of their education. Each has a claim to fame as being among the very earliest managed and studied forests in the United States. 

The most ambitious of these outings is Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Vermont. It makes for rather an arduous day trip, but the combination of science and art makes it very worthwhile. We have sometimes included a visit to Billings Farm, which is surrounded by the park and was once part of the property. It operates as an independent non-profit organization and shares some programming and resources with the national park. 

Because all federal web sites should be considered unreliable at this time (2025), I am including several extra links about the park: a description on the Billings Farm site, a Wikipedia article, and my own 2000 encyclopedia entry

The other major field trip in the course is a visit to Harvard Forest, of which author David Foster (see above) was the director for many years. I never met Foster, but his colleague John O'Keefe hosted many of my early visits with students before his retirement. I am able to lead reasonably effective visits there because of the combination of his teaching over many visits and the material he published for the Forest. 

In the 25+ years I have been visiting these sites, I have been able to see some ecological change in particular forest areas. More importantly, I have noticed that the organizations managing each of these properties have been building collaborations with researchers, neighbors, and indigenous communities. 

It's Complicated

Last Sunday, our minister recently read the Mary Oliver poem At the River Clarion by Mary Oliver, in preparation for a timely and insightful homily entitled Watershed.  

Although I do not know her work very well, I always enjoy poems by Mary Oliver. One line in particular stood out, leading me to find a nice photo of the poet on which to inscribe it digitally. 

Photo of Oliver and her dog by NYT photographer Angel Valentin,
as part of a story on Oliver's canine poetry by Dana Jennings.

I appreciate this line because it is a reminder of why education in general -- and geographic education in particular -- matters. We go to school only in part because it can help us to prepare for careers. We also study because the world is complicated, with complexities, connections, and paradox that defy easy explanation -- though charlatans are always ready to offer those.

Lagniappe 

As mentioned above, our minister's homily was entitled Watershed -- her thoughts in connection with the UU traditional in-gathering known as a Water Communion. Our congregations return from summer breaks to open the church year by bringing water from the places we have visited/lived/worked/played during the summer. 

At the beginning, she mentioned that she was going to use a watershed analogy, even though she was not an expert. To my mild delight, she singled me out as someone she hoped would not be disappointed in her use of the concept. I was pleased that she recognized that this concept is very much in my realm of expertise, though she could not have known that even among geographers, my involvement with watersheds is kind of extreme. My master's thesis involved thousands of calculations in dozens of watersheds, I worked for several years with my university's watershed program for middle schools, and I teach some very arcane lessons about watershed geometry. 

With all of that said, I can report that our minister succeeded not only in describing what a watershed is, but also in connecting it to a very helpful message about approaching moments of change.

Birds Do It

 ... migrate, that is! 

According to the tracking site BirdCast, this past Tuesday evening saw record-breaking levels of bird migration across North America. 

The map brings two spatial observations to mind. The first is the importance of the 100th meridian (100ºW longitude) -- a line corresponding roughly to the 20-inch isohyet and evident on a surprising variety of North American maps. 

The second is the vivid reminder of the importance of the Rio Grande Valley to migratory birds. When we lived there from 1994 to 1997, we became aware that the greatest bird biodiversity in the country is observed in the handful of counties at the southmost tip of Texas. Several hundred species of birds (more than half of the U.S. total) have been observed in just two locations Aransas National Wildlife Refuge and Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. 

This map is taken from my Texas County map page, in turn taken from 
my friend who created it for the regional Chamber of Commerce back in the day.

The latter was much closer to our home in Pharr, and we enjoyed a rich diversity of migratory birds there -- a single square mile that was occasional host to about 400 species of birds. Both sites are important because of the overland portion of the flyways converging -- with many birds essentially funneled between the Rocky Mountains and high plains to the west and open water to the east.  Birds following the eastermost flyways tend to do island-hopping as they skirt that side of the Gulf of Mexico.

I include a somewhat outdated map of the Lower Rio Grande Valley for several reasons, even though it does not show these refuges. Aransas NWR is a bit to the northeast -- just beyond the northern end of Padre Island, and Santa Ana is just to the south of Alamo (the town, not the San Antonio fort). What the map does show is that this is a largely urban corridor, with important highways and bridges in every direction -- a real challenge for preserving habitat, even for birds -- and even more importantly for large cats. Every acre of land matters, and I was involved with the Rio Grande Sierra Club in several efforts to preserve what remained. We were especially interested in maintaining corridors of connection between available patches of habitat -- this sometimes required rethinking the construction of bridges so that wildlife could transit under the roadway and along the floodplains. 

It is also worth noting -- for those not familiar with Texas geography -- that the Rio Grande Valley is not a valley at all. Rather, it is the very large, very flat delta of the Rio Grande / Rio Bravo. The lower 100 miles or so of this 1,896-mile river flows through a very large triangle of very flat land. 

Not Just Birds

The migration of birds made living in the Valley even more interesting than it otherwise was; I especially enjoyed certain evenings of my 108-mile commute to the town of Alice during seasons in which scissor-tailed flycatehers or red-tailed hawks would race my car in their hundreds. 

This is also an important corridor for monarch butterflies and was the first point of entry for Africanized "killer" bees, which we did observe at Santa Ana NWR. I knew what they were, because I had been mildly swarmed by during my first visit to the Amazon. This is a sound one does not forget!

Finally, of course, migration across this border by humans is immensely important and is lately the subject of much misinformation, abuse, and misguided wall-building. 

Lagniappe

I am reminded of what Nixon's (criminal) Attorney General John Mitchell had to say on the subject: 

"The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every bird watcher in the country."

We thought Nixon was the worst -- and at the time he was -- but even he ended up signing many landmark environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act.

Routes of Enslaved Peoples

 Congratulations to RISD Professor Spencer Evans for his installation at the harbor in Bristol, Rhode Island, entitled Our Ancestors Come with Us. This work was dedicated on August 24 and is the culmination of the Bristol Port Project Marker Project and is now part of Routes of Enslaved Peoples, a global UNESCO network of projects.

It is a good reminder for those of us who are proud of New England's role in the abolition of slavery that New England also played a key part in establishing the cruel institution on this continent.

There is surely more to notice, but what caught my attention was the fact
that each of the elders has a forward foot planted firmly on a stone, while
the youngster is pushing off from a similar stone, propelled to a wide-open future.
Their backs are to the sea as they all face inland.

I created the map below because of my Google Map habit, which leads me to create simple maps when I find articles or web sites that should have a map but do not. On this map, the sites identified as part of the project by UNESCO are shown with blue markers; the red markers are for similar sites not identified on the Routes of Enslaved Peoples web site.

The first of these non-listed sites is very close to my former home in Annapolis, Maryland. I was aware of the significance of the site, as someone who watched Roots when it was first televised, long before I realized I would be living near the landing point of Alex Haley's ancestor, Kunta Kinte. It is embarassing that I was not aware of the memorial there -- very close to where I once had a summer job. I will make a point of visiting next time I am in Maryland.

An artistic commemoration of the horrendous Middle Passage in a very different form was Madonna's 2019 Batuka music video -- a collaboration with the women of Cidade Velha on the island of Santiago, Cabo Verde. This is one of the sites from which Portuguese colonizers transported people in bondage to Brazil. I have had the privilege of visiting during my 2006 and 2024 travel courses to the country. We will always be sure to include this sacred ground in any program in which we bring students to Cape Verde. As of this writing, Cidade Velha is not part of the Routes of Enslaved Peoples project, but it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.