By Dr. Robert Thorson
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Rachel Carson (1907-1964), and Sam Dodd (1921-) shared a love of nature.
Sam who?
Unless I misunderstood what he told me last week during lunch, Sam grew up in in rural New Jersey, moving to Mansfield in the early 1960s. There, he had a medical career, raised baby-boomer kids and began a lifetime of volunteer service to local conservation. His pivotal years were 1963 to 1966.
At the time, I was a self-absorbed teenager with attitude, deciding not to trust anyone in the U.S. over 30. Industry was polluting the planet. Generals were escalating blatant and covert military operations. Klansman were firebombing the homes of civil rights leaders. The surgeon general finally got permission to say that tobacco kills. Race riots and peace rallies were routine.
Meanwhile, in 1963, saner, steadier and gentler middle-aged people like Sam G. Dodd were quietly getting serious about the environment. As icons like Malcolm X, Chairman Mao and John Lennon were stealing headlines, he was invisibly asking 50 residents to sign a petition to create a conservation commission in small-town Connecticut. His signature was the John Hancock on that founding document.
Sam and his friends didn’t stop there. Within the next three years, they created one of the strongest private, nonprofit, local land trusts in the state, Joshua’s Trust. By 1970, 56 like-minded souls had contributed $1,400 to buy a bumpy, pine-covered, pond-riddled patch of gravel behind the town library and called it Buchanan Woods. Joshua’s Trust has grown into a vibrant organization with hundreds of volunteers caring for more than 4,000 acres of preserved land in the heart of eastern Connecticut.
During the past four decades, volunteers for the Mansfield Conservation Commission and the trust led by Sam have bushwhacked the edges of their holdings to guard against encroachment. Using manual labor, they’ve made their land accessible, enjoyable and educational to all by clearing, maintaining, marking, mapping and signing trails.
Finally, a guidebook was needed. Sam, a physician by day, spent his evenings and weekends writing the “Joshua’s Tract Walk Book.” Over four editions, Sam expanded it to cover publicly owned trails beyond trust properties. And though it remains a perennial local best seller, its author doesn’t get a dime because the copyright and royalties belong to the trust.
Had I met Sam as an agitated adolescent, I might have been less suspicious of folks nearing 50. Instead, I had to wait 20 years to work with him on the Mansfield Conservation Commission in the mid-1980s, and with Joshua’s Trust in the mid-1990s. He’s not the only local hero, for there are dozens, many of whom are still around. I single him out here to let his legatees know he’s still thinking of them, despite having moved away from his beloved network of trails in Connecticut for a retirement community elsewhere.
The 1854 publication of Thoreau’s “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” is generally acknowledged as the defining moment for the American environmental movement. His book inspired Rachel Carson, who kept a copy at her bedside while writing “Silent Spring,” generally credited with launching the modern strain of environmentalism in 1962. Given the timing between her book and the emergence of Connecticut conservation commissions between 1963 and 1966, I asked Sam if the book inspired him. “Yes,” he replied, though I could tell he was reticent to single out anyone for praise, preferring to distribute his accolades widely.
Though not widely known for its lyrical style or as an epoch-changing manifesto, I suggest that Sam’s “Joshua’s Tract Book” (and many like it elsewhere) be held up as a symbol of the commitment to conservation made by individuals and volunteer communities all across small-town America. It belongs on the same shelf as “Walden” and “Silent Spring.”