The Kingston Land Trust, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to acquiring natural spaces for land conservation, held an Earth Day celebration at the Red Fox Ravine on Sunday, April 27. Over the course of four hours, an estimated hundred attendees slipped in and out of the rehabilitated void of a quarry, the negative space left over from decades of cement extraction to hear poetry and music bounce off the dizzy rock walls soaring up on three sides.
First celebrated in 1970, Earth Day is considered “the largest secular day of protest in the world” and it commemorates the beginning of the modern environmental movement.
Up from Wilbur Avenue, accessed by winding trails carved into the sloping hill or a more direct approach involving steps laid of stone, a lightly-wooded meadow waits to reward the hiker. A wooden stage built with a saltbox roof by Jared Williams and Michael O’Neill, one of the musicians performing that day, awaits.
Land trust board chair Michael Drillinger was down at the fresh-looking parking lot meeting folks as they arrived and advising drivers about the parking situation.
Land trusts are not land banks, Drillinger explains. “Land trusts preserve open space and conservation of particular important pieces of land, and they protect that land forever.” Land banks acquire vacant, troubled or condemned properties and return them to municipal tax rolls.
Drillinger says there need not be conflict between the two missions — creating housing or preserving open spaces. “Currently, we’re looking to continue to protect land that is otherwise not buildable,” he said. “For example, these are all very steep slopes.”
Though heavily disturbed because the quarry was a mining operation at the turn of the twentieth century, Drillinger called the land “a very special corner of the City of Kingston, serving as a wildlife corridor.”
While the urgency of creating housing supply tends to drown out the urgency of land conservation in the urban imagination, simply put, reducing problems to either/or propositions obscures the fact that nature — and the place of human beings in nature — is complex.
We can’t go back
Director of conservation and stewardship for the land trust Greg Shaheen agrees. If everything was covered in concrete, human beings would be miserable. There must be a place for nature in our society.
“If people are walking through Red Fox Ravine and picking blueberries or a shiitake mushroom [which the land trust cultivates], they can take it home and eat it. And it’s delicious,” he said. “If we learn how to work with nature and steward the land, we can enjoy the fruits of this relationship because nature is abundant, ultimately. Indigenous people were rich in their nutrition and the diversity of plants that they ate. And they had everything that they needed from nature.”
While he counsels learning from those that came before us — and we are not that long out of the forests — Shaheen does not propose everyone move back into the woods.
“We have to just acknowledge that we can’t go back,” Shaheen explained. “That’s the issue with ecological restoration sometimes. After all, this land was clear-cut, after deforesting and logging and mining we need to think about something new that acknowledges the reality of today and creates greater interdependence.”
He provides an example of how important interdependence really is. “Milkweed is a plant that is essential for monarch butterflies, and people just mow it over because they think it’s a weed. Why do we need monarch butterflies? Pollination. What would happen if all the monarch butterflies died? Food production and food systems would collapse.”
Is optimism enough?
Earth Day attendee Holly Hawthorne offers her own take.
“Which is not the end of the world,” says Hawthorne. “Eventually scientists will build little machines to take over the job of the butterflies and the plants will still be pollinated. And the machines will do a better job, obviously.”
Hawthorne thinks this is inevitable. “Nature is not only abundant but she is wasteful. But we’ll be machines, too, you know? We already are,” she says, pointing to her phone. “So machine butterflies. Maybe machine flowers. Machine people. But even with robot butterflies I hope there’s still people looking to live with nature in 50 years. They’ll call us human-huggers.”
A woman named Rita, a Kerhonkson native of 40 years who drove up for the celebration, couldn’t imagine anyone not realizing the importance of nature and open spaces.
“We need them,” she said. “Absolutely. More than ever. There’s many articles that say there’s a health benefit, and the Japanese have something called forest-bathing. You walk in the woods and you just take it in. And I think right now, too, with the leaves emerging, there must be a lot going on here that we don’t even realize we’re picking up on.”
Faced with the barrage of bad news reported from scientists, pollution, species extinction, intensifying climate outcomes leading to societal destabilization and collapse, and the massive multinational corporations and irresponsible governments behind it all, Rita still hoped for improvement in the way humans treat their planet.
“You asked me, is optimism enough?” she said. “Yes. You have to be optimistic. We’ve got to get involved locally. We’ve got to be annoying. We’ve got to make noise.”
Earth Day is a perfect time to recall the previous occupants of the Hudson Valley. Before the Europeans arrived to colonize the United States, the people living here practiced a philosophy in which, rather than being driven to dominate the wilderness because the devil was hiding in the bushes, instead viewed the plants and animals as siblings animated by the same ingenious spark which powers us all.
“They lived with nature,” said Shaheen. “Not outside it. And we can, too.”
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