MEET HANS

The forests there were the first place I learned to love being outside, and where nascent conservationism started for me.

I grew up in north-central Massachusetts, in the Gardner-Templeton area. My uncle Dick had 500 acres that abutted Harvard Forest, in the town of Petersham, and that is where I started to learn to work in the woods. That land was where I learned first that loving the woods and working the woods are not exclusive of one another. In the museum at Harvard Forest are those famous dioramas of land use in New England, and I spent hours mesmerized by them as a kid.

It was the miniature wonder of the past recreated that captured me then, but the lesson of land use and its consequences over time sunk in.

I was at a meeting not long ago, in the room at Harvard Forest with the dioramas. I hadn’t been there in decades, and it was striking to think about my work now, and that kid with his nose up against the glass. It’s hard to capture the arc of fifty-eight years in one event, but maybe that day in the museum did it. 

Over the last seven years, I have led two conservation organizations: Blue Hill Heritage Trust, in Maine, and Great Mountain Forest, in Connecticut. Before that, I was a college professor, and my research, teaching, and writing were at the confluence of cultures, environment, and resource development, specifically focused on the relationship between New England and the lands of the James Bay Cree in northern Quebec. Here too the necessity of loving the land while gaining by its use is abundantly clear, as are the larger forces of colonialism and globalism.

Before that, I was a boatbuilder and a wilderness paddler. In my twenties, these were the relationships with land that captured my imagination and focused my attention. The study of land and culture, and the protection of land and community came later, but again that work has shaped me as a conservationist.

It's very hard for me to think about protecting land without protecting the people and the communities that live with the land.

The other relationship which has shaped my conservationism is my work and friendship with the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec. 

Two things are important in this. The first is the deep cultural and community connection that exists for them, defined by the reciprocal relationship between land and people. The idea that land is a partner, not property, adds dimensions to land conservation worthy of our consideration. Second, Cree land has been heavily impacted in the last fifty years by the resource demands of those of us here in the south. Hydroelectric development has flooded the land for our power demands, and forests have been clear-cut for our wood needs. Land conservation in New England has thrived, even as this was happening.

All this has shaped the way I think about the work of protecting land and has deepened my commitment to conservation, even as it has taught me how complex it is to carry out that conservation.