At the end of this column in the last issue, we reported that we had subscribers in 48 states, and that in order to make it a perfect 50, all we needed were subscribers from Louisiana and Mississippi. I’m not sure the ink was even dry on the magazine when I heard from Steve Wright of the National Wildlife Federation. Steve is Georgia-born, and working as he does for a national conservation organization, he immediately knew of two southern colleagues who would like Northern Woodlands, and his gift subscriptions to them made it official that we now have subscribers in every state in the Union.
That doesn’t mean we are going to start covering longleaf pine ecosystems; in fact, as I found out this summer, the territory we do cover is plenty large enough.
First, in June, I traveled to central New York back to where I grew up (in Syracuse), with side visits to the Adirondacks, Tug Hill, and the Finger Lakes. We are working to reach more people in New York with our various programs, including the magazine, so I was there meeting with people from the many different organizations that we hope to work with, or already do. I had productive discussions with people from landowners’ associations, forest products companies, colleges and universities, and environmental advocacy organizations.
That trip took me 300 miles west of our home office, and then in July, it was 300 miles in the other direction, to Millinocket, Maine. There, we held a meeting of our board of directors. Each year, the board has one meeting in the field, since so many of our directors have made a career of working in the woods, in one way or another. We were hosted by one of our directors, Marcia McKeague, who is president of Katahdin Timberlands, which owns 350,000 acres of the former Great Northern lands. After our business meeting, she took us on a tour of the woodlands, showing us their approach to silviculture, road building, and water protection on harvesting operations.
The 600-mile east-west range that my two trips covered brought me nearly but not quite to the ends of our territory. There’s plenty of Maine north and east of Millinocket, and I didn’t get to the southern tier of New York, which is particularly rich in forestland.
What struck me along the way was the incredible recreational infrastructure. It was the heart of summer, of course, the time when parents and children, boyfriends and girlfriends, head outdoors. Across the region, outdoor recreation is big business, which of course includes small businesses, too, visible to the public through hand-painted signs announcing the availability of night crawlers, camp wood, and tube rentals. Across the region this summer, literally millions of people will visit a pond, lake, river, trail, wetland, or mountaintop.
Whether they are in pursuit of some quiet backcountry solitude or the thrill of a trip on water skis behind a motorboat, they have come to escape. A day trip for some, for others it’s a much greater commitment of time and money, all in the service of seeing and experiencing something different from urban or suburban life. They are acting on the innate human need to spend time outdoors.
We purposely don’t write about destinations for recreation because there are plenty of other publications that cater to that need. What we do is tell people about the forest, what lives there, and how to care for it. As the notion of eco-tourism gains traction, there is a great opportunity for us to have some influence on people who visit our territory to get away from it all. Most of them remain unaware of the work going on behind the scenes by local people to make their stay possible, to keep the public land accessible, and to keep the private land productive and largely available for visitors.
If you are hosting people from away who are falling in love with this beautiful part of the world, send them home with a subscription to Northern Woodlands or a copy of The Outside Story. They’ll understand much more about the land that draws them here.