100 Defend Camp

In Northampton on October 7 about 100 people attended a rally to protest police efforts to force people out of their campsites in a city-owned forest. “I issued the trespass order,” Alan Wolf told the Valley Post on October 9. He is the mayor's “chief of staff.”

Megan McDonough runs the group Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity. On October 9, she emailed the Valley Post a copy of an email she sent the mayor on October 3. The full email reads, “I understand that an encampment of the unhoused has moved on to the land designated for affordable housing at Cooke Ave. Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity is deeply appreciative to have been selected as the developer for four permanently affordable homes on this site. Prior to the encampment I have been in touch with the planning department about taking the steps necessary to transfer title of the land to Habitat. Habitat is still eager to move forward with the project, but we would advocate for adjusting our timeline if more time is needed to assist the people living in the encampment. I understand that case management services have been initiated but it may take time due to a shortage of shelter beds and supportive housing options. Our goal is housing people, and displacing people to house other people is not what we want.”

Megan McDonough's email to Northampton's mayor continues, “I will defer to the city about when/whether or not, you need to evict the people in the encampment from your land, but please do not use our partnership as the impetus for removal. We can be flexible. We stand ready to build permanent affordable housing when the time is right.”

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On October 1, the Vermont-based group Standing Trees posted on its Facebook page, "Over the past century, Vermont's Worcester Range benefited from a textbook case of accidental rewilding and benign neglect. Unlike heavily-logged private lands nearby, the (17,503 acre) CC Putnam State Forest and (the approximately 700 acre) Elmore State Park are islands of biodiversity and reservoirs of clean, cold water. Today, this remarkable and unfinished story of forest recovery comes to a pause with a shortsighted management plan that fails to rise up to the climate and extinction crises facing Vermont."

In December 2022, a spokesperson for the USDA told the Valley Post that his agency was allowing logging in the part of Green Mountain National Forest that is in the same county as Brattleboro. On November 12, 2022 about 110 people attended a rally to stop logging in Green Mountain National Forest. Standing Trees was one of the groups that organized the rally. The rally was in Rochester, Vermont, about 70 miles north-northwest of Brattleboro.

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