A few month ago I overheard a conversation about how nothing much in Dryden was really natural area worth preserving because the forest that previously covered most of the town had been cut down, and what we had left was secondary or even tertiary forest. What valuable could be left in old eroded pastures that no one cared about enough to keep under the plow?
I grew up surrounded by similar forests in Corning, and always found things worth looking for, so maybe I'm just corrupted by too much familiarity with our forests.
Other folks, though, find the regrown forests interesting in their own right. There's a great series of articles this week on the Harvard Forest, 3500 acres of former farmland that's been intensively studied since 1907. Yes, it's in Massachusetts, and not precisely the same landscape, but I run into their research regularly when reading about forests and a lot of it is comparable.
Take a look - we can learn a lot even from land that isn't pristine.
Posted by simon at May 24, 2012 3:43 PM in natural areas