By Mary Lee Camp, Standard Staff
The March/April 2018 issue of Yankee Magazine focuses on “Our Land, Our Sea, Our Future,” a special report on the New England environment – and where we’re headed.
The lead-in article in Yankee’s special report was written by Leath Tonino and is about George Perkins Marsh – who is considered to be America’s first environmentalist. Tonino writes about Marsh, a Woodstock native, who at a young age nearly lost his vision due to his intellectual appetite sought through reading an encyclopedia in a dim room at his family home, now known as the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller mansion.
Marsh’s father gave him an edict to stay outside and “heal in the light,” where in the confines of the family estate and Woodstock, he opened his eyes to the natural world for the first time. This discovery in Woodstock and later his world travels empowered Marsh to become a visionary for the future of the earth.
Concerned about human destructive habits in nature, Marsh wrote “Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as modified by Human Action” in 1864. His biographer, David Lowenthal described the book in part as “the most influential text of its time.”
Bill McKibben, another Vermonter living in Middlebury, is called the “sentinel” by writer Richard Conniff in his contribution to Yankee’s special report. “McKibben is an author, climate change activist and nemesis of the fossil fuel industry,” writes Conniff, who also included a 2008 quote from McKibben: “Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.”
Also included in the Yankee report is writer Cheryl Lyn Dybas who shares her experience about “ghosts moose,” meaning of course moose simply aren’t seen as frequently as in past decades. The moose decline reason given is “warmer winters have been a boon for the ticks, which attach themselves by the thousands to moose, draining their hosts of blood and strength making them vulnerable to illness, even causing death.”
Howard Mansfield’s contribution to Yankee’s report on the New England Environment is about the Maine coastline, titled ‘On a Sinking Island.” Not only are coastal islands disappearing, but also the seabirds are losing their habitat and nesting areas.
Included in the report is Green Milestones, a selective timeline of New England’s Conservation Highlights, beginning in 1836 when Ralph Waldo Emerson published the essay “Nature”– which describes the benefits of nature on the human soul, through 2017, when several New England cities banned single-use plastic bags at checkout counters.
One hundred and fifty four years after Woodstock resident George Perkins Marsh published “Man and Nature,” on March 12 Woodstock ninth graders under the leadership of their science teacher Sara Hahn will participate in a field trip to the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller property, where they will learn global implications of climate change and will define the words: Impact, Adaptation and Mitigation. Then the students will split to study the meaning of those words and brainstorm on how the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Park is adapting to climate change.
After the field trip, students will be working on a joint English/science project: a “Climate Change Newsletter” in which each student will write an article about an industry that is being impacted in Vermont, (i.e., skiing, sugaring, tourism, sports, jobs, snow plowing, foliage season, health/heat illness, etc.) They will need to find a community partner who can provide them with some qualitative and/or quantitative data about that industry in recent years and the projection going forward focusing on impact, adapt, mitigate.
Despite the doubters, climate change is real. As Yankee Magazine Editor Mel Allen muses, the magazine typically represents beauty, love of the land, tradition and history and explains, “Yet sometimes the stories that may shake us a bit demand their due…”
The March/April 2018 issue of Yankee Magazine is well worth the read for both climate-control supporters and doubters.
This article originally appeared in the March 8, 2018, version of the Vermont Standard.