Well-watered farmland and forest like the Valley's is becoming rarer and rarer in the U.S. and the world. Developers and even governments—China's is one example—are buying agricultural land in other countries—a practice which, if not controlled, may endanger the food security of the nations in which that land is located. In Massachusetts, open land is developed at a rate of 16,000 acres a year.
A large part of Western Massachusetts' charm comes from its wooded mountains, scenic forests and the winding tree-lined riverscape of the Connecticut. Other rivers—the pastoral Deerfield as it gleams along Rte. 2 and the Westfield, a trout stream famous well beyond Massachusetts' borders—contribute to the wellbeing as well as the beauty of the area.
Everyone enjoys eating food produced locally; with drought ravaging California and other farming states, that food may be more than a luxury someday. And as the supply of clean water in the world dwindles, the preservation of watersheds is urgent. The argument pitting environment against economy, especially as regards water, is false at its core: there is no economy without water and well-watered, unpolluted growing land.
The conflict between the impulse to preserve open land and the impulse on the parts of investors and developers to build it out has only been chilled temporarily by the financial crash, and even now is heating up again, given impetus by the wish of cash-strapped towns to build their tax bases. A bill now before the state Legislature, sponsored by state Rep. Cheryl Coakley-Rivera of Springfield and Sen. Steve Buoniconti of West Springfield, would go far toward undermining the Endangered Species Act as an instrument for protecting land from development.
The Valley, on the other hand, has many groups that have been ahead of the curve in preserving land. If you enjoy the view to the north over the farmlands of Hadley as you cross the Coolidge Bridge from Northampton, for example, you may not know that you have the Kestrel Trust to thank for working to ensure that you will go on enjoying it far into the future.
Since its founding in 1970, the Kestrel Trust has used state money, local money such as Community Preservation Act funds, and private donations of money and land to protect thousands of acres in the area between South Hadley and Sunderland. Last year alone (2008-2009) it helped guide 614 acres into agricultural preservation or other conservation programs: 100 acres by the Connecticut River in North Hadley, 138 acres of woods in Pelham, 57 acres in Belchertown, 28 acres in Lawrence Swamp (part of the watershed that serves Amherst) and 291 acres in Granby and Hadley, including two farms in Hadley's Great Meadow.
The Kestrel Trust has been concentrating for some time now on the Great Meadow, whose history as well as beauty makes it distinctive. It recently came to the attention of the New York City-based World Monuments Fund, which notes that it was laid out by seventeenth-century settlers in "an arrangement of slender, unfenced, elongated land parcels bounded by the river" which "has endured since the time of the allotments to original settlers… " Most such systems in New England, the group notes, "had disappeared by the 18th century."
Often a quiet organization, the Trust has organized a public event to support its farmland preservation efforts: on Sunday, October 18, it will hold a 5K run or two-mile walk through Hadley's Great Meadow (for more information about this and other Kestrel Trust projects, check www.kestreltrust.org).
