When Walker and I settled in the Berkshires, a strong conservation ethic grabbed hold of us. We began a decades-long conversation about land protection. With degrees in law and business, and actively engaged in art, Walker thought inside and outside the box at once. As for me, I had long believed that animals should be wild and free. We plotted how conservation easements could be used creatively. We looked to northern New England, where land was owned in larger tracts, forested land often hit hard by the timber industry. We theorized that these degraded landscapes could become the wildlands of the future.

In 1991, Walker set up a small foundation — Sweet Water Trust — whose mission would be to initiate conservation of territory large and diverse enough for wild animals to live free lives. My role would be to implement our vision on the ground. With our first intern, Kathy Orlando, we developed a theoretical model which we called a "Forever Wild easement", borrowing the name from the "forever wild" clause of the Adirondacks Forest Preserve. All our land protection projects must include this extra layer of protection. We sent our model easement to ecologists around the country, seeking comment, and posted it on our website. The thinking: one conservation entity would own the protected land and another organization would hold a Forever Wild easement over it; thus two conservation groups would safeguard the same land, in case future conservation landholders changed their intentions. Without strong protections through succeeding generations of ownership, the proliferating forests of today could well become the timberland of tomorrow. I headed north to figure it out on the ground.

New England had been worked hard since colonial days when The Crown imported as much timber as possible, the British having over-exploited their own forests in centuries past. In New England, the timber culture continued to predominate into the late 1980s. I listened and learned. Some said the wildlands approach to conservation could not be done. A few forestry advocates spun an aggressive, self-serving fallacy: that New England's "working forests" would neither grow nor prosper without being cut. Several large non-profits spent time and money aggressively promoting the viewpoint that conservation equals land protected with a forestry plan; that protecting “idle and non-productive” forests was wrong-headed, even bad for forest health.

By the late 1980s, change was literally in the air. Industrial pollutants pumped into the atmosphere were affecting the earth’s climate, the temperature of its oceans, the ancient ice at the poles. In 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came into being, to coordinate science with government action. In 1989 Bill McKibben from Middlebury College published The End of Nature. Research kicked into high gear: acid rain, atmospheric CO2 and carbon sequestration were measured and analyzed. Science led to a new reckoning: that forests, soils, waters, plants, animals, and the atmosphere were inextricably linked and critical to the health of the planet.

The journal Wild Earth was one of providence’s special gifts to me. It called for conservation founded on the principles of deep ecology. It advocated for biocentric management of public lands in the West. Degraded land could be rewilded. Big, wild, and connected. Yes! It seemed we needed such a wilderness network in the Northeast, though conservation here would be a different beast than advocacy for wilderness on public lands. It would need be built from the ground up, private land bought on the open market. We "Nor'easters" would need to tackle politics, find partners, raise money, think big, plan on a landscape-scale. With Sweet Water Trust's help, Wild Earth published "Wild, Wild EAST" as the theme of their Spring 2001 issue. We also contributed articles to several subsequent issues, on Forever Wild easements and mapping in the Northeast.

SWT went to San Francisco and then to Chile to study wilderness conservation as practiced by late Doug Tompkins, Kris McDivitt Tompkins, and the Foundation for Deep Ecology. We were seeking partnerships to fund land purchases. The Tompkins were not interested. Viewed from a high peak of the lushly forested Chilean Andes, New England would surely look like anemic forestland succumbing to death by a thousand cuts.

In Maine, we tried to interest Roxanne Quimby, a founder of Burt’s Bees, in a working partnership. She also had no interest, embroiled at that time in controversy over the lands she owned, which eventually became the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument.

We never found a big pot of money for acquisition, which was, in hindsight, a good thing. Sweet Water Trust’s seed money would help launch projects and motivate other financial support. Most importantly, it was local people who became vital for these projects, for raising money and helping to secure state funding. New Englanders became part of the bedrock constituency for wilderness, led by many courageous voices. The New England culture was changing.

Our work necessarily shifted to states with sympathetic governors, like John Dean in Vermont in our early days. In Maine, Governor Angus King protected large swaths of land — all with easements that encouraged timber management. It was John Baldacci (2003-2011), who uttered the word that I had never before heard a New England official say: “Wilderness.” With this new administration we intensified our work in interior Maine, a landscape long on clear-cuts, short on wild land.

The most vexing problem was finding those groups capable of either owning core preserves or holding Forever Wild easements. Most land trusts and conservation groups did not have the cultural history or the resources to own large areas of wildlands or to hold and enforce Forever Wild easements. We helped several groups build capacity, though sometimes Sweet Water Trust needed to take temporary ownership of core reserve areas. In 2001 we joined with several other conservationists to form the Northeast Wilderness Trust, whose mission would be to protect natural lands as forever wild. NEWT pledges that every landscape it protects today will be an old-growth forest of tomorrow. Eventually we were able to convey our core reserves and Forever Wild easements to NEWT and other groups throughout the region.

In the end we worked with more than 90 partner organizations, including our work in Quebec with the prodigiously talented Terri Monahan, a contractor with the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Terri's beat was the Sutton Mountains, an extension of the Greens in Vermont. Several hundred wild miles south lies the Berkshires

Dr. Mark Anderson is one of New England’s great natural treasures. For decades he has worked for the Eastern Regional Office of The Nature Conservancy, bringing ecological analysis to the forefront of conservation planning in Eastern North America. It was our good fortune to work with Mark and TNC to design and publish a pamphlet promoting Core Reserves, which Sweet Water Trust distributed broadly. From Mark's analysis, SWT adopted a policy of a 10,000-acre minimum project design, with the potential to expand and connect with other core reserves. We contributed new conservation data to TNC’s database.

Dan Morse, Geographic Information System Analyst, presided over the TNC office of GIS map programmers. Watching him was like peeking at the man behind the curtains in the Wizard of Oz. I loved that room and those programmers. It was a really good day when I could hang out there to watch data morph into layers of beautiful ink color. Maps are a compelling way to communicate with potential partners.

I became keen on mapping "protected areas". What lands were protected, and how. I was aggravated by conservation land maps colored the same shade of green, whether timberland, recreational parks, or wilderness. Useless! The Department of the Interior had established the National Gap Analysis Program to help assess how conservation areas are managed. Gap programs assign biodiversity management categories from 1 to 4, with Status 1 referring to those areas with permanent protection of natural land cover from conversion i.e., no timbering, no roads. 1a: wilderness. Status 2: more permissive recreation, light timbering, suppression of natural processes. Status 3: development is prohibited but extractive uses like timbering or mining are allowed. Sweet Water Trust promoted the mapping of these Gap status codes across northern New England.

Gradually the log jam that had impeded wilderness from flowing had broken. Large organizations were beginning to work at growing wilderness in New England. An exciting time in the North country! It was the right time for me to step away. Sweet Water Trust had created core reserves, and helped protect more than 300,000 wild acres. Now my improvisational zeal began to seem less useful; what was required was a lawyer with knowledge of conservation and an aptitude for administration, skills I lacked. We hired the talented conservation lawyer Eve Endicott, and I retired. Walker Buckner, too, recently retired as the Trustee; he changed Sweet Water Trust to the Sweet Water Fund, which now resides at the Northeast Wilderness Trust working still to protect wildlands.