This month, Mass Audubon is celebrating the official acquisition of a new, nearly 900-acre piece of land in Becket, Mass. The former site of the Berkshires Fishing Club is now the Palmer Brook Wildlife Sanctuary, and it will join the more than 40,000 acres already protected by the statewide nonprofit as its 113th property.
Mass Audubon President and CEO David O'Neill discussed how this fits into the organization's conservation goals with Berkshire Bureau Chief Josh Landes.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
O'Neill: Our principal goal in addressing biodiversity is to protect the habitats that are critical for critters and plants, and we're doing that through a very ambitious land conservation strategy.
Several years ago, our average annual land conservation acreage was around 650 acres. Today, we've quadrupled that rate of land conservation with a focus on protecting lands that are both rich in biodiversity, based on analysis that's been done by the state, as well as places that are rich in carbon. That is, forests that sequester a great deal of carbon, and there's a tremendous amount of overlap between those two goals in terms of the landscapes that we're looking to protect, and a lot of that rests in the Berkshires in the western portion of Massachusetts. So a lot of our land conservation work is west of the Connecticut River.
Landes: Mass Audubon, of course, recently made an acquisition in Berkshire County. Tell us about this acquisition, what it means for Mass Audubon, and how it's going to support biodiversity in Berkshire County.
O'Neill: It's the Palmer Brook Wildlife Sanctuary in Beckett. It's an 850-acre parcel of land, which is an extraordinary parcel of land, rich in biodiversity, incredible forest system. There's a lake that's completely surrounded by protected land, which is very rare in the Berkshires, and it's connected, importantly, to roughly 23,000 acres of other protected land, creating this incredible migratory corridor for wildlife that can adapt to climate change over time, but that entire corridor is also very rich in biodiversity. So, we're putting an important link in a chain of protected lands that will protect biodiversity now and well into the future.
Landes: As far as the accessibility issue, Beckett is famously not exactly on most bus routes. How does that factor into the accessibility goal of Mass Audubon?
O'Neill: Well, in in this case, Beckett is actually relatively close to our flagship sanctuary, Pleasant Valley in Lenox, about a 30-minute drive. One of the reasons why we thought this would be a great asset for Mass Audubon is that we can connect our educators from Pleasant Valley to Beckett in a reasonable commute, as well as have solid property management and stewardship of these lands, so that we're achieving our ecological objectives.
The access goal around Beckett is that we hope to create a trail network, including an all-person trail, so people with disabilities have the ability to get out into the natural world.
We'd like to see a trail go all the way around this lake. It'll be about a three-mile trail for people to get out into the outdoors and experience nature, and then we'll have accessible programming, including our canoe trips that are accessible for people with disabilities.
It is also a hotbed right down the street from Jacob's Pillow for tourism, particularly in the summer months. So, we hope to capture folks that are out and enjoying the Berkshires during those months where you have a lot of activity.
Landes: Let's put this all in context for the broader Mass Audubon mission and how this acreage in Beckett could impact this broader goal, how do you explain to folks in the sort of Russian nesting doll of the ecological system how this property is going to be a part of this this larger endeavor?
O'Neill: 850 acres, first of all, is a massive parcel of land in Massachusetts these days, one of the largest unprotected parcels of land before we purchased it, and as such, size matters here. The larger the parcel, the greater the ecological impact, and the fact that it's connected to all of these other natural lands just makes it that much more valuable in terms of addressing the challenges that I've outlined.
In terms of how this nests within the overall Mass Audubon strategy, our goal, and we have mapped out every single parcel of land in Massachusetts, to identify those parcels that are rich in biodiversity and rich in carbon, and this parcel is very much at the top of that list, so our ability to protect the lands that are unprotected, but that are rich in biodiversity, rich in carbon, is a key objective of the organization.
We're not doing it alone. We are partnering with lots of different organizations. In the case of the Palmer Brook Wildlife Sanctuary, our partners included the Beckett Land Trust and the Berkshire Natural Resources Council. So, all of our work is done in partnership with others, and that partnership includes, not only us purchasing land, but us assisting other organizations to purchase land.
Over the course of the last couple of years, we've protected 14,000 acres of lands that meet our goals for biodiversity and carbon, and that's by providing funding to other organizations to purchase land and to store those lands, or for us to acquire those lands, or for us to put land under a conservation restriction where the landowner continues to live on that property, but there's a restriction not to develop it in perpetuity.
So, the combination of these factors of us purchasing land and partnering with others takes our strategy to scale, and scale is really important. If we try to do this on our own, we wouldn't be able to achieve the objectives that we have.
