It has been a long day!  And I’m sore, hot and still thirsty from my poison ivy control project at the Seward House.  Day began, as usual, with banking and emails, my LiDaR data classification project, phone calls, tool organizing and off to the first job.  Lucky to see some old friends who were stopping by in Auburn, but in my excitement I skipped lunch.  After they split I looked at a really, really sick Spindle tree and ran some errands.  Bummer that I didn’t get to the wood shop to keep working on a framing project in cherry.

I’d also sent a brief email to a friend about the Sterling-Wolcott project — specifically in response to an email going around from someone upset they did not know much about it, but the words in my first email could easily be misunderstood.  So I gotta share some of the ideas I sent later on in this post.  This thing I wrote:

“I ran into the same Microsoft roadblock.  I’ve been participating in this process for several years, finding it increasingly frustrating as it evolved.”

doesn’t say enough, and if you read it the wrong way it could look like I have some sympathy for the woman who wrote an email attacking the NYS DEC – I don’t.  Her apprehension and ignorance about the process is understandable given how parts of it unfolded. Ideas are not the only thing that change in an authentic planning process.  People change too, and not always for the better.  Even though I predicted someone would come up with the language she uses in the email – especially her tone – my interaction in the process leads me to a very different place as a land owner and conservationist. 

I’m excited and looking forward to it.

Certainly my background, my work, and my life experience has afforded me a unique vantage point to view this process, but I’m also a landowner in the toe tracks of the project.  And like many, I witnessed the creation and evolution of the Cayuga Park out of the “Sterling Lands”, from long before RG&E ever proposed a nuke.

Contrary to the tone in the email, the stakeholder process HAS been inclusive of local participation and many kinds of property owners have been involved, including myself.  The “Working Landscape” is involved and is working together with conservationists, scientists, and GIS planners.  The process is organized within a complex and advanced conceptual framework based not on the economic assumptions of nature as resources, but on an scientific understanding of ecosystems:  how they function, provide benefits and services, can become stressed, and with care and compassion, recover.  It is so relevant a framework that I am proud the NYSDEC is attempting it.  It is very ambitious and thoughtful effort, and I’m pleased to have property in the landscape I love.  

Look, it is good NYS has returned to the road of conservation innovation.  After all, it is our state who pioneered conservation with the Forest Preserve, then the Constitutional Amendment creating Forever Wild wilderness.  The Adirondack Park Agency, the Tug Hill Commission, and the St Lawrence – Eastern Ontario Commission (ended by Gov. G Pataki) are examples of regional governance efforts testing a host of options.  There are others too:  NY’s Open Space protection initiative, numerous partnerships between land trusts, conservancies and the State.  

How about some background for context? 

I remember years back when Read Kingsbury wrote an op-ed about creating an agency or park identity for the Finger Lakes.  His suggestion came at a time when New Yorkers were gaining a shared regional perspective about land use and conservation within a planning context.  It wasn’t very long after the DEC was created as an agency, and EMCs were established in most NY counties to lay the ground work for wetland protection; indeed, it was these early steps that led to the county planning departments we now know.  

So even before an ecosystem management approach on the Sterling-Wolcott was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye, NYers have been thinking about how to do regional conservation.  We must learn how to live in these beautiful places without destroying their ecological underpinnings.  We lose the ecosystems, we lose everything.  And, after visiting and living here in the Finger Lakes for some years, I don’t think a regional agency model is ever going to work here.  A federated watershed model could work within the region, but it will never happen as long as the Governor remains so worried about votes from upstate farm communities and the $ tossed around by the farm lobby.  Not sure it matters, but that is the way it is.

This bears on the Sterling-Wolcott project because the models we’ve tried up to now are not what we’ve been working on. 

The document the author of the email is so, well –  excited about? / angry about? / looking for a mill for her grist about? – is the “Sterling Wolcott Integrated Watershed Action Plan” that articulates a watershed model framed not around a political arrangement of money and power – you know, the kind we have on Owasco.  ( On the Owasco you have all the org charts, lines and arrows, right? People think and talk like it is a kind of a federated model, but it really isn’t.  It is based on the way interests control spaces, not the way people within a unit of government try to. )   In the Sterling-Wolcott approach, the organization of the effort is based on the ways ecosystems define spaces, and how the communities of people there experience  natural wonder and create rich places where they can live, work and play.

I suppose we’ll see if the author’s mis-understanding is widely shared.  I doubt it.  The process wasn’t perfect, but it was a good process.  I’m hopeful.  A lot of good things come out of dramatic starts.

Walt