Sudbury Valley TrusteesConservation, Collaboration, and Community since 1953

Concord’s Natural Resources Commission hosts a Conservation Coffee, a breakfast gathering open to the public. Each monthly session follows a regular format. After announcements and updates from the leader, people take turns introducing themselves and speaking to any topic they choose. As the invisible spotlight works its way around the room, people raise a broad variety of subjects. Recycling. Water conservation. The management of community gardens. Litter.

Yesterday, walking in a residential neighborhood near the Assabet River, I heard a bird singing. Regrettably, I lack the gift for recognizing every bird call. But I guessed the identity of this musician, when I remembered that the season was autumn. Mornings have been quiet—the last bird I’d heard was an owl.

Schoolchildren know that woody plants store energy in their roots. As the new growing season opens, trees pulled these reserves up their trunks, fueling the revival of every branch and twig. Similarly, before they were dammed, rivers and streams—trees of water—drew fish from the ocean. En route to and from spawning in freshwater, many fish died inland, nourishing terrestrial food webs.

If protection of Massachusetts’ natural resources were our only value, I suppose we’d all move out, leaving coyotes and fishers in charge of the Bay State. But in all likelihood people will stick around and we will continue trying to preserve decent habitat for the whole variety of life forms: winged, two-legged, four-legged, green-leaved, and the eccentric menagerie of creatures who creep, slither, or swim.

At our house, where winter precipitation is concerned, I do most of the heavy lifting. While shoveling snow I sometimes muse that anyone who thinks we don’t have enough water can’t be hoisting much of it. From the fluffy cold stuff to gravity-loving rained-on leaden slush, every kind of precipitation falls here in quantity. How could such a well-watered state run dry?

Route 2 is being undermined by our state’s road builders, for the benefit of wildlife. At night, when traffic is the lightest, MassHighways is installing four concrete tunnels with the purpose of keeping our ecosystem stitched together. The culverts will allow fishers, bobcats, and other animals safe passage across this busy, deadly, highway.

Or so we hope.

Part of Framingham has kept its rural character because of farmers such as the Hanson family, who sell their produce in a stand on Nixon Road, and Stearns Farm Community Supported Agriculture on Edmands Road, where I enjoyed a recent visit. Starting from the farm shed to gather vegetables, I headed the wrong way, as I am apt to do, and wandered among rainbow beds of flowers until a helpful volunteer delivered me to the proper row and set me to work picking, of all things, purple green beans.

In June of 1971 two friends and I drove from Illinois straight through to Boston, to begin the post-college chapters of our lives. It was daylight by the time we picked up the Mass Pike. I was surprised at how far one end of the state was from the other—Midwestern pupils looking at a U.S. map assume that any state too small to hold its name must be teensy, and New England states are labeled in the blue Atlantic.