Land Preservation

What is the effect on land preservation of the recession and the difficulty towns are having balancing their budgets? One answer can be found in Harrison, where the town wants to sell 14 undeveloped acres it owns to raise cash.

Bernards, New Jersey, has voted to buy a conservation easement that includes public access for $5 million.

Even when I lived in the Adirondacks, 30 years ago, Follensby Pond was iconic -- a remote lake with both wilderness and poetry at its heart. Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Louis Agassiz and others of the Boston intellectual elite camped there in 1858, and their host, William James Stillman, underwent some truly mystical experiences, if his book, The Autobiography of a Journalist, is to be believed.

Locally-grown food is all the rage among the cognoscenti. The Journal News has a story today (here) that sketches out the trend and profiles a handful of farms in Westchester.

Wondering just how common deer have gotten in Westchester County? A doe ran onto the field during a high school baseball game in Dobbs Ferry yesterday.

Our friend Jim Nordgren has been named the first executive director in the 95-year history of Bedford Audubon. Jim is a member of Westchester Land Trust's Advisory Board. He and his wife, Peggy, also donated a conservation easement on their land in South Salem, and Jim was instrumental in efforts to buy and protect the Old Field Preserve and the Leon Levy Preserve.

Ryder Farm, one of the oldest farms in the region (it's been in the same family for almost 200 years), sits on the west shore of Peach Lake, just above the North Salem border, in Southeast. Although it's in Putnam County, it's close enough and important enough for us to do what we can to help protect it.

There's good news from Albany for those of us who think protecting working farms should be a state priority.

Christopher O. Ward, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, gets high praise in the New York Times today for knowing how to make tough decisions. We worked with Chris on two projects three or four years ago, when he was the commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.

Yesterday's mail brought the Spring 2008 issue of the Westchester Historian, the journal of the Westchester County Historical Society, and we were excited to see that the issue bore the title, "Stewards of the Land: The Meads of Waccabuc."