 The Connecticut River flows through one of the most complex landscapes in North America. This American Heritage River originates in relatively pristine headwaters along the Canadian border in northern Vermont and New Hampshire. As it flows south, it divides Vermont and New Hampshire. The river soon encounters areas of intensive agriculture and development in Massachusetts and Central Connecticut. It then turns abruptly to the southeast, and continues through 60 miles of mostly rural land and empties into Long Island Sound. The Connecticut has no major city at its mouth, making this tidal estuary all the more valuable. In fact, the nature conservancy is called the Lower Connecticut, one of the last great places. Managing natural resources in this urbanized landscape presents many challenges. No single land use dominates. A complex overlay of established uses competes for resources. Each land use impacts the river in a different way, but together give a sense of the challenge faced here. The biggest impact today comes from residential and commercial development. The 11,000 square mile watershed hosts 390 towns and cities and 2.3 million people. Many of these people have chosen to move away from traditional urban centers. The resulting sprawl consumes agricultural land at an alarming rate. As more open lands succumb to development, habitat is fragmented or lost and water quality suffers. The effects can directly be seen on the river and farther downstream in critical tideland habitats. 70% of the freshwater in Long Island Sound is delivered by the Connecticut River. The ecological health of the tidelands and the sound depend directly upon the water quality in the upland tributaries. In these tidelands and elsewhere, invasive plant species have established a firm hold. Land managers struggle with eradicating or at least limiting these species before native plants are completely overwhelmed. Anatomous fish can tell us a great deal about this landscape's overall condition. Atlantic salmon, shad and other migratory species were once plentiful, but are now severely threatened. Spawning habitat has been greatly reduced and often blocked off completely. Mill dams from the 1700s still block migration paths on many of the river's 38 tributaries. Within this intensely developed context, however, the river has some very enthusiastic allies. Community members, landowners and agency managers have joined together to fight the trends that threatened this watershed. Already, much of the point source pollution has been reduced or eliminated. The focus now is reconnecting the watershed by restoring and protecting the overall function and health of the ecosystem. This area seems to have always been the focus of much activity, even in a geologic time frame. An appreciation of these events can lead to a better understanding of the present-day topography and soils. So we're here at Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. And of course you always think of dinosaurs being a western thing, and though in Connecticut we have evidence that dinosaurs were here too. So there's hundreds of dinosaur tracks that you can come and see here. And the history of Connecticut is a long one. The rocks here in Connecticut, our oldest rocks are as old as 600 million years old. The more recent history of Connecticut is about two million years ago, the Connecticut River kind of started flowing the way that it does now through its watershed. And of course during that time there was glaciation. The glaciers came through Connecticut a number of times. So what we ended up with is a glaciated landscape. And this long valley, and this valley is deep enough and long enough that it really has its own microclimate. So it's a little bit warmer, a little bit more humid than the rest of the state. It has a very long growing season for this part of the world, about 200 day growing season. And these rocks that were here because of the basalt, which we call trap rock, and the sedimentary rocks that formed from those ancient soils millions of years ago. When those got ground up and laid down by the glacier, we have these unique red soils in the Connecticut Valley. So we have some unique soils in the valley here. The valley, because it's a rift valley, this big crack that was in the earth goes from Long Island Sound all the way up to Vermont and New Hampshire. So the reason why it's important to understand this early history of Connecticut and the bedrock geology and how it was formed is that the rocks that you see here, these red triassic, Jurassic sandstones and silt stones are basically the foundation of the parent material that our soils have formed in today. We're here on the flood plain of the Connecticut River and the soils here and the soil landscapes are legendary for their agricultural productivity. When the Native Americans started raising corn and beans and squash, the first place that they came to raise their crops was here on the flood plain of the Connecticut River. Since then, people have continued to farm the Connecticut River flood plain and fortunately it has less of development potential than the upland soils. So not that people don't put golf courses and parking lots and other things on the flood plain of the Connecticut River, but it's still dominantly from Vermont and New Hampshire all the way down through Rocky Hill, Glastonbury where the flood plain is wide enough to farm that it's dominantly in agriculture. And as you can see here, we have well-drained, very silty soils as I mentioned for the uplands and it has kind of a reddish-pinkish cast to it, the uplands from those red triassic materials that were eroded and then became part of the glacial till and glacial outwash as they've eroded in the uplands and carried by the various tributaries down along the Connecticut River the Connecticut River floods annually. The silts and very fine sands are deposited so we have well-drained, silty soils and very agriculturally productive. Earliest records of this area come from dinosaur tracks and other fossils. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, Native Americans moved onto this landscape. Agriculture and fishing were critical parts of their lives. Indians settled near water first of all as obviously for drinking purposes but also because of navigation. When you get the rivers like this, it provides a highway of travel, a highway of trade that can come up and down. But we also see very intensive settlement here along the flood plain of the river starting about 1,000 years ago when Native Americans were starting to grow corn, beans and squash. So they were taking advantage of the rich flood plain soils and setting up villages. The village right over my shoulder here was occupied about eight to 900 years ago and probably represented a large village of maybe eight or 900 people even. So these were prime areas for agricultural growth. When we look at where the English settled down and the New England coast when they first got a foothold here, these are the same exact places that Native Americans had large villages everywhere from Boston and New London, New Haven, Newark, Baltimore. All these areas that Native Americans had already cleared some land in some cases to grow their crops. They had already settled in villages. Europeans basically get a foothold on this continent not because this was a wilderness but because there were already people here that already had used the land and modified the land. So instead of our ancestors coming here to this complete wilderness, what they came to New England anyhow is a land that maybe over 150,000 people were already occupying. And that allowed the European foothold on this continent much quicker than it would have been had this truly been a wilderness. When the colonists came here, of course, they were taught by the Indians how to grow some of the crops they were growing and they were also able to grow some of the crops that they knew from Europe because of the excellent soils. So Connecticut was one of those, considered one of those provisioned states for the colonists and for the early part of our country all the way up until the West was cleared. So the significant agriculture was in the Northeast and particularly the Connecticut Valley was known for its productive agricultural soils. That history has continued throughout the Industrial Revolution that agriculture is still very important to the history and to the economy of the Connecticut Valley or these Connecticut lowlands. Because of the excellent soils, a lot of specialty crops are grown. When the colonists came here, the Indians were already growing tobacco and as tobacco became fashionable in Europe, tobacco became a very important part of the Connecticut Valley culture and economy. At one point in time, there were thousands of acres of tobacco grown in the Connecticut Valley and that tobacco was still grown today. It's a very expensive crop to grow during one of those time periods when cigars were out of fashion. A lot of those excellent soils went into truck crops, fruits and vegetables and nursery and turf production as well. So a lot of high value crops. European development began in the early 1600s. Farms quickly spread on the rich valley bottoms. America's Industrial Revolution also started in this region with water mills supplying the power. When the English first came here, they referred to the Indians as being primarily farmers and fishermen because of the Southern New England complex, not only with the coastline, but because of the rivers coming up. Native American settlements were logistically spread not only to use the flood plain soils, but also to utilize the fish that were coming up here. Especially off the secondary drainages that enter into the primary rivers, we have campsites that primarily were occupied during the spring season when the anadromous fish funds were coming. Very important resource here in New England for Native peoples. We have accounts of the English when they first settled here of the fish being so thick here during the anadromous spring runs that you could literally walk across the river on the backs of salmon and other anadromous fish that were coming up here. How true that is we don't know. But that gave us an idea of how plentiful these resources were. The main stem of the Connecticut River, which had the largest salmon run of any river in the northeast, was effectively dammed at Turner's Falls in the late 1700s. So it wasn't too long after that. All these dams on all these thousands of miles of tributaries that the salmon and the herring and the shad and the L.Y.s needed. And then this major obstacle at Turner's Falls, which is kind of at the Massachusetts border, basically did in the Atlantic salmon. We're here in Lyme, Connecticut, on the banks of the east branch of the Eight Mile River looking at a barrier that has stopped anadromous fish for hundreds of years. Anadromous fish are the species of fish that begin their life in freshwater, migrate out into the ocean to reach maturity, and then return back to freshwater where they originated to complete their life cycle, to spawn. And here in Connecticut, as well as throughout the northeast of the United States, all of these small streams were great habitat for anadromous fish species. Now, these species that we're talking about include Atlantic salmon, American shad, L.Y., blueback herring, in some cases striped bass, sea lamprey, and there's others too, but those are the species that we tend to focus on. Historians and anthropologists tell us that this part of the world had one of the densest populations of aboriginal peoples, and one of the reasons were the fisheries resources. These fish mostly run up the streams in late winter and early spring, at a time when the food storage of the Indians, the early Indians, had been depleted. So just when these people were facing starvation, huge quantities of high energy and tasty fish would be delivered to their doorstep. They didn't have to go out and net them. They didn't have to go in search of them. In many cases, in a small stream like this, they could just reach down, literally reach down and pick them up. As this area was settled and developed, we started industrializing the area and building dams such as this. This dam probably built in the 1700s, powered a series of mills, perhaps a grist mill, perhaps a saw mill. Later on, maybe manufacturing a small item like knife handles or axe handles or something like that. At that point, the jobs in the industry was more important than the natural resource, and they didn't have the technology to get fish beyond the dam. They didn't worry about the fish. The dams blocked the fish migration. Many species, most notably Atlantic salmon, need to get to the very headwaters of the stream to spawn. There is no appropriate spawning habitat for them downstream of the dam. Therefore, when that wall was created across their migratory pathway, they couldn't get upstream to spawn. They didn't spawn. Their population died out. This rich history leads us to today's critical issues and conditions. Reconnecting those migratory paths and protecting habitat are vital management goals. Preserving Connecticut's agricultural function is also an important objective. Many partners along the Connecticut are working towards these goals in the face of some significant challenges. The best agricultural soils are in the valley. They're also the most vulnerable to development, the easiest to develop. So we have these cities, the Industrial Revolution, here in the valleys, brought all these people in here and that's, of course, where the prime farmland is, the best farmland is. And that is also where our drinking water aquifers are in these gravel-filled valleys as well. And in the uplands, you know, as we continue to sprawl across the landscape, truncate those natural drainage patterns. The Connecticut River Watershed has about 20,000 miles of streams. You know, we get 44 to 56 inches of rain here, so there's a lot of precipitation, a lot of surface water runoff, ground water runoff, all going into the valleys. So as we have increased our impervious area from development in the uplands, we've seen streams become unraveled, we've seen our wetlands dry up because of changes in hydrology, not able to maintain the base flows to our streams. So those are some of the impacts to development. For many years now, the Nature Conservancy has been concerned about the development's effect on the Connecticut's ecosystem, especially in the Thailand areas. This is one of those last great places because there is a large area of land, such as we see here today, that is still, for the most part, undeveloped. And it's also at the mouth of one of America's largest and greatest rivers, the Connecticut River, that gives rise not only to great beauty and some interesting history culturally, but in terms of nature. The abundance of rare species, all kinds of species of plants and animals, we have large intact natural communities, like the tidal marsh that we're at today. So what makes this place one of the last great places is its large scale and abundance of diverse natural communities and rare and endangered species. There is a very important connection between that upland landscape and these tidal marsh communities and the Connecticut River, where these tidal marsh communities lie along. And in fact, with the Connecticut River, then into Long Island Sound. And what connects all of them is water. The rain that falls down drains through the landscape of these forested communities and into rivers that all flow into these tidal marsh communities. And then through those tidal marsh communities, the rivers flow, the waters flow into the Connecticut River, ultimately into Long Island Sound. And that's what makes this place one of the most important communities in all of these communities. And what has helped maintain these tidal marsh communities is that the uplands that we keep referring to are remarkably intact. But that is all changing. There is tremendous pressure for this area to grow and develop. As access to it has improved and as people's willingness to commute longer distances has grown, there are tremendous pressures to grow. The greatest single threat to this system, to the uplands, to the forest, to the intactness of the forest communities and the many species like interior nesting birds that they support, the threat to the health of these tidal marsh communities and the water quality that feeds and sustains these tidal marshes and even ultimately the threat to the Connecticut River itself is this rapid expansion of growth. It is basically cutting up this landscape that is our greatest threat. Our partner is the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. Within their fisheries restoration efforts they have worked to restore migration paths along the river's main stem and tributaries. We now can work with landowners and dam owners to get fish beyond these barriers. We can either remove the dam which is preferable because it restores native habitat as well as reconnects the migratory pathway. Or if that's not possible to let the fish get up into that habitat. What's important here though is that habitat has to exist in good condition in order to make that worthwhile. We could build a fishway but if the habitat is in poor condition the fish won't go up there and it will be a waste of money. We need to be concerned with particularly loss of habitat through urban sprawl. As population grows as more homes are built more people want to live in towns like this and well meaning people may want to build their home right next to the stream and cut down all of the trees. There's a lot of issues while we're all working on our specialty. Mine happens to be anadromous fish. We all have to educate the people and make sure that they're not biting the hand that feeds them. They're not coming to a place like this for the nature and in the same process hurting that very nature. When we first started this there was a lot of skepticism of how much impact we could have. We've already opened up 100 miles over 100 miles of stream to migratory fish. We're in the process of opening up another 100 miles and I suspect that before I go out to pasture we'll probably open up a third 100 miles. So this is not something that we have to wait indefinitely for. It may be a long time before we're actually angling for salmon but it won't be that long before we see fish spawning in our communities. That in itself leads to other benefits. We're seeing increased numbers of nesting ospreys and one of the reasons is because the ospreys are eating the alewives and the alewives numbers are going up because we're restoring them to habitats like this. And so we're seeing benefits really quickly and we're going to continue to see those benefits. The Connecticut River Watershed Council works across all four states of the watershed in partnership with private and public land managers. The council is the only watershed wide organization. We serve all four states of the Connecticut River. It's 11,260 square miles of watershed. That's a lot of space and yet there is a willingness of people, landowners and citizens to come together and to figure out how to solve the problems that are confronting the environment. We're really focusing on two areas. Fisheries restoration and also land use as it relates to development and sprawl in all reaches of the river. The council is engaging in terms of fisheries restoration in a variety of ways. We have two river stewards who manage our fisheries restoration program and they are working at the grassroots levels in communities and towns across the watershed to install fishways and also to remove dams. There are over a thousand dams in the watershed. The Conti National Fish and Wildlife Refuge manages resources across the watershed yet owns no significant part of that land. Instead private owners are enlisted as management partners through education and cost sharing programs. Congress gave us the purpose of going out and protecting the diversity and abundance of all the species in a 7.2 million acre watershed and so when we looked at that mission and how to accomplish it we immediately saw that if we purchased lands that would help do that we could only purchase 2% of the watershed we didn't feel like that would do much but when we looked at lands that were being managed by state agencies and by watershed watershed lands that were owned to produce water for the city of Boston and whatnot that's more like 22% of the watershed and we felt like if we could help those folks understand the wildlife issues we could get somewhere. Our primary mission deals with migratory species and I think that again what we can do to all the citizens of the watershed but also especially to those landowners that can actually manage their land to help these migratory species is to give them that to give everyone a picture of how their particular town fits into this and look at the landscape and to look at how this ecosystem works and a big part of that is the fish coming up the river and migrating upstream and the birds coming up and using the river what we do try and do is stay very close to our mission which is to protect the rare things rare species and to work with the migratory species and also to look at the health of the ecosystem that we're not worrying about and I think invasive plants is one of those areas where we've seen kind of a vacuum in New England there's not the county weed boards and things that there are in other parts of the country and yet invasive weeds are a huge problem and one of the things that we've been trying to do is reach a lot of people so that they understand that everything that's green isn't good and it's a hard sell frankly to get people to understand what a threat some of these species are. Much of the stewardship responsibility lies in the hands of individual landowners. Increasingly the stewardship ethic has spread to those most closely tied to the land. One of the things that changed my life was reading Aldo Leopold's San County Almanac where he described that the most important part of the land was the part between the cultivated fields and the forest in which a lot of people thought of as wasteland and you see a lot of what farmers call weeds around me here and this is the area in which we find enormous biodiversity and so I got interested at the time I read his book in looking more closely at what was around me. This land is on the upland headwaters of the Eight Mile River. The headwaters of the Eight Mile River run down to the tidelands of the Connecticut River and we've learned that that's one of the most important areas left as a natural area. Between here and there I've worked with other landowners and partners who have worked to get fish ladders. The Ann Andromes fish are now coming back for the first time in 200 years. One of the most amazing changes in my lifetime is the return of the beaver. The beaver took those areas that were ditched, plugged them back up. We know from the soils types what used to be wetlands and they've restored almost exactly to the government maps where all of the wetlands were in historic times and the number of birds that used the little beaver ponds is enormously increased over what it was when I was a child. We need to be a farm in the sense that we produce something for society from the land but certain fields are really difficult especially in New England where most of what we grow is rocks and fields that are surrounding me right now are ones that were traditionally very difficult, often abandoned and would just be woodlands again if we abandoned them completely. What I've tried to do in my own life is to take those fields that weren't working out well for intensive cultivation but to continue to mow them occasionally in the fall and spring to allow the nesting species that I knew as a child whether it's bobble inks and meadowlarks or this lands in meadows. Stewardship is really a word that I first heard when I read Aldo Leopold's works and the understanding that the government can't protect it all for us and in fact if they try to do it they sometimes might love it to death in some areas of the country that's happened in areas that we've tried to protect. Individual landowners really can do a huge amount to help preserve the native species that have historically been here. Across the watershed people are finding ways to decrease the pressure placed on the river's resources. In attempting to balance the needs of an ever increasing population with finite natural resources signs of hope are emerging. One strategy to reduce sprawl has evolved from enlightened urban design. We need livable cities because if we don't live in our cities then as population grows it spreads and it spreads out across all different types of landscapes and where we are we consider quite urbanized and in other parts of the country they're urbanizing and so as we sit around worried about the rate of sprawl increasing we see someone at a loss is to figure out what can we do about it. Northampton, Massachusetts that remembers what to do about it. They have principles here that have been in practice in other places in the world like Europe for millennium. So it's a city that people feel comfortable and safe in. It has a nice blend of commerce on the first floor of the buildings and then residences above that. There's tree line so it's shaded, there are outdoor cafes and it's a city that feels good to be in and one of the things that I think people here remember is that cities aren't dead zones they're places that people need to care about and it makes a place worth living in. We've also really tried to figure out over the long term how are we going to find this balance yes helping to slow down the rate of sprawl by making cities livable is one of it and I think that's something that most of us hadn't really been aware of so that's very positive but also really giving up the notion that we can't work together across political boundaries you know from one town to the next one county to the next one state to the next I really see signs that we're ready to do that in the east and I think across America to really figure out what's the vision that we need to have for how we want to live on the land and how we can put the least pressure on the land. More and more the real power to make positive changes lies with educating and empowering a concerned public creating new allies can move these issues toward a more desirable future so the question is with this great threat of increasing development in this last great place what do we do the greatest difference that we can make is going to come from working with the communities themselves and what we have found is that it is not as though the collective communities and the people that make up these communities don't care to a large extent they don't have a connection to this resource but they still know they love it there is some connection they have but they don't necessarily have the tools or knowledge as to how to make a difference it is complex some of the reasons we're able to do what we're doing is because of the the fact that the residents care about it and there's a certain affluence here that can fund it what generates that income and some of the things that in some ways degrade the environment so that's a balancing act one of the challenges with anadromous fish restoration is some of the species we're dealing with have been regionally extinct for 200 years Atlantic salmon is one example but there are others and so not only do the residents of this town not know of that species their grandparents didn't know about these species isn't just restoring the fish and building structures part of it is re-educating the public about the resource itself and what it is and what it needs but also the value of it conservation since it's not short term has to be managed long term and the idea behind our program is to get that local involvement where once we are no longer there or the federal or state government is no longer there we have a core of people who care about their river their fish so there is a synergy in essence that goes beyond the actual putting in the fish way or taking out the dam that the community takes on and works on through time here in the Connecticut river valley we run from very very wild lands at 4th Connecticut lake at the headwaters near the Canadian border right on down to Long Island Sound through very urbanized areas of Springfield Massachusetts and Hartford, Connecticut to a very rural and really wild estuary so we're tussling with how you work with people and the private sector in preserving our rural landscape in preserving our wild lands and our natural and cultural heritage and the way we seem to be able to do it is through partnership preserving these rural and wild areas presents a challenge and an opportunity for natural resource managers making connections with the people in the land making sure that migratory fish and bird species have a chance to thrive these actions will ensure this unique landscape can remain a place to come the people just really want to do the right thing and so if we can show them what the right thing is and they understand it then they just take right over I think we have a lot to to tell people in other parts of the country as to how government and the private sector can work in partnership and succeed in terms of building their economy as well as preserving the things that we hold dear in our hearts for people in a small town to be able to go out and see shad or salmon or L wives come up their stream and realize that that's not only a connection with the ocean but that's a connection with the past that really connects with the people because frankly that's one of the reasons people live here because they want to live in a rural area that has a functioning ecosystem David Dobbs from Vermont wrote in an article that a watershed that dies of a thousand cuts or that's dying of a thousand cuts you need a thousand band-aids and shields and I think that's really what we're facing in this struggle to maintain water quality and other things is that it used to be that you could just have a point source of pollution going into the river and EPA would come in and fix that with the Clean Water Act and now we're dealing with a lot more subtle problems, the thousand cuts if you will, non-point source pollution and again it's all of us causing these stresses and so you need all of us to affect the solution. There's one very exciting optimistic hopeful thing about all of the challenges that we face and living in a part of the country that has been developed for a long time it was under intensive management before Europeans even got here is the willingness of the people to come together to really figure out what are we dealing with and how are we going to make things right for the short and the long term. You can talk about restoring fish but what we're really doing is we're restoring a portion of the ecosystem.