Sun streams under the evening clouds, lighting us up on Raven Ridge. We are glowing, and not from exertion. Eighteen Vermont Master Naturalists just spent five hours hiking a quarter of a mile with me. We smelled the sharp wintergreen scent of black birch sap, rubbed the sulfur yellow buds of a bitternut hickory and gazed at its canker-strewn branches, and we ate bright red American basswood buds (picture a mouse in a motorcycle helmet!) and felt the slippery mucilaginous goo in our mouths. It is Superbowl Sunday or, if you prefer, just another Sunday in the woods chilling with winter trees.
Creating the Vermont Master Naturalist Program is a dream come true. VMN is fertile ground for teaching the layer cake approach and, best of all, it allows me to work with ̽̽ Field Naturalist and Ecological Planning graduates. FNEP alumni Sean Beckett, Sophie Mazowita, and Monica Przyperhart head VMN Chapters in Montpelier, Cambridge, and Middlebury areas. Alumni also lead field days on natural communities, pollinators, and winter tracking and star in VMN films about wildlife habitat and vernal pools.
Nationally, most Master Naturalist programs focus on plants and animals – the charismatic living pieces of the landscape. VMN diverges by building a framework from the ground up, giving natural communities a solid geologic foundation. Besides its holistic approach, VMN is unique in scale. Other master naturalist programs are regional, state-wide or, in one case, national. The Vermont Master Naturalist program is by nature local.
It’s as if the question of VMN’s scale was decided by men sitting around an oak table in Massachusetts 250 years ago, gridding off six-mile-by-six-mile squares on a Vermont map. Those squares became Vermont towns. The founders’ experiences with towns in southern New England taught them that six miles by six miles was a magic number. That distance allowed farmers (and eight out of ten Vermont settlers would be farmers) to travel from anywhere in the town by horse or by foot to the center village, conduct their business, and get home again in time to milk the cows. Center villages by charter had a church (or two or three), a green for military drills, a post office, a store, and often later additions like a pound for loose pigs. Vermonters of European descent embraced their towns and have hung on tightly ever since.
It turns out that telling the story of Vermont in a six-mile-by-six-mile-square area is a piece of cake. All you need are bedrock outcrops, gravel and/or clay pits, stone walls, cellar holes, barns, natural communities, and wildlife to track in winter. Almost all Vermont towns have these features – if you know where to look. And it is fun to look. It's a game of “let’s find your special places,” whether it’s a glacial spillway over a mountain pass or a hidden glade of lady’s slippers right in the middle of town.
In addition, decisions about school budgets, local taxes, and conservation issues such as managing a town forest, delineating wildlife corridors, or restoring riparian buffers are decided at a town level in Vermont. These decisions are often made by volunteers. It’s a lot to ask of them. Working with Vermont Fish and Wildlife’s Community Wildlife Program, in collaboration with FNEP alumni Jon Kart, Jens Hawkins-Hilke, and Dave Moroney, VMN helps provide ecological training and technical support to these individuals.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the town scale is still a human scale. Vermont Master Naturalists are neighbors who receive ecological training and then work on projects in their town. They know the school where they are planting native plants for pollinators and other wildlife, they know the floodplain where they are removing knotweed and planting trees, they know the places to set cameras to capture wildlife photos, and best of all they get to know each other. As VMN begins to weave a network of alumni through Conservation Field Days and other offerings to address conservation issues at a watershed level, the distance people travel between towns is still manageable. The carbon footprint remains light. And people are amazed by what is right outside their door.
