In the Woods Again

Of all the conclusions to all the lectures delivered by the illustrious and mischievous Jacob Holzberg-Pill in his Environmental Science class at the Woolman Semester, the most memorable was this: “We must map this land to understand it, steward it, and make Woolman truly sustainable.” The subject at hand? Agroforestry and the ways in which indigenous peoples managed the land to make it most productive for humans. Agroforestry is highly complex; the wrong technique can have disastrous effects, the right technique can save an entire species.

At the beginning of the project, I had lofty goals: map ALL of the trails, mark the property boundaries, find the student build “Ithaca,” and make trail markers. However my greatest personal goal was to become more familiar with the seemingly massive woods that lend Woolman much of its beauty and mystique. With these goals, my friend and companion Brylie and I set off on our great adventure. We spent countless hours walking the trails, often mapping them multiple times due to unreliable technology or personal error. Many trials marked our heroic journey. We bushwacked through fields of poison oak, debated the importance of trails outside the Woolman parcel, avoided taciturn neighbors, and tangled with somewhat cumbersome technology. In one extreme instance we bushwacked out to the southeast corner of a large Woolman parcel to mark the boundary and began our return hike in the cover of darkness. Brylie slipped and dropped our tracking device, leaving us with only a compass and our intuition to navigate back to campus. Thankfully our forestry skills were proficient enough for the task, and we managed to return (mostly) unharmed.

To what extent did we accomplish our goals? We managed to map many of the major trails, marked several important corners of the Woolman parcel, and found Ithaca, but we decided that creating trail markers was not the most important part of the project. I believe that the raw data we collected was the greatest accomplishment of the project because it will be so useful to future projects involving the Woolman forest. The rough map produced with the data is only a pre-cursor to future student maps that will be more accurate and detailed thanks to the experience we garnered. Brylie will be able to more efficiently train students interested in the GIS (Geographic Information System) Project, and those students will have fewer initial hurdles to leap. Eventually they will not need to worry about things such as marking the property boundaries, they will be able to focus on things like species succession. The GIS project will become more than just a pipe dream of a few curious Woolmanites, it will become the backbone of agroforestry and sustainability here at the Woolman Semester.