WHY STRAWBERRY FIELDS?

Welcome to our new website!  I hope your virtual visit to Strawberry Fields will entice you to make a physical visit to the preserve in the near future. By subscribing to this blog,  I’ll keep you up to date on contacts with and observations about Nature that you can see online before visiting the preserve and seeing what I saw in person.  I will also comment on my own and the world’s progress on fighting climate chaos caused by global warming;  I promise to be fact based, rational, and to ignore political “realities”. I’ll always look forward to comments that are equally fact based and rational.

My father acquired this abandoned farm in 1971 and it has been a sanctuary for me, my growing family, and my friends ever since. About 25 years ago, in 2000, I moved permanently from Manhattan to Strawberry Fields here in Amsterdam, NY.  Retiring in 2002 from working for a living in corporate America finally gave me the chance to think more strategically, and long term, about how I wanted to spend my time in my next chapter.

The thinking was pretty simple, and boiled down to two questions.  

What’s most important to me now? My growing family, the environment and climate chaos, and my own well-being.

Think global, act local?  Yes!  I got on my own road to net-zero, electrify everything with renewable energy, spread the word with credibility after it’s done, protect the undeveloped land from development, open the preserve and its nature trails to the public, live sustainably on the land. By providing this positive, demonstrable way forward, my hope was that more people will respect Nature, be concerned about their own environmental impact and take action following this example.  My family’s and my own well-being will come from taking those actions - your’s  will, too!. 

Our family was at four kids and two grandkids when we began on the road to net zero in 2003; by 2012 we had ten grandchildren.  I guess by having a lot of heirs, we must be an optimistic clan!  On the other hand, having more certainty about how future generations would be affected by the climate chaos we already now have, and believing they will face much greater impacts than today by the time those grandkids reach my age, does not seem to be optimistic at all.

But it can and does stir us to action; the situation is dire, but not hopeless, and the future generations of my family are launched, so non-action is not an option.  If most people in the most polluting countries act urgently to reduce their carbon footprint to net zero, global emissions will start to decline. It does not have to take very long for an individual to get their life to net zero. 

At Strawberry Fields, we started in 2003 and got to net zero by 2013, just 10 years. The technologies we used have all gotten cheaper, more easily available, and more efficient since then.  Even so, our own move to renewable energy has led to quick pay backs and longer term cost savings as well as (admittedly, incrementally) helping the environment and Nature.  Today, I’d guess that most middle-class families and individuals, whether urban, suburban or rural, who put their minds to it can get to net zero in a year or two by making some structural changes that lead to benefits for themselves and the planet. This can be accomplished without diminishing, and even clearly improving, quality of life.  I’ll leave an enumeration of the benefits of individual net-zero life for a future post, although if you want to get ideas now ask Google, “How can I get to net zero?”.

The decision to get to net zero in 2003 opened a lot of new directions for me.  I gave this place a name, “Strawberry Fields”, because one of our first discoveries coming here in the 1970’s was that everywhere we walked in sunny areas, wild strawberries were underfoot.  We even managed to pick enough (it’s hard to beat the critters to ripe fruit) to make wild strawberry ice cream!  

Knowing that development of farm lands is a major contributor to global warming, I contacted local land trusts and found one all volunteer group that had already protected property in Montgomery County.  I served on their Board for seven years with the hope that I could help strengthen the organization.  Today I feel quite confident that the promise of in perpetuity protection would go on far beyond my lifespan.  Since “in perpetuity” essentially means “forever”, I decided that it really means as long as the “civilized” world continues to exist.  [Hopefully that will be more than a few centuries.]  I’m confident that Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy will continue its role in protecting Strawberry Fields and our local environment for many decades to come.

As I learned about how land can be protected from over development, an obvious question arose:  what things are here on these 118 acres?  I started networking with all sorts of naturalists and conservationists, professional to amateur, who helped answer that question.  The resource lists on the website are the result; I am so grateful for their help.  All of those species are my friends and neighbors who are mostly easy to live with.  At Strawberry Fields, we follow the laws of Nature in our relations.  Mostly we just watch each other and let each other be; occasionally we seek to separate and even draw a line.  We respect the food chain, visible or not, and marvel at the behavior we can see of non-human life here at Strawberry Fields.  Nature became my “everything” that I value most, along with my family.

I also met geologists who helped me understand the ancient history of this land.  I enjoy offering to tell folks about the history of this land and starting 500 million years ago!  Evidence of glaciation here over the past million years is easily found.  

While I’ve never found evidence of Native American presence here, we have found the native flint called chert that was used for sharp edged weapons and tools. This area was on the eastern edge of Mohawk territory; to the east and north were Algonquins.  It is quite likely that our wet areas were hunted for beaver and other game, and possibly fought for between the two tribes.  Time in the county archive and  copies of old deeds gave me an appreciation for how Europeans settled the land and built some of the current structures, and how traditional agriculture ended here in 1965.

Needless to say, this journey of learning and acting on it, which continues today, has been very rewarding for me intellectually and physically, much better than working in corporate America.  I try to get out in Nature’s gym every day to keep in shape.  After years of developing trails on the property, I officially opened the trail system to the public in 2017;  we had over 2500 visitations in 2024.  I meet great people on the trails as I do stewardship work.  Importantly, I get frequent moments of joy every day courtesy of watching Nature at work, and integrating that moment into what I already knew.

The other side of this story is that I have now witnessed over 50 years, particularly in the last 25, how Nature in this region has changed - not for the better.  Those changes are all consistent with what climate scientists have predicted for 50 years: less snow, more ice, 2-3 month droughts preceded and ended by severe rains and flooding, many species of plants, trees, and animals suffering heat and dehydration moving north, poor air quality.  Seasonality is confused, 60 degrees in January, snow in October.  Plants are flowering earlier, or not so much.  It seems like everything is trying to adapt to new and still changing realities.  It is difficult and depressing to imagine the long term effects of the changes we can already see, let alone where those changes may be going.  Uncertainty about such basics will not be good for nearly any living thing, and certainly not for humans who depend on the reliability of Nature. 

Climate isn’t the only existential threat to Nature - invasive plant species are unrelenting in their attack on native habitats, and are often made worse by the warming climate. We lost the chestnuts and elms in the 20th century; now it is ashes and hemlocks dying all around us.  Much of my exercise in Nature’s gym is fighting invasives.  The list keeps growing. An outbreak of burning bush has been mostly controlled but oriental bittersweet (a real baddie that will ultimately take down the trees in a woods) has now joined the long time list of buckthorn, tartarian honeysuckle, barberry, multiflora rose, garlic mustard, and purple loosestrife.

I should clarify that most non-native plant species that have naturalized in wooded and open areas are not invasive; they do not take over and exclude natives from living in the same area. Many of my favorite wild flowers are in this category.  Besides plants, non-native pathogens, imported unknowingly in plant stock and packing materials, create big problems. Examples are the chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease (fungus); the emerald ash borer (EAB) and hemlock wooly agelid  (HWA) (insects).

Here at Strawberry Fields, I’d never seen a chestnut tree, but pre-blight it would have been our most common hardwood. In response, we are participating in a chestnut restoration project with the hope of finding disease resistant chestnuts trees that may successfully return to the ecosystem.  We had a few American elms here in the 70’s but they were all gone by the 90’s, victims of Dutch elm disease.  I first saw ashes dying from the EAB ten years ago; today we have hundreds of dead and dying ash trees around the land, mostly standing for now. So far, no HWA have been found but it is being monitored.

I guess it’s time to close this first blog post for Strawberry Fields. The last four paragraphs are gloomy but they are great motivators for aggressively controlling greenhouse emissions and fighting to protect Nature. It’s easy to be inspired by Nature when you see how it works patiently and relentlessly, balances predator and prey survival, and does all the things that humans need to do - find food, shelter and reproduction - without needing armies, police forces, nuclear and other weapons, governments, and all the many “necessities” of human life.  Humanity has not yet found that kind of balance, but it is possible to at least move in better directions.  I’m optimistic that most of humanity innately knows this, and that more will show their love and appreciation for Nature.