Toluu : Walking the Berkshires

Walking the Berkshires

"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and conservation science with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone.

I adore the blog Strange Maps, precisely for posts like this one. From "The Atlas of True Names " translated into English from the original German version produced by cartographers Stephan Hormes and Silke Preust: The Land of the Great Tatooed!

(Click to enlarge)

Recent Lakeville Journal Nature Notes ArticlesYesterday

My lastest Lakeville Journal article, readable on-line with free subscription, deals with the Housatonic River. Fair use excerpt:

"

I drove along the Housatonic in the piercing cold of the New Year. The steam rising from the river glazed the trees on either bank in glistening sheaths of ice. They call this phenomenon “sea smoke” in the Gulf of Maine, and it arises when water that is cold enough to kill an unprotected swimmer is still warm by comparison to the arctic January air.

The cold streams and rivers of the Berkshires and Litchfield Hills can look like the Valley of 10,000 Smokes. At such times they reveal their kinship both to the urban vapors that rise from sidewalk grates when it’s Christmastime in the city, and to the midsummer wisps that settle in cool fens and seepage wetlands.

The Housatonic certainly seemed to be smoking as I drove past the paper mills on my way north. Not so many years ago, you could tell what color paper they were making by the stain of the water below the discharge from the mill. Massachusetts has some of the most progressive wetlands and river protection laws i

Pave It to Save ItJanuary 6

These are the best of times and the worst of times for land protection. On the one hand, real estate values have started to come down. On the other, landowner expectations have not fully made that adjustment, and with credit tight and conservation dollars even more limited, we still do not have the resources we need to take more advantage of these conservation opportunities. There are some bargains to be had if conservation investors have the liquidity to buy and hold land now to protect later, but many potential conservation buyers have seen their world erupt in flames and are still trying to get a handle on what to do with their remaining assets. While there is another year left to run on the Conservation Tax Incentives passed by Congress in 2006, many folks have lost more than they can recoup even with these attractive deductions.

What to do?

Conservation development is an idea that has gained traction in some quarters, particularly in hot real estate markets where saving land through the development process is the only feasible means to keep what limited open space remains open. Around the Litchfield Hills, it is generally recognized that there is far more land we need to conserve across this landscape than we can possibly protect using conventional means. Whether through a buy / divide / restrict / resell approach or through actually working with d

I SpyJanuary 4

I've been enjoying Alexander Rose's Washington's Spies; The Story of America's First Spy Ring, not only for the solid writing and his excellent detective work piecing together the inner workings of Patriot espionage in and around New York, but also because it contains a trove of period details you won't find in the D.A.R. archives or in your ancestor's Society of the Cincinnati biography.

Rose memorably describes New York during this period as "A bustling mercantile metropolis descended into a mare'snest, the leading red-light district in North America, the black market capital of the Revolution." A third of it gutted by fire, the city was a brimming caldera of Tory refugees, smugglers, soldiers of the British emp

Walking the Berkshires Receives 2008 Cliopatria Award for Best Series of PostsJanuary 1

I am utterly astonished and delighted to learn today that I have been awarded a 2008 Cliopatria Award for Best Series of Posts. It is a rare honor to be in the company of some of the finest history writers in the blogosphere.

Best Series of Posts: Tim Abbott on Trumbull's The Death of General Montgomery, Jan. 12, Jan. 13 , Jan. 14 , Jan. 17 , Jan. 18 .

The examination of Jonathan Trumbull's famous painting The Death of General Montgomery in Attack on Quebec, December 31 1775 over five posts at Tim Abbott's Walking the Berkshires is good scholarly writing and engaging analysis. Abbott raises intriguing questions about historical memory, as he guides his readers through the examination of historical records.

Tim Abbott is a conservation professional.