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In an interview last week, Canaan resident and Greenprint director Tim Abbott showed off a series of colorful and detailed maps at his new office in the HVA building in Cornwall Bridge. Through a series of layers, or filters, the "greenprint" offers an interconnected, big-picture view of the region's natural resources, along with conservation success stories and examples of urban sprawl throughout 25 municipalities.
"A greenprint is a series of tools and a way of doing things," Mr. Abbott said. "It's not a blueprint that says, 'If you follow this map everything will work just out fine,' because it's only as good as the information that goes into it. Mapping is a component."
The other component of the Greenprint project, according to HVA's executive director, Lynn Werner, is a not-so-simple matter of pulling people together. "It's a partnership project of people, and that's the thing that will drive the project and has driven the project," she said.
In developing the map, HVA and the Trust for Public Land (TPL) conducted a series of town meetings throughout the region over the past year, asking area land trusts, municipal officials and others for input, Mr. Abbott said.
On Tuesday, Greenprint Advisory Board member Eliot Wadsworth explained, "It became obvious ... that there was a stampeding pace of development." Owner and president since 1975 of the Litchfield-based White Flower Farm, Mr. Wadsworth provided the seed money to jumpstart the Greenprint project.
"There are a lot of smart, interested people looking at the issue of land preservation," he said, "but there didn't seem to be a central organizing intelligence of the process so that ... the most important pieces, which sometimes straddle more than one town or more than one ecosystem, would get done."
But a "greenprint" is hardly an original concept-the TPL has employed the model over the last five years, in places such as King County, Wash., and in states from Georgia to California, according to that group's Connecticut state director, Tim Northrop. Mr. Northrop has been very involved in the Litchfield Hills project, which includes Sherman, which lies at the northern tip of Fairfield County.
He said his group's partnership with HVA combines the mapping expertise of both organizations, along with the trust's fund-raising and financing resources.
"The first step is the conservation vision," Mr. Northrop said, explaining that the major fund-raising effort to pay for preservation projects will kickoff sometime this fall.
The maps provide the vision.
"It's a way of recognizing that open space conservation needs to be thought of both at the very local level and at a slightly larger level," Mr. Abbott said. "Because often the threats that are changing the landscape ... are bigger than an individual town and, in the Northwest Corner, than a state boundary."
The Greenprint project also brings known characteristics into sharper focus. It shows, for instance, that Sharon is well fortified by conserved private land, and so is the area around the town of Litchfield, thanks to 4,000 acres of preserved land owned by the White Memorial Foundation.
Bethlehem, though endowed with much working farmland, is hardly protected at all from the sprawl spilling out of Watertown. And, ridgelines have withstood development pressure better than lowlands-on one map a big swath of green, the key code color for private or publicly protected land, runs from Macedonia Brook State Park in Kent up through the Housatonic Meadows State Forest in Cornwall and on to the Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk, along mostly higher elevations.
Tan denotes parcels that are greater than 100 acres, but are not protected, and that color dots much of the county. "If you're trying to think about where the best conservation bang for the buck might be, that's a good filter to start with," Mr. Abbott said.
"I frankly worry about the communities that have a fairly low percentage of protected space and are not self-regulating themselves with some up-to-date zoning-and that have some large parcels in them, because those are the areas I think that are likely to experience change more rapidly," he added.
But in some ways the county has done a remarkable job of meeting the goals set in 1998 by former governor John Rowland, who proposed preserving 21 percent of Connecticut's land as open space by the year 2023.
As a whole, Litchfield County exceeds that goal, Ms. Werner noted, but with substantial variations. "Some towns have 30 to 40 percent conserved lands; other towns have below 5 percent," she explained.
Where, and in some cases whether, to conserve more land is the Greenprint project's goal. "That's the next step of analysis and that really has to be locally determined," Ms. Werner said. "It's got to be up to these communities. That's the challenge."
The maps of the Greenprint project are works in progress, both Mr. Abbott and Ms. Werner cautioned. The group hopes to solicit enough input about the maps to complete them and have an official coming out for the project May 20 at the White Flower Farm.
Before coming to HVA, Mr. Abbott ran his own environmental consulting firm, Greensleeves Environmental Services, and prior to that he was a program director of the Berkshire Taconic Landscape Program for The Nature Conservancy.
The Greenprint project may, however, more closely resemble his much earlier work, when, as a Fulbright Scholar and employee of The Forum for Integrated Resource Management, he did community-based conservation work in the impoverished African nation of Namibia (where he also met Viv LaBerge, a Peace Corps volunteer and now his wife). The hands-on-the-ground approach and sensitivity to local knowledge he learned there will be put to good use here.
To conserve resources that overlap townships and private lands, Mr. Abbott explained, " ... people have to benefit and feel that those things are valuable or they don't take care of them."
To attend today's event, which begins at 4 p.m., make a reservation by calling Mary Nemerov at 203-777-7367, or for more information about Greenprint, contact Mr. Abbott at HVA's office at 860-672-6678.
