Insights

Dicken Crane was destined to become a conservationist. “I was born into it,” he says. “My great-grandfather’s grandfather came to Dalton to build a paper mill. The original incentive to acquire land was to protect the watershed that provided hydropower to run the mills. My great-grandfather and other family members were interested in the agricultural, forestry, and wildlife benefits that came from protecting the watershed, and that tradition continues four generations later.”

Today Crane owns and manages a thousand acres of forestland and 200 acres of farmland, including Holiday Brook Farm, a diversified farm in Dalton, Massachusetts. He also serves as board chair of the Woodlands Partnership of Northwest Massachusetts, a Regional Conservation Partnership (RCP) encompassing 21 towns in the northwest corner of the state.

“Northwest Massachusetts is a very forested region, and it’s identified as a priority in both the State Forest Action Plan and federally recognized as an important area,” says Lisa Hayden, administrative agent for the Partnership, which began in 2013 as an advisory committee focused on forest conservation. At the time, the U.S. Forest Service was considering expanding Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest into the Commonwealth.

“The region has many towns with more than 50% state-owned land, so it didn’t seem like a good idea to add more state land,” says Crane. “And there was a lot of concern over the viability of the small towns and a decline in the rural, natural resource-based economies. The sustainability was in jeopardy.”

In 2018, the organization became a legal entity under the name “Mohawk Trail Woodlands Partnership.” The New England Forestry Foundation currently serves as both a fiscal sponsor and administrator overseeing daily operations in support of the 30-member board, which includes representatives from municipalities, land trusts, regional planning agencies, economic development groups, UMass, and other organizations.

“When you attend our board meetings, it’s a group of local people who are very familiar with the towns; the job opportunities; the challenges, particularly in rural towns, to provide services—schools, fire services, ambulance services. Those are things that the local community understands in a way that some outside group just wouldn’t know. That’s the benefit of having a board made up of local people who intrinsically understand what’s going on,” says Crane.

In 2022, the board voted unanimously to change its name to the Woodlands Partnership of Northwest Massachusetts in response to concerns that the former name was both inaccurate (the Mohawk historically lived in what is now New York state) and “contributing to making local Indigenous folks seem more invisible.” They also expanded board membership to include Indigenous representation from the Ohketeau Cultural Center, a Nipmuc-centered, multi-tribal organization based in Ashfield. Rhonda Anderson, a Native Alaskan who grew up in northwest Massachusetts and currently serves as Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs, is the first Indigenous representative on the Partnership board.

“Rhonda has been a wonderful addition, helping to raise Indigenous issues of concern,” Hayden says. The Partnership has hosted walks led by Nipmuc leaders who discuss Indigenous knowledge and identify plants that are sacred to local Indigenous peoples alongside foresters who bring a more Western perspective to forest management. “It’s been a really interesting dialogue,” she says.

The Partnership’s mission includes land conservation as well as municipal financial sustainability, rural economic development, and education and outreach goals. “The forest economy is an important part of the Partnership’s mission, making sure we have local jobs that are natural resource-based,” says Hayden.

“Rural sustainability will promote conservation,” Crane adds. “If that landscape is seen and recognized as valuable by the community, there is an incentive to conserve it.”

One of the Partnership’s priorities is to reform the Payments in Lieu of Taxes or PILOT program whereby the State reimburses municipalities for lost tax revenue. The current model, which is based on real estate values, favors more densely populated urban communities over rural ones and does not take into consideration the outdoor recreational opportunities and ecosystem services, such as carbon storage, clean water, and clean air, that forests provide.

“The rest of the state benefits from our lack of development. We have an intact forested landscape that provides all sorts of ecosystem services to the entire region, but it’s sort of at our expense because of the lack of development,” Crane says.

RCPs like the Woodlands Partnership bring communities together to address these types of regional issues. For example, the Forest Service’s Forest Legacy Program, which supports forest conservation, is now available to private landowners throughout the region thanks to the Partnership. And participating towns can apply for grants for everything from planting trees and restoring riparian habitat to improving public safety services.

“We’ve had great participation in a state-run grant program specifically aimed at the Partnership region where towns can apply for up to $25,000 for an annual grant for specific local needs,” Hayden says. “Emergency services is one of those concerns regionally, so we’re trying to help and fill gaps.”

The Partnership is also helping towns and forest managers adapt to climate change, including through a collaboration with the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science, an arm of the Forest Service that helps forest managers develop resilience plans for the long term. The Woodlands Partnership also worked with Mass Audubon and other partners to create The Forest Center.org, a website packed with resources related to climate change, forest stewardship, and planning. It also includes Indigenous perspectives, which are often omitted from such documents.

For Crane, education is the most important benefit of being a member of the Partnership. “There’s a counterintuitive nature to nature,” Crane says. “Getting people to really understand why we’re doing what we’re doing is gonna take a lot of work. As much as it is our responsibility to protect the landscape, it is our responsibility to deal with the problems we have brought to the landscape.”

“I think that’s a strength of regionalism and the RCP concept; land trusts working together to do ever bigger and more impactful things,” Hayden says. “That’s one of the benefits of this Partnership as well. Voices can be amplified when you have your neighboring communities that are facing the same situation speaking up together.”

When it comes to the Staying Connected Initiative, the “think globally, act locally” motto fits.  

An international partnership with more than 70 partner organizations, the Staying Connected Initiative, or SCI, works to conserve and restore landscape connectivity across the roughly 80-million-acre Northern Appalachian-Acadian region of the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. The cross-border coalition, which spans six states and three provinces, involves a breadth of stakeholders, from local communities and land trusts to state and federal wildlife and transportation agencies. The results are adding up, says The Nature Conservancy’s Mikael Cejtin, SCI regional coordinator. 

“We work with a lot of different partners at multiple scales,” he says. “We find as many opportunities as we can to leverage and support the work of organizations that are already out there doing the work on the ground.” While The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is the primary fiscal sponsor and coordinator of SCI, the partnership is supported and co-led by multiple partners who contribute funding and staff time.  

With the devastating impacts of a warming planet and biodiversity loss becoming ever more apparent, individuals can often feel impotent and frustrated. But within a coalition like SCI and the many Regional Conservation Partnerships (RCPs) working at smaller scales, the average person can have the biggest impact by going local, Cejtin says. The actions of both community-based and regional land trusts working with municipal land-use boards all add up to meaningful impacts for wildlife and our future.  

“The challenges are huge. There certainly needs to be more action at the larger scale, but some of the biggest needs and opportunities are at the local level,” he says. “I work on a local conservation commission; so many important decisions are made at that scale. It’s where the rubber meets the road.”  

It can be hard for people to wrap their minds around something as complex as global climate change. “It is important and usually easier to engage people around what matters to them locally,” Cejtin says. Yet SCI’s goal is also to “inspire communities to see themselves as part of a bigger network and vision.” One step above conservation commissions and below the much larger SCI, RCPs help local boards and land trusts coordinate their activities for wider impact.  

The Berkshire Wildlife Linkage Partnership, for example, covers the Green Mountains to Hudson Highlands Linkage, an SCI priority linkage area for continental-scale connectivity for one of the most complex and varied habitats in southern New England. This interstate, interconnected, and sparsely developed region is “an irreplaceable link in the Appalachian Mountain chain of the Eastern United States,” according to TNC’s website. SCI partners have been working with municipalities and regional planning organizations within the Berkshire Wildlife Linkage Partnership to obtain competitive federal funding to repair and replace undersized culverts so that both water and wildlife can better pass safely.  

Cejtin says these are long term cost-saving measures for communities. “People see the storms getting worse; they see all the flooding happening. We need to speak the language of economics and insurance.”   

It is vital for conservationists to show communities that conservation can help solve the real-world problems they are facing. “Intact forests provide free water purification, free air conditioning, and downstream protection from flooding and erosion,” Cejtin says. Rural communities across the region also depend on unfragmented forests and connected habitat for hunting, fishing, forestry, and outdoor recreation-based tourism.  

SCI partners also seek to help fulfill “30X30” policy commitments to protect and steward 30% of lands and waters by the year 2030 at different scales and in different landscapes. Cejtin says that securing connected networks of habitat and protected areas is critical for biodiversity conservation and climate adaptation in urban to rural landscapes, and that the urgency to act is now. Heeding their own call to action, this past June, SCI and its partners convened a landscape connectivity “summit” that drew high-level attention and many enthusiastic attendees.  

While some species like moose and lynx need big, wild landscapes to survive, many other species, like turtles and salamanders, require habitat connections on a smaller scale and some wildlife can travel through more developed areas. “We need connected landscapes on multiple scales,” says Cejtin. “Even if you live in New Haven, Conn., your forests ultimately connect to these linkages. You’re still contributing to this larger vision. The beauty of connectivity is that it naturally makes you think of how your land connects with the neighbor’s land, the neighboring town’s land, and so on. Everything that everyone’s doing everywhere does make a difference.”  

The SCI website provides resources to assist its member RCPs and others, including a library, technical and scientific documents, sample zoning language, story maps, and case studies featuring examples of completed partner projects to enhance connectivity at both local and regional scales.  

For more information about the Staying Connected Initiative, contact Mikael Cejtin at mikael.cejtin@tnc.org.