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November 15, 2002
Harvard
Forest Director to Speak about History of Local Landscape
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On
November 21, David Foster will discuss the history and ecology
of the landscape of western Massachusetts. Illustrating
his talk will be paintings of the Pioneer Valley on view
in the art museum's current exhibition.
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"I went to the
woods because I wished to live deliberately," wrote American
philosopher Henry David Thoreau of living in a small cabin in
Concord, Massachusetts, from 1845 to 1847. During his two-year
"experiment" at Concord's Walden Pond, Thoreau
also observed deliberately, making detailed records of his small
wooded retreat and of the heavily farmed region that surrounded
it. By the time ecologist David Foster built his own cabin in
Vermont's Northeast Kingdom in 1977, the cleared, cultivated
New England that Thoreau had described was largely gone, almost
completely covered by forest. Foster was struck by the dramatic
transformation, which he has described in his books Thoreau's
Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape (Harvard
University Press, 1999) and New England Forests through Time:
Insights from the Harvard Forest Dioramas (Harvard University
Press, 2000). The landscape of western Massachusetts, which has
been similarly transformed by human activity, will be the subject
of Foster's talk "An Unfolding Landscape: Seeing Mount
Holyoke and Its Valley over Time," scheduled for Thursday,
November 21, at 7 pm, in the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum's
Weissman Gallery. Foster's presentation, cosponsored by the
Center for Environmental Literacy (CEL) and the art museum, is
part of the Weissman Center for Leadership's series Destinations:
New Meanings of Travel.
Standing among and
referencing paintings of the Pioneer Valley displayed in the art
museum's exhibition Changing Prospects: The View From
Mount Holyoke, Foster will discuss the ecology of the landscape
of western Massachusetts. "The more we look into the history
of landscapes worldwide, the more we uncover the fact that even
most of the seemingly most pristine areas have a lengthy history
of human activity and alteration," Foster writes. "Consequently,
we can use history and ecology to interpret the modern landscapes,
to anticipate changes into the future, and to devise environmentally
sound alternatives for conserving and managing them. One key to
the New England landscape is nineteenth-century (and subsequent)
cultural activity. This is exactly what the exhibition depicts
for us."
Foster has been a
faculty member in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary
Biology at Harvard University since 1983. He is also director
of Harvard's Harvard Forest, a 3,000-acre ecological research
and educational site in central Massachusetts that is one of twenty-four
sites in the U.S. Long-Term Ecological Research Program, sponsored
by the National Science Foundation, and the field center for the
Northeast Center for the National Institute for Global Environmental
Change, sponsored by the Department of Energy. In addition to
Thoreau's Country and New England Forests through Time,
Foster's publications include the forthcoming Integrated
Land Change Science and Tropical Deforestation in Southern Yucatan:
Final Frontiers (Oxford University Press).
"The museum's
current show was a natural choice for CEL collaboration,"
said Susan M. Benoit '86, who volunteers for the CEL and
the art museum programs, "because of all the student research
and exploration the CEL is supporting on the Holyoke Range and
in the local Pioneer Valley." One of CEL director Thomas
Millette's current classes, for example, is working on a
historical wetlands study for a local property owner, and CEL
Mellon postdoctoral fellow Peter Houlihan recently designed and
oversaw the production of a GIS-based environmental needs assessment
of the Holyoke range, performed and drafted by the students in
his forest ecology seminar. "It will be a very different
sort of gallery talk, but also a very different sort of ecology
lecture," said Benoit. "Foster is very comfortable with
the cultural aspects of ecology. In Thoreau's Country,
he explores a number of historical and biological themes, collating
and then interweaving pertinent entries from Thoreau's journals,
and presenting them for the reader to sift through and enjoy—as
much for their craft of composition as for their historical/ecological
content."
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