A quiet little movement is building in forests and fields across the country, as landowners join hands to protect wildlife. 

By David Dobbs

I stumbled across my first wildlife cooperative when an acquaintance invited me to see what he and some neighbors were doing with their woodlands. David Clarkson is a retired math teacher and former state legislator who owns 230 acres of forests and fields near Newfane, in southeastern Vermont. Starting in the late 1980s, he convinced several dozen owners of adjoining properties to manage their land together for the benefit of wildlife. Most of his neighbors occasionally cut trees to help pay property taxes or feed the woodstove. They figured if they coordinated their cuts, and activities such as mowing hayfields and cultivating berry patches, they could do a lot for the animals in their neck of the woods.

So with help from foresters and wildlife biologists, they mapped their lands to identify important wildlife habitat, then started working to enrich it. They let raspberries, pin cherries, gray birches, and poplars grow at field borders to provide cover and food for deer, songbirds, woodcocks, and grouse. They left broad stands of spruce, fir, and hardwoods for such reclusive species as black bears, fishers, thrushes, and winter wrens. And when they cut trees they did so selectively, staggering harvests across space and time to mimic natural disturbances. There are now 50 members of the Wildlife Habitat Improvement Group (WHIG), including local landowner and economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and their 7,000 acres function much like a big reserve.

It's a stunning accomplishment. In an age when many landowners use property rights to ride roughshod over the environment, these Vermonters are using their rights to improve it--and they're still getting economic use from their land. I found scores of similar efforts in the Northeast alone. Many were launched by people who, like Clarkson, are members of Coverts, a landowner-education and habitat-improvement group funded by the Ruffed Grouse Society. (Coverts are the thickets grouse and other wildlife use for cover.) Other efforts were started by land trusts, conservation commissions, or neighbors who just stumbled on the idea. Some span 10 or 20 acres, others hundreds, and a few, like Clarkson's, whole watersheds. 

The movement toward cross-boundary management, as it's sometimes called, is so decentralized that it's difficult to say how much is going on nationally, but Vermont is the clear leader. Groups here have protected some 110,000 acres in the past decade--more than Vermont has added to its public lands in the same period. (The state owns 339,000 acres of protected land.) Unlike public-land managers, wildlife cooperatives use no tax money and have created no social or political discord. As George Weir, a forester who works with WHIG, puts it, "What we're seeing here is the beginning of sustainable community forestry."

So why do so few environmental groups take the movement seriously? Many activists seem to see wildlife cooperatives as amusing but inconsequential: amateur sideshows to "real" conservation initiatives such as bioreserves, wilderness areas, and land-use regulations. They warn that voluntary arrangements will never work because they're so decentralized. They fear that cooperatives are unreliable because they're not "permanent."

Horsefeathers. The voluntary nature of this movement is not its weakness but its strength. It's the fact that these people aren't clear-cutting today, despite enormous economic pressure to do so, that makes the movement so significant. At a time when habitat needs and landowner interests often seem irreconcilable, we should rejoice to see owners taking care of their land not to meet some legal requirement but to express their own values.

Consider Clarkson's neighbor Ora Mae Knapp, whose land has been in her husband's family since 1830. Knapp has always looked to the woods for her livelihood. Her father owned a sawmill, her husband marked timber, and she once picked "fancy ferns" for florist shops. In her 70s now, widowed 15 years, Knapp lives determinedly alone in an old house in the woods. By most Americans' standards, she's poor. Yet she forgoes the money a heavy harvest would bring. "I've seen too much of people who think they know how to lumber, but when they get through with the land it might as well be a dooryard," says Knapp. "We don't need any more of that." 

For more information write Farley Brown, Vermont Coverts, P.O. Box 83, Craftsbury Common, VT 05827, or call 802-586-2250.