“Hail Winooski River! Hail Mad River! Hail Middlebury River! Hail Lake Champlain!” With this rousing tribute, Caring for Our Home Grounds: A Commons Conservation Congress for Vermont’s Center-West Ecoregion, sprang to life on November 2, 2019. After leading the eighty-plus participants in a salute to the four waterways that bound Vermont’s Center-West Ecoregion, Vermont Family Forests Executive Director David Brynn …
Our Commons Conservation Congress painting illustrates an inconvenient truth about Vermont’s beautiful landscape. Read more>
More than 20 VFF landowners gathered for lively conversation and wood-fired pizza. Read about it!>
by Sandra Murphy Last Thursday, among the stream of emails that flowed through the Vermont Family Forests email box was a newsletter from the Vermont Department of Forests Parks and Recreation. Without fanfare, the newsletter’s first item began, “There has been a new detection of Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) in Bristol, Vermont.” I wasn’t prepared for the blow of those words. …
A Legacy Visit from Quebec Conservationists by David Brynn Vermont Family Forests recently had the distinct honor to host a group of forest conservationists from the University of Quebec Montreal (UQAM). Under the leadership of Dr. Christian Messier, these bright young people from across the border and planet are looking at new relationships with forests. A focus of their work …
Guest blog by Jane Dorney Vermont Master Naturalists from the Bristol Five Towns area visited the Wells Farm recently as part of an all-day field trip. The day’s goal was to explore the human use of the local landscape over the last 250 years, and how that was tied to the natural landscape. As a classic Vermont hill farm with its old …
At a time when logging equipment is getting bigger and Vermont’s private forests are getting smaller, it’s increasingly challenging for family forest owners to carry out light-on-the-land forest practices related to tree harvesting. It’s our aim at Vermont Family Forests to help explore possibilities that help landowners engage in mutually beneficial relationship with their forests. In March, we put our …
“I have learned how dangerous our ignorance of the commons is. It simply enables the private plunder of our common wealth…. The commons is essentially a parallel economy and social order that quietly but confidently affirms that another world is possible. And more: we can build it ourselves, now.” — David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner Here in …
A Commons Conservation Congress for Vermont’s Center-West Ecoregion
November 2, 2019, 8:30am – 1:00pm
Details and Registration>
Last week, we won the jackpot. Well, more specifically, our conservation forester, Kathleen Stutzman, did. The prize? A 12,000-pound portable logging bridge. Kathleen offered her weighty prize to Vermont Family Forests, and we, in turn, gave it to local forest conservation contractor, Matt Atkins, who will use it for his log forwarding projects in local forests. To understand how this …
