When John McNerney moved from Ohio to Vermont about 20 years ago, he didn’t know much about forest management, processing firewood, or tackling invasive species. An economics major in college, John worked for many years for Seneca Wire (where he’s been chairman of the board since 2003). In 2001, John and his wife, Kim Clark, moved east, landing in Monkton, Vermont, where they purchased 82 acres from a farmer, built a house, and are raising two kids. John dove into his new role as forest owner, joining Vermont Coverts, becoming a founding owner of the Little Hogback Community Forest, and fostering community in endeavors from helping to start the Monkton Wood Bank to battling invasive species in public recreational areas.
I grew up in northwest Ohio on a farm. That part of Ohio is flat as a board, and most of it was fencerow to fencerow farm fields. When somebody talked about their woods, most of the time what they were talking about was the row of trees between their farm and the neighboring one. We were unusual in that we had 30 acres that was actually wooded, mainly because there was a sheet of limestone a foot down that made it impossible to farm. I was one of five kids. My dad was always out there making little trails, and we spent a fair amount of time running around in that stretch of woods.
All of us really had an appreciation for nature, but maybe not such an understanding of it. I grew up thinking that logging was a dirty word: why would you ever cut a tree? We assumed the best thing you could do for wildlife was never touch anything in the woods. We thought of a forest as a static thing, and it’s not. That 30 acres had a chunk where there weren’t a lot of trees growing, and there were wild strawberries there. Over the years, the strawberry pickings got slim, and we couldn’t figure out what was going wrong. It didn’t even cross our minds that what used to be a grassy, shrubby area had filled in more densely. It was forest succession in action, but we didn’t know what that was. It’s a similar thing to people who will buy a wooded property in Vermont and not touch a thing, and then 20 years down the road, they wonder why they don’t see the deer they used to. They don’t understand that as far as the deer are concerned, the forest has matured and “gone by.” There’s nothing there for the deer to eat in the winter.
Moving to Vermont and meeting people who were actively managing their forests responsibly was an eye opener for me. The first time I met Randy Wilcox, the forester who was doing the management plan for this property when we bought it, he brought along a few issues of Northern Woodlands magazine. It was perfect for me, because it wasn’t all tree hugger stuff, nor was it completely focused on how to maximize timber value. To me, the fascinating thing about owning woodlands is how you balance these different uses – wildlife, timber value, recreation. Vermont Coverts had an ad in one of the issues about their three-day cooperator training – their flagship program teaching landowners things they can do on their land for wildlife and how to integrate wildlife concerns with other goals they might have. I was just fascinated, because that was exactly what my interest was – how do you make decisions where all these things come together and might seem to be in conflict?
I joined Vermont Coverts in fall of 2002, a few months after moving to the property, and that helped me learn that a forest is not static, there’s a natural progression that a forest goes through. Contrary to my childhood belief, sometimes the best thing you can do for wildlife is go in and make a patch opening or release a tree that might produce some mast that animals can live on in the winter. I was fascinated enough with Vermont Coverts that I started showing up to board meetings, and after a year or so, they put me on the board. After a few years, I served as president, and I’ve been on the board full time or as an ex officio member ever since. It’s an organization that’s very interested in wildlife and healthy forests, but also is looking at how that interest interfaces with human needs and other goals you may have for your property.
We have 82 acres, almost all forested, that we bought in 2002. Two years ago we bought a parcel to the north of us, so now we have 144 acres and have safeguarded our neighborhood trail network. We have a few trails, some of them resurrected from old logging trails and some we put in ourselves. My wife used to run Tough Mudders and Spartan races, so we built a few obstacles along our trails in the woods, and that was her training ground. Our trails connect with others on adjacent properties, and it’s kind of become a neighborhood network.
My main interest is wildlife and sustainable forestry. I appreciate a working forest. I also appreciate a wild forest. I believe there is a place for both. A few years back, I applied for an EQIP grant (Environmental Quality Incentives Program, through the USDA) on my original parcel to do invasive species control. I have a “buckthorn plantation.” About 25 acres of it was moderate to heavy infestation. I thought I was going to manage it purely mechanically and get ahead of it, but it just wasn’t working. So I applied for an EQIP grant and hired somebody to come in. We’re just finishing the follow up on that project. Now on the new parcel, we’re doing the same thing. The eastern half of that is heavily infested, so I got another grant to work on that.
The Little Hogback Community Forest came into being in 2007. It was the brainchild of Deb Brighton, who is on the board of Vermont Family Forests (VFF). She and David Brynn, the executive director of VFF, had an idea about alternate scenarios of forest ownership and forest management, and particularly in the social equity side of things – how could you get forest property into the hands of someone who might otherwise never have even considered owning a forest, and also conserve the forest while you’re at it?
They sold 16 shares and reserved half of those shares for people who were below median income in Addison County. Those shares went for half of the full price. The idea was that the land would pay for its property taxes and the forest management plan through sustainable forestry. Part of how the Little Hogback Community Forest supports itself is through doing an occasional timber harvest. The last one was done in 2007, and we’re planning another one for this winter.
I didn’t really need more forestland, but the whole project seemed really fascinating to me. So, I bought in. At the time, none of the owners knew each other. Now, 14 years later, we are all good friends. We hope it will be a model for other people interested in conserving land, or folks who want to get neighbors together to conserve a piece of forest in their neighborhood. As far as I know, that hasn’t really happened yet, but it’s been an interesting thing to be a part of. We’ve adapted our logging roads and use them as recreational trails. A number of community members make use of the trails as well.
That first year, a few of us did a little firewood harvesting. The next year, 8 of the 16 members were involved in harvesting firewood. We cut an extra cord or two so we could donate it to families in need. This effort eventually grew into the Monkton Wood Bank. We talked with the guidance counselor at the local elementary school, because she knew the community, and asked her to let us know if she heard of somebody who could use a hand, and we would make a cord of wood appear. We did that for several years. One year, it was an older gentleman who had been involved in the school, donating time, bringing musical instruments in for the kids to try. He had only a couple of armloads of wood left, he heated primarily with wood, and it was the middle of winter. We put a cord and a half of wood on his pile with an anonymous note that said, “Thank you for all that you do in our community.”
It was just a few of us doing that for several years. Then one of the co-owners got himself put on the Monkton Energy Committee, and we expanded it to a community effort. Now we have 10 or 12 regulars who are there any time we need them – helping make a delivery in a blizzard or cutting and splitting wood. I lost track of how many people from the community have been involved, but with the local scout troops helping out and college classes from UVM and Middlebury, it’s now in the hundreds. One of the Little Hogback Community Forest owners is a professor at UVM, and every fall she brings a class down for a community service project. They’ll spend half their time splitting wood, and the other half we’ll take them on a walk through the forest and explain some of the management goals and practices.
One of the things I most love to do is bringing the community together. I really prefer to be in the background, but somebody has to communicate this stuff, and it’s turned out that’s often me. Monkton’s got a reputation – people look out for each other here. People come out of the woodwork to help. They’re happy to be able to do something. You don’t have to agree with someone 100 percent in order to be able to work with them and make something happen that can do a lot of good for the community.
We have a recreational area here that was overrun by wild parsnip, so Jaime Shulte and I organize what we call the wild parsnip battles. We’ll stage a workday where we’ll round up 6 to 12 people, give those who need it a little training, and start pulling wild parsnip. Most of that park is now parsnip free. In the early years, it might have taken us a half dozen workdays to clear a chunk of the park. We’re thinking next year we might just about do it in one or two workdays. We’ve had quite a range of people who have come out to help with that over the years. And people get to learn a little bit about invasive species. I’m hoping we’ll convince people that we need to tackle the buckthorn that’s overtaking the woods behind the elementary school next.
I have a compact tractor I use for a lot of my own firewood work, but it’s about a 35- or 40-minute drive by tractor to get from my place to Little Hogback Community Forest. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine who restores old Dodge trucks found me an M37, a truck made by Dodge for the Korean War. The doors have a white Army star, and right above that it says “Brutus.” I don’t know where the name came from, but it fits. The short wheelbase and high ground clearance make it perfect for work in the woods. The bed has wooden sides that can fold down into seats. In the war, they’d flip those down, and the troops would ride back there. Now, with the seats flipped up, it holds a good bit of firewood, and with the seats flipped down, I can give the neighborhood kids a ride in the parade. It has a mechanical winch – it’s not as fast as the logging winch on my tractor, but I don’t have to spend half an hour getting there.
I am an inveterate “gadget hound.” This ranges from trying out just about every hand tool known to man for handling firewood logs to setting up my compact tractor for work in the woods with a belly pan, limb risers, forestry grapple, and logging winch. Several years ago, I found a log forwarding trailer with hydraulic grapple in like-new condition. It’s too small for anyone to use commercially, and usually too expensive for a landowner to justify for “hobby” use, but when it came up used at a good price, I jumped on it. If I ever did the math, I probably still could not financially justify it, but it has given me a lot more options for working in the woods and has probably saved me a few trips to the chiropractor. It has also come in handy when someone has a tree down and wants to donate it to the Monkton Wood Bank.
Kim I are both pilots. We do this as a hobby, not a profession. We keep a Cessna 172 at the Middlebury Airport. When I first moved to Vermont in 2001, I connected with an organization called Northern Wings which paired volunteer pilots with various environmental causes in New England. The Vermont Land Trust became my most frequent passenger. I did “donor familiarization flights,” showing various areas targeted for conservation to potential funders of easement purchases. I also flew them all over Vermont on easement monitoring flights, giving the VLT folks on board a quick way of checking for easement compliance.
These flights allowed me to connect my interest in flying with my interest in land conservation and the natural world. My most memorable such flight was flying Middlebury College professor John Elder over the Champion Lands deal in the Northeast Kingdom. He was working on an article about how the deal came together. It was a beautiful day for a flight and very informative for me as I got to hear the explanation of what was special about the area, the history of it, and how the whole complicated conservation deal came together.
My favorite places in the woods vary, but this past winter I was skiing our new parcel, and I looked over and saw this big, scraggly, old tree. It’s a sugar maple, four feet across. You can tell it’s been there so much longer than anything around it. I just stopped and hung out there for a little while with this tree. It obviously grew in the open, but now it’s surrounded by these tall, straight trees. A few weeks ago, I found its twin sister tree a few hundred yards away. It looked like the same vintage, same condition. These trees are probably well on their way to dying, but they don’t know it yet. They’ve got such character. You can really feel the energy is different around those two old, scraggly maples. They’re massive and obviously past their prime, but there’s a different energy there than in other parts of the forest.
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