Wilderness, Working Lands and Tebenkof Bay

Gil Livingston
Article for Vermont Land Trust
Wilderness, Working Lands and Tebenkof Bay

Have you ever found that Vermont inspires you to think most broadly precisely when home is most distant? If so, then you will understand why, only when I stood on an island shore in Tebenkof Bay, Alaska did I finally come to a deeper understanding of concepts that lie at the core of “conservation biology”: the ideas of inter-connectivity, natural cycles, biological richness. In an organization that focuses on the relationship between people and land – through the protection of community lands, working lands, family lands – how do these ideas have relevance?

Tebenkof Bay lies within a 65,000 acre National Wilderness in the heart of the Tongass National Forest, the 400 mile long rain forest archipelago that dominates the Alaska panhandle. A collection of environmental activists from around the country arrived by float plane from the remote fishing village of Petersburg. Peter Forbes, founder of the Trust for Public Land’s Center for Land and People, gathered our odd menagerie: botanist, clergyman, philanthropists, third-world economic developer, wilderness advocate, elderly rabble-rouser, conservation photographer, environmental educator, and land trust lawyer (me). Joined by Kurt Hoelting, a commercial fisherman turned poet and Zen practitioner, we learned something of the quiet, commanding wisdom of Tebenkof Bay.

What are some elements of that wisdom? In the immediate presence of black bear and bald eagle, sea otter and jellyfish, porpoise and hump-back whale, palpable, breathing cycles are evident. cycles of the tide, cycles of water, cycles of predation, cycles of seasons, cycles of migration. And in this most remote, “untouched,” old growth wilderness, man once thrived. Human settlement began10,000 years ago, and perhaps 30,000 members of the Tlinget, Haida and Tsimshian tribes once occupied scattered villages throughout the Tongass until their decimation by European diseases. Only Kurt’s local knowledge leads us to a weather-worn burial marker, settlement berms, and shell middens, all manifestations of occupation opaque to the untrained eye.

Six years ago, VLT’s Trustees engaged in creative, thoughtful, heartfelt conversations to answer the question: What are the end objectives of VLT — what benefit should VLT provide, for whom and at what cost? Among the many different people to whom they posed these questions, the Trustees listened carefully to the perspectives of our conservation partners in Vermont. In part because our friends at The Nature Conservancy, The Conservation Fund, the Trust for Public Land and the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife were so active and so effective in their land protection work, VLT elected to consolidate its focus on “land and people” conservation. But the Trustees’ discussions of operating farms, community lands and working forests have continued to be laced with questions about “sustainability” and the impact of our work on Vermont’s air, water, soils and habitats.

As in Tebenkof Bay, it seems illogical, if not unethical, to compartmentalize our conservation analysis, either at the single parcel level or at the landscape level. We should not approach each project with blinders on: focusing only on the agricultural attributes of farms, recreational attributes of trails, timber attributes of working forests. Instead, we should make a reasonable effort to empirically evaluate all resource attributes of a target parcel and to thoughtfully choose a conservation design based on this broad view. And VLT should join with its conservation partners to better understand the broader relationship between VLT’s conservation work and the achievement of state-wide biodiversity protection. Natural cycles and interrelationships demand nothing less.

Does this represent a dramatic shift in VLT’s thinking? As the list of projects in the sidebar suggests, throughout its history, VLT has actively participated in land protection driven by biological attributes. In recent years, these efforts have included:

  • Atlas Timberlands: 26,000 acres purchased in partnership with The Nature Conservancy in 1997, to help both organizations learn how to advance biological and economic goals in managing timberland.
  • Champion International: With many other partners, VLT played a crucial role in creating the Conte National Wildlife Refuge and the West Mountain Wildlife Management Area, 48,000 acres of refuge lands.
  • Vermont Biodiversity Project: VLT has played a leading role in this partnership designed to bring new science-based tools to the task of protecting Vermont’s biodiversity.
  • Chittenden County Uplands Project: With seven other partners, VLT is a key participant in an evolving effort to conserve 8,500 biologically important acres in eastern Chittenden County.
  • Geographic Information Systems: Under Jon Osborne’s leadership, VLT has developed a sophisticated GIS system providing each of our regional offices with remote access to a broad assortment of natural resource data.

Must VLT choose between working lands and wilderness protection, between community and biology? VLT Board member John Elder has written:
“In affirming wilderness both as a physical area protected under law and as a source for renewal for individuals, we need to be aware of how easily we can fall into a false dichotomy. One reason Native American people so often criticize the language of wilderness is that it seems to be defined in opposition to the human realm – as wilderness versus culture, or as land devoid of human settlements. They see this as a tourist’s admiration for ‘nature,’ in contrast with their own experience of living in daily communion with a nonhuman world . . . “ 1

Wendell Berry concurs:
“. . . if we cannot preserve our farmland, we cannot preserve the wilderness. . . nature and human culture, wilderness and domesticity, are not opposed but are interdependent . . . conservationists must necessarily conserve both inheritances, the natural and the cultural.” 2

Tebenkof Bay teaches this same lesson: while the tension and the dilemmas may be substantial, while we may on occasion reach impasse, conservation must struggle to honor biology and culture, economy and habitat, people and wilderness. VLT must be a leader in this healthy struggle.

Gil Livingston,
Vice President for Land Conservation

1 John Elder, Reading the Mountains of Home, Harvard University Press, 1998.
2 Wendell Berry, “Getting Along with Nature” from Home Economics, North Point Press, 1995.