Poems by Richard LeBlond

A Hard Concept to Sell

by Richard LeBlond

From Canary Summer 2022

Richard lives in Richlands, a small farming town in eastern North Carolina gradually being eaten whole by Jacksonville, a city that used to be 15 miles away but has grown ever closer as it transforms cropland into suburbs.

He was the manager of a small municipal airport in southeastern Massachusetts. The local chamber of commerce wanted more and longer runways. The FAA wanted facilities added to improve safety. The local conservation commission had erected a Great Wall of Paperwork around nearby wetlands to keep out the proposed extensions and improvements. And now a state natural resource office was asking the airport manager to preserve an open grassland – eminently suitable to accommodate the pressure to grow – for the sake of a rare butterfly and a few endangered plant species.

It was enough to make the man tear his hair out, had time left him any. The state office had sent him a document about the obscure and beleaguered creatures – obscure because of inconspicuousness and rarity, beleaguered because that rarity was an apparent consequence of loss of habitat. The state, or at least this small portion of the state, wanted him to become an advocate for the preservation of the upland tract before his governing board, the airport commission.

“That’s a hard concept to sell,” he said to the state officials when they arrived for the pre-arranged site visit. The pressures on him were all going in the other direction. He needed more land, not less.

“Why should I consider doing this?” he asked curtly, visibly annoyed at this interruption of his normal schedule by a youthful contingent of bureaucratic bug and blossom savers.

(I was present at these proceedings, and have omitted places and names. But they could have taken place – in fact, are taking place – almost everywhere.)

The state officials explained that protecting this habitat would protect the state’s biological diversity, that the more native species present in an ecosystem, the healthier that ecosystem tends to be.

“Who benefits from this?” the manager asked. Everyone, replied the state; future generations. The manager thought about that for a moment, apparently weighing that benefit to future generations against the current generation’s clamor for expanded and improved facilities. “That’s a hard concept to sell,” he repeated.

The state representatives countered that less than five percent of all the world’s plants had been researched for their food, medicinal, and other human use potential, how plant-based medicines alone were a $6 billion a year industry, and how plant species extinction worldwide was approaching one an hour.

The manager thought about this. “Are any of these going extinct?” he asked, waving the state document. They could be, was the reply. The butterfly and two of the plant species were restricted to southern New England and Long Island, and their largest remaining populations were in this part of the state. If they could be saved, this was the best place to do it.

He agreed to visit the site within the airport complex and see for himself what had brought this group of experts to his backyard. We clambered into the cab and back of the airport’s pickup and bounced along a dirt road, around a runway, and into the multi-usable grasslands. For those of us on the side of preservation, it was like visiting a patient who had been diagnosed as having a fatal yet curable disease, but the cure was in short supply.

Suddenly, the manager stuck his head out the window of the cab to yell at those of us in the back of the truck: “Where are they? I’ll run ‘em down.” Oddly, it seemed positive, uttered in a tone that expressed a mix of good and bad humor. He might have been saying that even though he had no intention of backing down from his original position, he had nothing against us personally. He trusted us to interpret his threat correctly, that even though it was made in jest, it was nonetheless an expression of the difficult position he was in, a position our arguments were trying to make even more difficult.

No sooner had he said this than the rare butterfly was seen. The pickup stopped and we all jumped out, including the manager. He rushed over to where the zoologist among us had gone in pursuit. The manager’s interest was sudden, instinctual. It had knocked down his guard.

Then he tried to find a few butterflies on his own. I think he was amazed that the contents of an arcane and partly Latinized bureaucratic document had come to life. It raised a cautious hope that the airport manager might consider arguing for the butterfly’s landing rights.

He was less impressed by the plants. At best, they were landscape. At worst, they fueled wildfires, obscured landing lights, and cracked runways. But he concluded the visit by asking the state people to prepare a slick document full of attractive pictures and dire predictions that he could present to his commission. It was, after all, a hard concept to sell.

© Richard LeBlond

Inadmissible Evidence

by Richard LeBlond

From Canary Summer 2022

The wooded parcel on the Upper Cape had been purchased by a developer. But a group of residents wanted to keep the land in its present wooded state. To do this they needed weapons in addition to the arguments about the pace of development and the need for open space and aquifer protection. It would be helpful if the parcel itself were special, containing something of significance to hurl at regulatory bodies, something that would forge an alliance with an agency interested in significant things.

The parcel had been pastureland from the 19th century into the early years of the 20th, when the farm was abandoned. The land had lain idle since, at least in terms of human use. Like most abandoned land on Cape Cod, the pasture was eventually claimed first by the pines and scrub oak, and later by the taller oaks. Several large pines remained on the parcel, but the land now belonged to the oaks above and the huckleberry below. It was, by today’s standards of significance, an insignificant habitat, and would fall flat at the feet of the regulatory body.

The pasture it used to be could well have been significant. Pastureland is grassland, and grasslands on Cape Cod often are reservoirs of the very rare, like the now-lost heath hen. A member of the grouse family, the heath hen once ranged from southern New Hampshire to Virginia. It was so over-hunted that by 1835 it was only found on Martha’s Vineyard. There it depended on grassy sandplain habitat kept open by naturally occurring fires, which prevented succession to forest. From the cover of low pitch pines and scrub oak, both fire-adapted trees, the hen foraged in the adjacent pastures and heaths. The bird was last seen in 1932.

No sandplain rarity will find a home in our insignificant woodland parcel. The pasture is long gone, and any lingering scrub oak openings have been closed by the white and black oak canopy.

This does not mean the woodland has run out of possibilities. Tucked away in its hollows, where the soil is moist, dark, and rich, are pockets of young beech, hickory, and holly. Eventually, these trees could dominate this woodland along with the oaks, and a new order of groundcover – including orchids, ferns, and clubmosses – would replace the monotonous huckleberry. This community also has its share of rarities and is itself a significant habitat. All our woodland parcel needs to produce it is time.

But time isn’t on this woodland’s side. The fate of this land won’t be decided by its history or its potential natural riches, but by today’s economics. Because we value this woodland for its commercial potential and not as an evolving forest, we not only ignore its possibilities; we lose them. It isn’t just the trees that are replaced but also the soil and its seed bank.

Unlike the forest’s recovery from the pasture phase, it will not return from residential and commercial development. These are the final uses.