January 31, 2020

Land Saved

by Eesha Williams
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An all-volunteer group has protected thousands of acres near Brattleboro in recent years. “We just got a state grant for $116,000,” Carolyn Mayo-Brown told the Valley Post on January 31. She is a member of the Putney Mountain Association and is leading the group's effort to save land in Dummerston, Vermont. Dummerston borders Brattleboro. “With private donations and the grant we now have about $160,000.” The group needs another $40,000 or so to buy 55 acres in Dummerston. Mayo-Brown said she is confident that will happen. Then, within a year or two from now, she said, a trail will run from Prospect Hill to Putney Mountain. The next step, she said, will be to get from Prospect Hill to Black Mountain, both in Dummerston. Once that happens, the trail will go from Brattleboro to Grafton, Vermont, about 25 miles as the crow flies. The group has a web site at www.PutneyMountain.org.

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In the summer of 2019 near Greenfield 17 people were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience to stop logging on publicly owned land. On February 4, 2020 some of the protesters will be in court in Orange, Massachusetts. They are asking the public to come to the court to support them.

More information, and links to the protesters' Facebook pages, are at:

www.restore.org/save-wendell-state-forest

A phone number, e-mail address, and snail mail address are at:

www.restore.org/our-story

In 2019, the New Yorker magazine published an article by Vermont resident Bill McKibben. Europe is buying trees from the USA to burn to make electricity, he wrote. The Republican governor of Massachusetts wants to burn trees for electricity too. McKibben wrote, “Burning wood to generate electricity expels a big puff of carbon into the atmosphere NOW. Eventually, if the forest regrows, that carbon will be sucked back up. But EVENTUALLY will be too long—as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made clear last fall, we’re going to break the back of the climate system in the next few decades. The payback time ranges from 44 years to 104 in forests in the eastern U.S."

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On January 31 at 6 p.m. in Brattleboro there will be a Critical Mass bicycle ride. The ride, which is organized by the environmental group 350 Brattleboro, will start at 134 Elliot Street. The group has a web page at www.facebook.com/350Brattleboro

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