What is a watershed?

· It's a piece of geography defined by the high points of land. Rain falling outside the line that connects the dots flows away. Rain falling inside the line flows to just one river.

· It's all the features of the landscape that lie inside the line that connects the dots - hills and mountains, forests and woodlots, fields and hedgerows, lakes and ponds, wetlands and tributary streams, and just one river.

· It's the communities that are located inside the line that connects the dots, communities with the historic buildings their founders raised, with their schools and businesses. Their pasts and their presents are intimately connected to just one river.

· A watershed is the people that once lived and that today live inside the line that connects the dots. It's the hopes they have for their children and the dreams they have for themselves. And like the line that connects the dots, they're all connected to just one river.

Our river is the Battenkill.

Nearly every watershed resident polled in a recent survey said preserving the rural and small town character of the region is of the highest importance. But some changes threaten the watershed's rural and small town environment, changes like

· New houses appearing in former farm fields or breaking up formerly intact forest tracts

· Unplanned developments eating up open spaces on village outskirts

· Center village businesses failing as chain stores move into outlying strips and along major roads

· Water systems being put on "boil" orders

· Lakeside septic systems failing and lakes filling with algae every July

Preserving a Place of the Heart: Managing Change in the Battenkill Watershed will provide tools to build our future together. It will help residents and town officials in watershed towns and neighboring communities insure that the changes that lie ahead are desirable, that they will improve the quality of life for the people that live inside the line that connects the dots, the line that encompasses just one river.

Agenda

Saturday April 7, 2001

Greenwich High School, Greenwich NY
 

(events take place in the high school auditorium unless otherwise noted)
 

9 a.m.: Registration and refreshments (auditorium lobby)
 

9:30 a.m. Welcome and Keynote Address

Our Watershed: Working Together to Plan Its Future

   Walter Cudnohufsky is a landscape architect-planner directing a small but diverse practice in Ashfield, Massachusetts. Some examples of his firm's work include landscape preservation, community vision planning, master and site planning, historic master planning and landscape character assessment. As the founder and former twenty-year director of the Conway (Massachusetts) School of Landscape Design, he is a dedicated educator speaker, and contributor to many professional publications.
 

10:15 a.m. Our Landscapes: Farmland

Tom Daniels is a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University at Albany-SUNY and a consultant to several state and local governments and non-profit organizations. From 1989 to 1998, Tom was the director of the nationally recognized farmland preservation program in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Tom holds a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Oregon State University and has taught rural and small town planning at Iowa State and Kansas State Universities. He is co-author of titles including Holding Our Ground: Protecting America's Farms and Farmland (Island Press). His latest book is When City and Country Collide: Managing Growth in the Metropolitan Fringe (Island Press, 1999).
 

11 a.m. Break
 

11:15 a.m. Our Landscapes: Open Space and Scenic Resources

Harry Dodson is a registered landscape architect and principal of Dodson Associates of Ashfield, Massachusetts, a landscape preservation, site design, and planning firm. He graduated from Harvard College and has a master's degree in landscape architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is adjunct professor of landscape architecture and regional planning at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and has lectured widely. Harry is a founder of the Franklin Land Trust and is co-author of Dealing with Change in the Connecticut Valley and contributing author of Rural by Design.
 

Noon: Lunch (cafeteria)
 

1 p.m.: Our Communities: Preserving Village Centers and Managing Sprawl

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere, and eight novels. (His The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition is forthcoming in fall 2001.) His nonfiction focuses on what he calls America's "tragic landscape" and what can be done to heal it. Mr. Kunstler's work appears regularly in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and op-ed page. He is a former staff writer for Rolling Stone and is a writer and reporter for a number of newspapers. In addition to being an author, he is a lecturer and has spoken at major American colleges and universities and has appeared before many professional organizations.
 

1:45 p.m. Break

2 pm: Our River: Fisheries and Aquatic Habitats

Jeff Reardon is New England Conservation Director for Trout Unlimited (TU), a national organization with a membership of 125,000 whose mission is "to conserve and restore cold water fisheries and their watersheds." Prior to joining TU, Jeff was Watershed Program Director for the Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association in rural coastal Maine. Jeff has worked on a number of partnership projects to protect or restore rivers by finding consensus between resource advocates, local community interests, and town governments. He graduated from Williams College with a degree in biology in 1989, and worked as a high school science teacher for seven ears prior to beginning his career in river conservation.

2:45 p.m. Break

3 p.m: Our Watershed: Collaborating to Shape our Future

Messrs. Cudnohufsky, Daniels, Dodson, Kunstler and Reardon will join the audience in this discussion.

4 p.m.: Wrap-up and Adjourn

4:15 p.m.-5pm: Reception for town and village officials (cafeteria)

Directions to Greenwich High School

Greenwich is located on the Battenkill and on NY Route 29 in central Washington County. On Route 29 in the village center, go north on Gray Street, opposite the public library and Academy Street, one block to School Street. Take School Street (a left) to the high school, the large building on the rise at the end of the street.

The Battenkill Watershed Conference is being made possible in part by grants from the May K. Houck Foundation and Rural New York, a program administered by the Open Space Institute with the support of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation, Philip Morris Companies Inc., the Woodcock Foundation, the New York Times Company Foundation, and the Northern New York Community Foundation.

The Battenkill Conservancy-New York is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1990 to preserve and enhance the Battenkill Watershed. Visit our web site at http://www.crisny.org/not-for-profit/bcny