Adaptation Forest
A forest, a landowner, and some company.
The steward
This is a family property in the north Berkshires, in the Taconic range above the Green River valley. I am the person doing most of the work here — not a forester by training, not a scientist, but someone who has spent enough time on this land to understand that it needs more than benign neglect and less than the kind of intervention that forecloses options. I came to it through a combination of inheritance and intention and have been trying to figure out what responsible care looks like on a two-hundred-acre scale.
The three practices this site is organized around — forest thinking, tending, and adaptation — are not a brand. They are a description of what the work has asked of me. The forest thinking came first: learning to read the land, to understand what the species mix was telling me, to see the difference between a forest that is functionally healthy and one that is just quietly losing. The tending followed, which is harder and more physical and more humbling than the thinking. The adaptation is ongoing, which mostly means accepting that the plans I made two years ago are already partly wrong and the plans I make today will also be partly wrong, and working anyway.
The company
Adaptation Forest works best in company, and the company has been good. This is not a solo project pretending to be an institution. It is a single landowner working in active partnership with people who think about these questions every day and bring expertise that no individual owner can replicate.
The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service administers a three-year EQIP conservation contract covering brush management, early-successional habitat development, and forest stand improvement across roughly fifteen acres. The coordination with the NRCS field office in Pittsfield has been one of the more useful things to happen on this property: working within technical standards, planning cutting windows to protect federally listed bat species, having a district conservationist who has seen a hundred properties and knows what the anomalies mean.
The New England Forestry Foundation and Mass Audubon run a parallel climate-smart forestry contract through the Woodlands Partnership of Northwest Massachusetts, funded by a U.S. Forest Service grant. The technical oversight comes from Mass Audubon's forest ecologists — the same people doing the regional forest-carbon and climate-resilience research are the ones deciding what happens on specific stands here. That is worth a great deal. The scope includes invasive species treatment, crop-tree release thinning, and a two-acre oak enrichment planting with seedlings Mass Audubon supplied.
These partnerships are not sponsorships. They are working relationships in which the land is the shared subject and improving its long-term health is the shared goal. The property is a small piece of a larger regional effort to understand how working forests in the northern Berkshires can be managed through the climate transition ahead. Being part of that effort is one of the more clarifying things about doing this work.
Get in touch
If you want to walk the land, propose a collaboration, ask a question about the forest management work, or just say something — write to info@adaptationforest.org.
The people I most want to hear from are curious neighbors, regional ecologists, artists thinking about land-based practice, researchers working on northeastern forest questions, and anyone who has walked a piece of forest in this part of the country and knows what it feels like when it is doing well. There is more to learn here than one person can learn, and the project works better in conversation.