The subtitle to Nature and Us is A Symbiotic Relationship - one that is mutually beneficial. For billions of years, nature got along just fine without the human species. Is it presumptuous to assume that we have given nature a hand? Well, for quite a while man has messed up what nature presented to us. Thus there are now countless opportunities to undo some of the blights that have been introduced by our fellow inhabitants of this planet.
Nature and Us describes the evolution of our neglected woods with negligible wildlife into a rejuvenated forest where wildlife thrives. As the forest evolves, so does Dick - from a research and development engineer who is uncomfortable in the woods into a person who feels an ongoing kinship with the land. The book covers a span of three decades - from the time Dick purchased the land in his mid thirties as a financial investment, to now as a senior citizen with the woods helping define who he is. Even though the property has increased many times in value, it failed as a financial investment because selling the land now would be like selling his soul.
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A half century before Dick purchased the land most of the best trees were timbered, and the land left to recover from the plunder. When the book begins, balsam fir trees had declared victory, but it was not a satisfactory victory. In many parts of the forest the trees were so close together that neither man nor beast could enjoy walking in the woods. For that matter, birds avoided the area too.Over the following three decades the forest metamorphasized due to selective timbering followed by lots of tender loving care. In the process, trails, roads, ponds and a field were created, and the land became a registered Tree Farm. Two marriages terminated, three houses were built, and Dick Daniels met his coauthor Sandy Cole.
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The land is now protected by a conservation easement, donated to the Society for the Protection of New Hampsire Forests, so that its glacier produced esker will remain for centuries to come. Quite a while ago, we stopped managing the trees for economic gain. For the rest on the time we are here, which we hope will be decades more, there will be no more biomass tree harvests. The trees are now maturing nicely without drastic surgeries. I hope the same will be true for us.
The book is available via the web. The " Preliminaries" link yields the Dedication, Preface, and Acknowledgements. The Nature and Us link leads to the Table of Contents and all the Chapters. Hint: if you want to go to a specific page number (e.g. number 40) in a PDF document, "CTRL n" and enter the page number when prompted.
WARNING - the PDF file is over 1.5 Meg. If you have a dial-up internet link, the Adobe reader may take 15 minutes to display the book.
Our property contains many interesting features: an esker, erratic, trails/roads, field, pond,
and treed swamps. The genesis of these features is desribed in Nature and Us. Virtual tours of
the features can be taken by using an
index or links embedded in two maps: a
1999 map of the property or a
current map of the property.
Visitor Number