Community service brings together gowns and towns

In the mid-1980s about 4,000 blueberry bushes were moved from a property owned by Henry Kissinger to the Kent School (when it was still on Skiff Mountain; the property is now the home of the Marvelwood School).

About half of the blueberry bushes now flourish on a spectacular site in gorgeous long rows on the Sharon side of  the Marvelwood athletic fields.   

Judging from the way the berries disappear on a hot summer day, a lot of people know they are there for the picking. What they may not know is that nearly every Wednesday morning when Marvelwood is in session, the faculty and student body turns out and, as part of their community service work, maintains these bushes.  They prune them, remove vines and dead wood, and cut the grass around them.

Not far from these blueberry bushes on a 200-acre tract of land owned by the Sharon Land Trust, there is another field of berry bushes — the other half of the Kissinger berries. These bushes have become overgrown with vines and weeds, and trees have grown up which overshadow them.  

In the course of investigating how the Land Trust might rehabilitate the bushes, I met with Laurie Doss, a Marvelwood science teacher who took me on a tour of the Land Trust Skiff Mountain tract. She knows it inside out from her visits with students to observe and band and study birds.

And now, thanks to Doss and to Mike Augusta (Marvelwood’s community service coordinator) and the students and teachers of Marvelwood, these neglected berry bushes are also being rescued. And the meadows are being rehabilitated.  Eventually we hope to have marked walking and riding trails crisscrossing that part of Skiff Mountain.  We even hope to link the Sharon trails with trails being developed on a Kent Land Trust tract just south of the Marvelwood campus.  

Does this matter in the larger scheme of things? Maybe.

In 1950, the United States’ population was 150 million and the world’s was 2.5 billion. Now, less than 60 years later, the U.S. population has doubled and the world’s has nearly tripled.  Before another 60 years have passed, the numbers could double again. The pressures of population growth on our resources — water, land, air — are already huge. In 60 years they may be unimaginably large.

I’ve heard people say that conserving land stifles progress and inhibits growth and kills jobs. I find that to be a false and even dangerous dichotomy.  Of course we need development.   But development needs to be done wisely so that everyone can share in its benefits. If we preserve farms and woodlands and wetlands and develop our resources carefully, the result will be a high quality, affordable and sustainable way of life. Progress and preservation have to go hand in hand, because one without the other is short sighted and destructive.  We should embrace change but also be absolutely sure we manage it well.

Sharon, where I live and where the rescue of the berries is happening, is a town of about 60 square miles—the second largest town in Connecticut—with many miles of woods and meadows and wetlands.

Our abundant space is not immediately threatened, but some day not very far in the future it could be.  

Thanks to the Sharon Land Trust and the Marvelwood School’s community service program, people should be able to pick blueberries for years to come. They should be able to enjoy walking and riding along miles of Skiff Mountain trails.

The more cooperative efforts we have like this one on Skiff Mountain, around Sharon and throughout Litchfield County, the better life here will become.

Sharon resident Peter Steiner is an author, painter and cartoonist.  He is a member of the board of The Sharon Land Trust.

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