Sometime twelve to twenty thousand years ago, this familiar boulder ceased its laborious inching along under a retreating wall of ice and came to rest on a south-facing cliff between what would become Mohegan and Nipmuc territory.
I can’t see our future. I can barely see my own past. And this after seventy-plus years and some truth-driven autobiographical work. But I can show you something that isn’t there. In this pencil drawing, deep snow covers Wolf Rock and its bluff, doesn’t it? Like my “snow”, the future is blank. We involve ourselves in creating it, as if our energetic labors are more than the mere fluttering of butterfly wings. We can’t help ourselves. As artists do (usually with more awareness), we are working with negative space.
At Joshua’s Trust our actions don’t permanently save anything within our 5000 or so acres of nature. What we protect is a canvas where plants and animals may continually re-create themselves. A lovingly initiated Joshua’s Trust artwork. Subject to geological and meteorological changes that are out of our hands, ordinary Connecticut woodlands are rapidly evolving. As meteorologist Edward Lorenz wrote in 1963 (of a seagull, not a butterfly), small changes have big results. Chaos theory, right? The ripple effect. “The loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats…is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.”: E. O. Wilson. Some spring far in the future, unbeknownst to us in a vernal pool deep in our forests, on an island, if you would, a salamander in her nursery who may have otherwise gone extinct – now with one DNA mutation – may successfully reproduce.
No, not the earth, nor our gentle green tract right here, will ever go back to the way I remember it from the last century. Our efforts to save these hills and dales are a way to give it a chance, in its glorious randomness and flexibility, to save itself. What you do for this conservation organization named after a Mohegan sachem who may have had the very same hopes, is consequential. Nature continually heals itself; we just need to keep giving her the chance. I can’t see our future, but I am the butterfly’s wings. You are too. Keep on flapping.
~George Jacobi