At the end of this month I will retire from my position as Vice President of Policy & Reservation Stewardship at the Forest Society.
Your body and mind have a way of letting you know when the right time comes to think about retirement. I started getting the signals a couple of years ago, and told then President/Forester Jane Difley that I’d like to target April 30, 2020. Last fall, when Jack Savage took over as President, I re-affirmed my plan with him. Little did I know then that a global pandemic would ease me out of my office at the Conservation Center before I was ready to leave voluntarily!
I’ve really enjoyed both hats that I’ve worn at the Society over the past 15 years. Our public policy advocacy has helped to make New Hampshire a better place. It’s even given a new life to the color orange. The stewardship of our 57,000 acres of forest land has helped set a standard that will make New Hampshire forests more resilient over time. Stewardship, the care and feeding of lands the Forest Society has conserved, offers opportunities and challenges. Forever.
We are blessed at the Forest Society to have an exceptional staff, an incredibly committed group of volunteers — including a very talented Board of Trustees, and a very engaged group of members and donors — all of whom care deeply about the organization and its work. The relationships I have shared with each of you won’t end with my retirement, even though my responsibilities, my office and my phone extension at the Conservation Center will.
And I won’t be gone entirely. I’ve agreed to stay on in a part-time capacity to help the Forest Society manage its rebuilding project at The Rocks, in Bethlehem, the project which we refer to now as “Forest Society North.” Our goal with Forest Society North is to expand our organizational capacity to provide land conservation and forest stewardship services north of the notches, to create new public educational and recreational uses of the land and facilities at The Rocks, and to sustain our commitment to the continued success of the Christmas Tree Farm, the maple sugaring museum and maple programs known as “The Maple Experience.”
As our recent experiences with the corona virus have reminded us, human societies and economies rely on the natural world as a foundation. We all have an interest in keeping the foundation strong. Over the past 50 years we as a nation have made great strides in natural resource conservation. We need to protect these assets, and the significant investments we’ve made as a nation in reclaiming them.
The greatest global environmental challenge of our time remains ahead of us — successfully balancing the man-made imbalances that exist within our global climate. Time is of the essence. We’ve socially and politically distanced ourselves from the reality of climate change long enough. As with the COVID-19 pandemic, with climate change we are all in this together. We need to tackle it together. Tackling climate change may require collaborative, disruptive adjustments to our daily lives, similar to the scale of adjustments that COVID-19 has asked of us. I know there are some who say it’s too late on climate. I am more optimistic. That foundation the natural world provides is amazingly resilient, even forgiving. But there are limits. We should not allow further inaction to test these limits. Keeping forests as forests will help, but much more needs to be done.
I am looking forward to spending more time (after May 4) with my family, and particularly my 17-month old granddaughter Ainsley. I also hope to spend more time at a family seasonal camp in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont (I know, but NH is where my heart is), and do some sailing on Lake Memphremagog. I probably won’t be able to fully suppress the advocacy gene or the stewardship gene in retirement, but as I step away please know that there are very talented people who I encourage you to reach out to. On policy issues please talk with Public Policy Manager Matt Leahy; on forestry issues please talk with Managing Forester Wendy Weisiger; on other reservation stewardship issues please talk with Vice President for Conservation Brian Hotz. And if you are looking for guidance on who the right person is to reach out to on any issue please call on Reservation Stewardship & Policy Coordinator Rebecca Darman.
Thank you all for an incredible ride.