BATTENKILL WATERSHED CONFERENCE

The Battenkill Conservancy-New York is sponsoring a conference on the Battenkill Watershed -- "Preserving a Place of the Heart: Managing Change in the Battenkill Watershed". The conference will be held on Saturday, April 7, 2001 at the Greenwich High School, Greenwich, New York . The conference program will run from 9 am to 5 pm. The registration fee is $20.00 and includes lunch provided by caterer Susan Quillio.

The purposes of the Battenkill Conference are to give people an idea of the tools and concepts that are available to insure that changes in the Battenkill region are desirable and will improve the quality of life and to also encourage residents and municipal officials in watershed towns and neighboring communities to collaborate and work together to build and develop a sustainable future.

Walter Cudnohufsky will keynote the conference and speak on working together to plan the regions's future. Before and after lunch conference speakers will address key issues including strengthening village centers and addressing rural sprawl (James Howard Kunstler), enhancing fisheries and aquatic habitats (Jeff Reardon), protecting open space and scenic resources (Harry Dodson), and preserving farmland (Tom Daniels). Before adjourning and wrapping up, the keynote and issues speakers will join the audience in a discussion of collaborating to shape our region's future. The conference will include a post-program reception for municipal officials and will provide them with the opportunity to meet and speak with the conference presentors.

The Battenkill Conference addresses village and town growth and preservation, open space, agriculture, and fisheries resources. This is because when polled in a recent survey, watershed area residents said that preserving the rural and small town character of the region is of the highest importance to them and because changes involving these areas are especially critical as they can threaten that character.

We are thrilled to be able to have such well known, recognized and respected persons address these watershed area issues. Walter Cudnohufsky is 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. Hie directs a small but diverse practice in Ashfield, Massachusetts which has been involved in, among other things, community vision planning and community planning and growth efforts strategies.

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, Professor Daniels was the director of the nationally recognized farmland preservation program in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He has 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 the co-author of 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).

Harry Dodson is a registered landscape architect and founder and senior partner of Dodson Associates of Ashfield, Massachusetts, a landscape preservation, site design, and planning firm. He is also an adjunct professor of landscape architecture and regional planning at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and has lectured widely. Dodson 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. Mr. Dodson graduated from Harvard College and has a master's degree in landscape architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design

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.

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, he was Watershed Program Director for the Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association in rural coastal Maine. Mr. Reardon 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 years prior to beginning his career in river conservation.

Return the Registration Form by March 27, 2001 to attend the conference. For additional information about the conference, please review the Conference Announcement or contact us at bcny@crisny.org.

"Preserving a Place of the Heart: Managing Change in the Battenkill Watershed" is being made possible in part by funding to the Battenkill Conservancy-New York by 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.