Dear LincolnTalk,
[Disclaimer: Posting this as a resident of Lincoln to provide hopefully useful
information for this part of the Lincoln Talk discussion and not in any of my
capacities on Town-based Boards.]
In case you are interested in the question Rich Rosenbaum recently posed (also
below):
"So I think the question is: what is the best trade off between allowing us to
enjoy what nature has to offer and the impact of such enjoyment on our natural
surroundings?"
I offer the publication, "Trails for People and Wildlife: A Guide to Planning
Trails that Allow People to Enjoy Nature and Wildlife to Thrive," put out as a
joint effort of the NH Fish and Game Department, Great Bay Resource Protection
Partnership, UNH Cooperative Extension, US Fish and Wildlife Service, NH
Audubon, among others which can be found as a link at the bottom of the page
here. It offers one practical way of thinking about this problem. Of course,
there are others as well, depending on what you think the objective should be
among other considerations. Essentially, this publication explains their
effort to allow passive recreation where possible while minimizing the impact
on wildlife by carefully selecting where to site trails so that as much
connected wildlife habitat as possible is preserved, and to locate trails in
areas which are relatively less important for wildlife habitat according to a
set of criteria. It is one approach to a balance between optimizing on
recreation versus optimizing on habitat preservation and biodiversity. As
someone pointed out, one can tip that scale according to preference in
principle (and practice). In this publication they essentially allow as much
recreation as possible, but where there are opportunities to greatly expand the
area of connected wildlife habitat by relocating or eliminating a trail, they
do so, and in general they try to site trails in places where the trail impact
on wildlife will be less. So here, primacy is still given to recreation, but a
significant effort is made to minimize the wildlife impact of that passive
recreation. It is hard work.
The authors came up with various corridors of influence off human activity on
trails depending on the type of animals under consideration and these figures
were based on a literature review that they performed; much closer in, we
affect smaller animals and amphibians, a bit further out, birds, and the full
400' for larger animals. Based on their literature review, it seems the more
unpredictable we are in our trail usage, the greater our impact as well.
If you are interested in doing the math implied by the corridor of influence on
wildlife (800 ft wide; 400 ft either side of the trail) of human activity on
trails in Lincoln, please note that of the 83 miles of trails and roadside
paths, 10.2 miles are roadside paths, leaving 72.8 miles of what we would think
of as nature-based trails. All of Lincoln is 15 square miles according to
Wikipedia.
It may be a relevant fact in this discussion that Lincoln has a much larger
than usual share of conserved land (I've heard 38 percent), including wetlands
(I've heard 30 percent) and trails, relative to its size than most if not all
other towns this close to Boston. As such, there may be important
opportunities for our conserved land to offer unique ecological and human
health services to our town and the region, especially in the context of
climate change.
The issue of trail use and its impact on human health and wildlife, also in the
context of climate change, is obviously very important to all of us who have
taken the time to study, reflect and even speak up about the issue. It also
relates intimately to various important town values. I hope the attached
publication helps you in your journey of thinking about these very hard and
very important problems even as we all (hopefully!) remember that we are
indebted to so very many, past, present and future people who have generously
provided vision, time and treasure to conserve and protect our open spaces here
in Lincoln. In other words, this is a hard problem, and an important problem,
but it is a problem we are in many ways very fortunate to have!
Thank you,Michelle BarnesSouth Great Road
On Tuesday, July 12, 2022, 02:58:43 PM EDT, Rich Rosenbaum <[email protected]>
wrote:
Those are reasonable points. I might point out, though, if the goal is to
restore nature as much as possible we should stop all trail usage. We can
reverse the incremental changes that those before us have made and some of us
are currently benefiting from.
So I think the question is: what is the best trade off between allowing us to
enjoy what nature has to offer and the impact of such enjoyment on our natural
surroundings?
On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 2:35 PM Gordon Woodington <[email protected]>
wrote:
Because not everything that is grey can be undone and when it gets too dark it
is too late. Just the nature of how most of humankind, governments, groups of
people react. It is too hard.
An individual claims one's personal increment is important and must be allowed,
as many others will do too, and that one's own part was not the cause of the
total negative impact and is absolutely needed. Every year for more than a
century there has been environmental pollution and resultant damage, but each
increment was not the issue, but the sum of increments is a big disaster. We
see so many examples that society/mankind is not able to "unroll" enough of the
increments .
I expect human nature to be the same on a small scale, here in Lincoln. Once
the damage of an increment becomes "the new normal", memories fade of what was
lost, and it's easier to forge ahead yet another increment, because " it too
has so little impact". So I disagree wholeheartedly with allowing the proposed
incremental changes.
Because of many real aspects of Nature and human nature, I believe changes will
become irreversible.
Gordon Woodington
On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 10:09 AM Rich Rosenbaum <[email protected]> wrote:
I don't know why people think that changes are irreversible. If something isn't
working is there a reason that it can't be undone?
How else can you learn what really works and what doesn't?
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