Personal Reflections

Personal Reflections
J. Glenn Eugster

My earliest connections to conservation came before my education or my profession. My Mother's parents were farm workers from Poland. My Father's parents were dairy farmers from Switzerland. For as long as I can remember my Mother gardened and Father did landscaping for pleasure, as well as profit in a home we lived on the North Fork within New York's "East End". My parents lived where they did because it had open space, farms, rural life and diverse water bodies for fishing, swimming, and beachcombing.

During my childhood I always had some type of boat and would wander up, down and around the tidal marshes of Brushes Creek and into the Great Peconic Bay. If I close my eyes I can still feel the sun beating on my shoulders and the smell of the salt and the muck, as I dipped for blue crabs among the wetlands, fiddler crabs and waterfowl. Standing in my flat-bottom boat, I could feel the temperature of the stream change as I maneuvered from the main channel to the tidal flats.

We lived adjacent to the "Potato Landscapes" of the North Fork and they offered a distinct contrast to the forests and riparian corridors that laced through and linked the region. Miles of precisely plowed, nearly flat fields, green in the spring and summer, brown in the fall and the winter.

Over time I watched the shellfish of the Bay and the Creek die and our recreation lake close because of unrestricted farm runoff. The groundwater levels in our hand-operated pump dropped as more and more new residents tapped the sole-source aquifer and farms everywhere began to grow houses.

For me the evolution of conservation, and my involvement in the movement, has been a ramble based first on discovery and then design. Surprisingly, it has progressed in a hierarchy that led me from the influences of my family and the landscape of my youth to education in horticulture and nursery management. From horticulture I was introduced to small-scale landscape design and community-based landscape architecture. Landscape architecture took me to broader ecological planning with a focus on watersheds, cultural landscapes, metropolitan regions and large ecosystems, working regionally, nationally and internationally.

Ecological planning expanded my conservation practice to view this work holistically with an appreciation for how people and nature are interrelated. It exposed me to ecology, and human ecology, and the need to recognize, understand and respect the values of people, economies, living resources, and natural values and functions.

My evolution has taken me from being a part of a small conservation business, into local, regional and State governments, deep into the recesses of federal government, and eventually into sophisticated coalitions of governments and private groups from the U.S. and around the world.

As an eight year-old I once dragged a wagon filled with vegetables up and down North Oakwood Road in Laurel, NY. I would sell fresh fruit and vegetables grown nearby on a relative's farm to neighbors. Never in my wildest dreams would I imagine that the road I walked then was to converge with the roads that were to follow.