Linda Gibbs is the community programs director for the Tug Hill Tomorrow Land Trust and has worked as an environmental educator and natural resources specialist since the 1980s. She grew up near Syracuse, New York, just outside the village of Minoa, and now lives in Watertown. When she’s not working to introduce others to the beautiful open spaces of the Tug Hill region, or exploring on her own by foot or canoe, she’s likely crocheting items from sustainable fibers as a hobby-turned-side business.
I grew up in the outskirts of a village surrounded by a rural landscape. I spent a lot of time outside in our yard and in the adjacent area of forest and wetlands, where we would go exploring. I loved to climb trees – there was one maple that had a great branch, and I would hook my legs over and hang upside down – and to ice skate in the flooded forest in winter, go to our neighbor’s little pond and gather pollywogs and pick blackberries. As I got older, I loved riding my bike on roads in the country, and heading to Green Lakes State Park to sunbathe, swim, and walk with friends.
I had two loves as I graduated high school – music and the outdoors. I was the youngest of four children, and I primarily decided to pursue an outdoor-related field because none of my siblings had done it before. I chose to do a dual major in forestry and wildlife biology at SUNY ESF (State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry). I just felt like I wanted to cover it all. There wasn’t a lot of overlap of the two disciplines at the time, and I could see places where I really wanted more information about that other side. Forestry isn’t all about timber management, and wildlife biology isn’t only about specific animals. It’s all connected.
During the summer of 1985 I interned with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in Albany and was required to attend a Project Learning Tree workshop as part of my job. Project Learning Tree is a classroom curriculum project created with teacher involvement that allows teachers to incorporate environmental education into their classrooms. There really wasn’t a great resource for teachers before that, unless you trained as a science teacher, and even then it was earth science or something more specific. I think this appealed to me because it combined real life experiences with learning. The workshop was like a lightbulb. I was getting to the end of my college career and thinking, what do I really want to do with this degree? That workshop showed me that environmental education was what I was meant to do.
After graduating, it was a winding road of seasonal environmental education jobs in Colorado, New York, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. I completed a master’s degree in science teaching at Antioch New England Graduate School in 1991, went to work as a school program director at Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center in Pennsylvania, then took a job with the Tug Hill Commission – a state agency – as a natural resources specialist in 1995. I was loaned as staff to Tug Hill Tomorrow Land Trust during my years with the commission, and I am very happy to be working with the land trust again now in my chosen field.
I think access to environmental education is even more important now because there is so little opportunity for kids or adults to get outside and have meaningful contact and connection with the outdoors. I think the pandemic really demonstrated that to people. Through the course of 2020, we saw an increased interest in our programs, like the Tug Hill Bird Quest, and trail use at our wildlife sanctuaries tripled.
Tug Hill is the third largest contiguous forested area in New York State, after the Adirondack and Catskill Parks, with over 2,100 square miles included in its official boundaries: the Black River to the north and east, Oneida Lake to the south, and roughly Interstate 81 on the west. It includes portions of four counties and over 40 municipalities. The center of this region is forested, with agriculture primarily located in a concentric circle around that, and larger communities in a further concentric circle beyond that. Tug Hill is famous for receiving “lake effect” precipitation, especially in the winter, where winds pick up moisture from Lake Ontario then deposit large amounts of mostly snow, making Tug Hill the snowiest place in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. It has also gained notoriety for its wind farms in the last 13-15 years, the first of which was Maple Ridge Wind Farm.
Tug Hill Tomorrow Land Trust was formed by private landowners who were concerned about several issues: landfill and potential hazardous medical waste sitings by the state, plus large forest land holdings being transferred in the late ’80s and early ’90s. These could have greatly changed the character of the region. These landowners formed a nonprofit to work toward protecting the region’s wildlands, working forests, and farms. Landowners tend to be land rich and cash poor, and they rely on their land for meeting their needs. They need to be able to make some cash by providing some kind of product, whether that be a farm product or a forest. How they do that, whether they do that sustainably or not, is the question. There are people who have requested that we protect their property as forever wild. But the primary interest is in keeping the open space character, keeping the land healthy, and protecting it from overdevelopment.
As the community programs director for Tug Hill Tomorrow, I manage programs to get people of all ages and backgrounds out in, aware of, and appreciative of Tug Hill’s open spaces. In 2020 we didn’t do group programs, but we did volunteer trail maintenance days. With the local Adirondack Trail Club chapter, we’re establishing a hiking trail through the center of our region called the Tug Hill Traverse Trail. When it’s finished, it will be 20 miles long and will go right through the heart of the forest on Tug Hill. We’ve got 6 miles marked and maintained now, and we’re going north and south of those. It’s very remote, and we’re working with multiple landowners.
When the pandemic hit, I was in the midst of putting together the annual Tug Hill Bird Quest, which is a feeder watching event every spring. The program started off as a competitive birding event and grew into more of an academic exercise for school groups. It’s expanded to youth groups and families and individuals. We solicit donations of birdseed and bird feeders from regional businesses and distribute those to teams who need it to be able to participate in the program. In the spring of 2020, I’d gathered 700 pounds of birdseed and quite a few feeders. The distribution of that was supposed to happen about a week after all the schools shut down due to the pandemic. I wondered what I would do with all that birdseed! But because we had expanded our range of groups, we had record participation. We lost classrooms, but we made up for it with other people joining.
Birds are so interesting and they’re everywhere, so it’s easy for people to connect with them. If we can keep that interest going, I think it improves people’s understanding of the larger world around the birds. It’s not just a pretty bird that comes to your feeder and entertains you. It’s also connected to all of the insects and all of the other animals and the trees and plants and climate and on and on. It’s a real opportunity for us to use the momentum to try to deepen people’s understanding.
I crochet with natural, organic, and sustainable fibers and materials, so wool, organic cotton, silk, bamboo, linen. I use wood or coconut buttons and findings that are naturally and sustainably produced. I make hats, scarves, mitts, bags, purses, hair clips. I’m on a drink cozy kick right now. I learned to crochet when I was young from my mom and grandmother. I loved it when I was little, then went on hiatus from teenage through child-rearing years. Then I was laid off from my state job. I went through a period of high stress and insomnia and needed something to do at night. Crochet fit the bill. Eventually I had made so much stuff that my husband suggested maybe I should try to sell some of it. I sell at the local farmers market and on consignment at a few shops in the area, and I have a website. Crochet has been therapeutic for me. It’s really kind of grounding.