t's the first week in April, and spring rains have recently washed away the winter snows. Klemens and salamanders both are thinking about vernal pools, those depressions in the Northeast forest that in the spring fill with rain and meltwater and that by July have dried up and vanished. So with wire-mesh minnow traps stacked into the pod on top of the jeep, and with dip nets, hip boots, and snake sticks piled inside, Klemens and I are off to see what's happening in some of the pools of spring.
In their brief coming and going, millions of amphibians move en masse into the vernal pools to mate and lay eggs. These are the nurseries where the young feed and grow before making their metamorphosis and moving onto land. Klemens calls them the energy cells of this forest ecosystem.
"Think about all these leaves in the forest," he says. "They're all energy. All these deciduous leaves. And when deciduous leaves fall on the forest floor they sit there for several years and eventually decompose. But what breaks up leaves best is wetting and drying, and that's exactly what a vernal pool does. It wets and dries, wets and dries. It releases all the organic material, releases all the sun's energy into nutrients. In comes the wood frog to deposit its eggs, the eggs hatch, the young suck up all the nutrients, and the wood frogs transform. Thousands and thousands and thousands -- they take all that energy that came out of the leaves and transfer it back into the ecosystem. So where you see little froggies hopping around, I see energy hopping around.
"And that's why the vernal pools are so important. That's why it's also important to keep the upland habitat around these pools. If you preserve the pools but lose the trees and the leaves that fall into the pools, the pools are useless. We've stripped them of their energy sources. They need to have the leaf fall to feed the frogs. It's like 'The House That Jack Built.' It's terrible. We underestimate the importance of what these things mean to the overall forest."
The particular land we're on our way to see this bright morning is in the town of Dover, 70 miles up the Hudson River from New York City, where some 900 acres are slated for redevelopment. The land is divided into two parcels by a north-south strip that contains New York State Route 22, the tracks of the Metro-North Railroad, and the northern extension of the Great Swamp, one of the most species-rich wetlands in New York State.
There is development-ripe land like this in scores of small towns in New York State and Connecticut, all at risk of being swallowed up into the continued sprawl of the urban corridor running from New York City into New England. These are small communities -- villages, towns, and townships where mostly citizen volunteers run the councils and planning boards; rural districts that until recently had a distaste for federal or state regulations on private property. Their rallying cry, says Klemens, has been "home rule." It is, he says, a notion more myth than reality.
"How much control do you have over your town or your county when the neighboring jurisdiction can build an industrial zone right up to the border of your prime residential area? So the first thing I say is that by planning across municipal boundaries you're actually empowering yourself. You're talking to your neighbor and planning on a scale that resonates beyond a single township or county."
These communities also contain still-vital reserves of nature -- woodlands, forests, wetlands, and the vernal pools that Klemens prizes and that sustain species from amphibians and reptiles to bobcats and rare plants. To Klemens, protecting these places and species was an obvious priority. Yet it was also obvious to him that the idea of protecting nature by means of preserves alone was just as much a myth as home rule.
Since its foundation in 1997, his Metropolitan Conservation Alliance has been working with six municipalities that border the Great Swamp. The aim has been to educate town leaders on land planning and to support their efforts to create corridors of natural habitat that go beyond the borders of individual towns or developments. This has meant persuading both property owners and conservationists to set aside their preconceptions about each other. Klemens and a colleague put together a manual called "Best Development Practices," hoping this would help put everyone on the same page.
