Joshua’s Trust is excited to announce Professor Robert M. Thorson (Thor) as the featured speaker at our 60th Annual Meeting on Saturday, April 18th. After a reception and brief business meeting, Thorson will give a talk titled “Drylands and Wetlands: Legacies of Human Ecology”
We hope you are able to join Joshua’s Trust staff, trustees, and volunteers at our Annual Meeting to reflect on & celebrate another successful year of protecting land and preserving heritage!
April 18 | 4:00–6:00pm | Holiday Hill Day Camp
RSVP HereTalk Description
In early New England history, freshwater wetlands were considered miasma to be loathed, drained, and converted to more productive use. By the early 1970s, however, the values of freshwater wetlands in New England had been recognized and they began to be protected by state and federal regulations, even though the majority had either been created or altered by agroecology and hydropower development. Much the same can be said about New England’s gridwork of drystone walls estimated at 200,000 linear miles within an area of about 50,000 square miles. What has turned out to be the region’s signature landform resulted from the same human agencies at wetlands. But with respect to wildlife habitat, they are complementary drylands whose ecological functions as volumes, areas, and lines enrich habitat diversity in ways that are only just beginning to be investigated. For decades, Professor Thorson has been trying to make a peer-reviewed science out of stone walls as part of a vision for more effective conservation and management. This talk will be a status report on that emerging science with specific attention drawn to their inventory, classification, and interpretation on Joshua’s Trust properties.
Speaker Profile
Robert M. Thorson (Thor) is a Midwestern native, turned Northwestern geologist, turned Northeastern academic. Since 1984 he’s been a resident of Mansfield and has served on many of its committees. For Joshua’s Trust, he’s co-coordinated its Nature-Environment-Science reading group with Kristine Thorson since 2016, and has guided its annual Earth Day walk since 2021. Currently, he’s a Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Connecticut with a research focus on the link between New England’s landscape, archaeology, history, ecology, and literature. His work as a journalist was recently featured by the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian. A three-part Ken Burns-PBS reframing of Henry David Thoreau will air nationwide on March 30-31 and locally screen with a panel discussion on April 8 at UConn His most recent book, The Walden Experiments, is upcoming at Princeton University Press.
Links
Stone Wall Initiative – Information Website
Stone by Stone – 2002 Book
Stone Wall Science – Academic Minute Audio
Manual for the Inventory and Description of Stone Walls – How to Do This
Conserving the Historic Stone Walls of New England – Recommended Process
K.M. Johnson and W. B. Ouimet – Physical Properties and spatial controls of stone walls
Taxonomy and Nomenclature for the Stone Domain in New England – Scholarly
Stone Pavilion Project – UConn’s forgotten resource.
Colonial Impacts to Wetlands in Lebanon, Connecticut – Documents the Human Agency
