time

Early in my consulting career, I was asked to conduct an endangered species evaluation at a site in north-central Massachusetts. It was a complex site, about 500 acres of mostly spruce-fir forest with a variety of wetland types and small streams disappearing and re-appearing in the sandy soil. With my then-colleague Christine Ross, we spent about three days out on the site before returning to a Boston office to write up the results.

On the first of those three early spring field days, we were given a guided tour of the site by a forester who had years of local experience, who had been caring for that particular site for a long time. He knew every inch of the land, cared about it deeply. He maintained a professional attitude, never expressed an opinion on the proposed development of the site, but it must have pained him. Although he'd overseen selective cutting of the site, it had been done so lightly that it was almost impossible to tell.

That development never happened. It was a bad idea, poorly thought out, and it fell apart under the weight of economic feasibility. The fact that we'd found evidence of a couple of sensitive species on the site never really had a chance to factor into the decision.

But over those three days walking a mature forest, I'd repeatedly stepped over remnants of old stone walls. Clearly, much of this site had once been farmland. Because of the wet and rocky soil it had quickly been abandoned for more fertile places. Over the intervening 200 or maybe 300 years, it had recovered quite nicely. The vernal pools were so full of wood frog and spotted salamander egg masses that it seemed almost possible to walk across the pond on them. It was a magical place.

The project site had a little more history behind it than most of the U.S., or at least more history written down, more than we know about those other places. While there we'd stayed in a revolutionary war era hotel just across the state line in New Hampshire, and other things of that age were fairly common in the neighborhood.

The project site had come full circle. The forest had been cut, the land had been tilled, and abandoned. The forest had grown back. Maybe not the same as the original forest, but diverse in a way that reflected the ecological process in play at the time of regeneration, and a few fairly random accidents of seed bank and land management.

In most of the U.S. we're still looking at a much shorter time cycle. But even in my own lifetime, I've seen change. Places that in my childhood were buckthorn thickets in former farm fields now have large trees beginning to shade out the shrubs. Only weeks ago, I drove by a place that had once been so dense, it was impossible to see into. Now, I could walk through it without difficulty.

Often these changed places aren't the same as what was once there, what they would be with fire management. But my point is that change is never ending. Looking at any snapshot of time is misleading, especially when it's done within the context of a human lifetime.

When I first became involved in habitat restoration, a friend who thought in terms of 100 years impressed me as a visionary. Today I understand that we need to be thinking over timescales much longer than that.