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Faces of the Forest |
| "I've always thought forests can be beautiful as well as productive economically." |
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Brendan Whittaker: Living Through the Land
By Greg Coyle
Reverend Brendan “Bren” Whittaker, Jr., has spent the majority of his 76 years reading the future. Unlike the side-alley clairvoyant, however, he does not use tea leaves, and the only palm lines he may know how to decipher are those chewed out by mice on a moose antler. The future Whittaker reads is written on the landscape, and it is less a certainty than a suggestion of distant potential. As a forester, both at home and in the public eye; as the longest-serving Secretary of Environment in the state of Vermont; as an Episcopalian minister to his parish; and as a hoping-to-be great-grandfather, Brendan Whittaker has learned to see the present in terms of generations.
“It’s been said, and this is true, that no forester lives longer than the rotation age of his shortest-lived species,” he says. |
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And taking a day’s walk around the 70-acre woodland that Bren and his wife, Dorothy, and their three children have owned and cared for since 1959, this point is demonstrated clearly. “There are four or five methods of reproducing a forest. First, you do improvement cuts.” In other words, cut out the low-quality trees to make room for the good ones to grow. Not until improvement cuts are completed should you begin removing quality timber.
“We’ve just completed our improvement cuts,” he says. “It took us 50 years, but I’m proud of every tree in this forest.” Quickly, he adds that pride is the worst of all sins. “But, please, pride with me in just this one thing.”
It’s hot—abnormally hot for May—and as Bren leads the way through winding forest roads deeper into his property near West Mountain in Brunswick, VT, a dozen or so students from Lake Forest College in Chicago swat away at the incessant swarm of black flies that attend our every step along the tour. Glen Adelson, Director of Environmental Studies at Lake Forest, has been bringing students of his biodiversity class to the Whittaker forest for seventeen years—he dedicated the textbook for the class to Dorothy and Bren.
“The love that Bren holds for his land is deep and complex,” Adelson wrote, “…hearing him share the many ways in which he loves and uses its biodiversity, each of us gains new insight into our own values and the worth of biodiversity.” |
| The Making of a Forester |
| Born in Boston in 1934, Bren graduated from forestry school at UMass-Amherst
in 1956, then spent two years in the Army during which he was stationed in
Germany. There he saw first hand the positive impact well-planned forestry can
deliver. “I love the practice of silviculture,” he says. “Its roots from Germany,
France, Switzerland—the way of treating the forest well. I’ve always thought forests can be beautiful as well as productive economically." |
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"Sin...is blindness
to what's going on...
denial." |
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In 1959 Bren took the job of Essex County Forester, and he and his family moved to Brunswick. They bought the land to which their lives have paid tribute, quite simply, because there were no homes for rent. When the family moved to Cambridge in 1961 so that Bren could earn his graduate degree in theology, the diocese of New Hampshire dissuaded him from selling the land by loaning him the money to make payments on the house—for three years.
At graduate school, Bren wrote his master’s thesis entitled “The Church and the Conservation Movement in the United States.” In the introduction, he wrote: |
| “It has long been my belief that Christianity has resources and insights into good conservation which it has seldom offered for use. Similarly, it has been apparent to me that the deep conviction and learning of the great American conservationists have never been properly understood by the Church, and little attempt has been made to deal with these insights as part of the truth about the world in which we live.” |
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| This is a powerful statement coming from an aspiring minister—more powerful still when considered with Bren’s definition of sin. “My definition is, in a biblical sense, blindness to what’s going on…denial.” |
Managing Forests From Afar
Such conviction and dedication was not lost on those Bren worked with. Though he only worked for the Vermont state government for two years before leaving his post as county forester, the Davis administration turned to him when they needed someone to chair the first-ever environmental commission required by the passage of Act 250. When Tom Salmon moved into the Governor’s office in 1973, Whittaker was appointed to publish the newsletter “Environmental Mission” for the fledgling Agency of Environmental Conservation. |
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"To me, the action of the 501(c)3s buying easements, the big land purchases, has been the biggest thing in my lifetime, professionally." |
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Just four years later, under Governor Dick Snelling, Bren was tapped to become the third Secretary of the Agency. He remained in the post for seven years, longer than any Secretary before or since.
Despite his lengthy term in charge of Vermont’s natural resources, the conservation role Whittaker recalls navigating through most vividly was served after he was out of office: on the Northern Forest Lands Council (NFLC), the task force assigned to determine what to do about the global restructuring of the timber industry.
“I was [the representative] for the environmental group appointed from Vermont. During those years, the high gear of the NFLC, we had what we called the North Country Mafia—three of us—we used to kid we were the only ones who really lived in the Northern Forest. The rest were all from Augusta, or Concord, or Montpelier—the state officials.
“Those were good times. I’ll never forget the Boston listening session. I thought there’d be all kinds of suburban environmentalists—fine; great; glad to have ‘em—and there were. But also, it was very touching, people who lived in the Boston area—some of them obviously not well-off—would come and say ‘Please, our grandparents came from Maine during the Depression. There’s still family land up there. We still want to go back some day. Please do what you can to save the Northern Forest.’ Very touching.”
“I think the best we can say for the Council, and I’m very proud to have been a part of it, was the [groundwork] for the initial machinery that started things, instead of us just being caught flat-footed with huge sales, not knowing what to do and wringing our hands.”
The actual work was grueling: “Late-night meetings and caucuses in motel corner lobbies; we really had to thrash things out.”
“I have to say that the result was a lot of protected land. From Tug Hill [NY] through Vermont and Maine, I think over two million acres now have been protected in some form.”
Until the 1990s, the use of conservation easements had largely been restricted to farmland. “[The] first ever was in Nash Stream. Forty-thousand acres got dumped on the market and there was a huge auction—people really scrambled. To me, the action of the 501(c)3s buying easements, the big land purchases, has been the biggest thing in my lifetime, professionally. Just to see that. That’s when I began to feel things were changing.” |
Changing Habits in a Changing World
But changes come slowly. As paper companies prepared to sell their lands, they began high-grading the forests, doing “liquidation cuts” that removed all but the worthless trees.
“Several of us got very disgusted with American forestry. It’s been a mixed profession. [At that point] I think it had sold out. They were treating the forest as just machinery. ” |
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"We do not have to wreck the environment in order to make a living, and in fact if we do, the economy is going to continue to go down." |
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Ross Morgan, a professor at Sterling College in Craftsbury, invited Whittaker on as a founding member of the Forest Guild, an organization of foresters dedicated to sustainable practices. Today, there are more than 1,000 members nationwide. “The first obligation of a forester—the common thing, wherever they are—is a care for the land and the forest first. It sounds idealistic and it is, but that’s what we believe in.”
Climate change, invasive exotics like the emerald ash borer, economic uncertainty—all cause worry for conservation of the natural environment in Bren’s mind. “We’ve said since the 90’s that over this whole north country, the Northern Forest, is a question mark. The question is where do we go from here? We genuinely don’t know if it’s going to be a tourist economy, small-scale wood, huge-scale wind and wood energy; I think there’s a role for all. I’m excited about the possibility of wood as a renewable fuel, but it would have to be done right. It’s a crime to take an eight- or ten-inch yellow birch and chip it into fuel chips.
“Another pressing problem is the human one: how do our people in this question-mark land make a living in order to be here? The cost of money militates short-term management. It’s been pointed out that particularly for longer rotations [of timber harvests], the long-term owner probably has to be government. Individuals can’t afford it.”
As supporting evidence, Bren offers examples from the founding fathers of forestry and conservation: “In Europe, the foresters know [their] lands, have been on them for generations. In Switzerland the canton (village) owns them. They’re going to be there in perpetuity. We do not have to wreck the environment in order to make a living, and in fact if we do, the economy is going to continue to go down. With America being so jumpy—we move, we sell, we speculate—who can do forestry?”
“All the Tea Party stuff—no taxes, no government—it’s not very realistic when it comes down to what actually happens in real life.”
Lately, in a time which he describes as having “a politically broken system”, Bren has stopped listening to the news. “I refuse to listen to VPR. You feel so frustrated. There’s nothing you can do.”
But, frustrations aside, Bren is incredibly active. Between leading tours of his forest and working his farm with his wife, Bren continues as a consultant for the Open Space Institute, an organization funded by the Doris Duke Foundation to conserve land in the Northern Forest. He works in a similar capacity for the Montpelier-based Trust for Public Lands. “They want my eyes and ears for local input,” he says.
Most recently, Bren was appointed to a national USDA committee for Vermont, the Farm Service Administration Committee. “I was put on because of my forestry background because some of the new programs have to do with wood energy on farms. What I found out is it plunged right into the heart of the nation’s dairy crisis. The fear is wholesale diminishment of dairy in Vermont—it’d be tragic. So we meet once a month, and do what we can.”
And that sums up Bren’s long-term optimism for conservation in America. “The right path,” he says, “is to do what we can. Because you can do something.”
Directive
Back in the woods along the forest road the students have stopped and settled cross-legged on rocks protruding from a shallow dip in the trail. Bren, his faded blue minister’s shirt buttoned only at the bottom to avoid overheating, explains that the red-and-white pine plantation in which they sit was planted 49 years ago and had been thinned four times. The rocks on which the students sit, he reveals, are all that remains of the foundation to a farmhouse that once sat in an open field. He describes the likely Depression-era diet of salted suckers caught from Dennis Stream, and dandelion greens, gathered right there in the field, which the long-departed family likely gleaned from the land in order to survive.
He then opens a sheaf of folded papers pulled from his trouser pocket and begins to read the poem Directive by Robert Frost: |
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town…
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. |
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