WILD EARTH WILDERNESS SCHOOL

In 2015, Wild Earth began a partnership with the Kingston City School District, labeled a Focus District in 2013 by the New York State Education Department due to poor outcomes for at-risk students including the economically disadvantaged, to create the Kingston Middle School Nature Connection & Experiential Education Project. The project will continue to scale up over the next two years and will provide over 200,000 participant hours of experiential education to all under-served youth (over 2,000 students) in Kingston City’s middle schools. The project leverages Wild Earth’s 15 years of expertise in delivering experiential, connection-based nature programming to individuals of all ages through a multi-generational mentoring model designed to build character and community. Wild Earth, with the Kingston City School District, has tailored its programming to at-risk public middle school youth. Consisting of full-day nature immersion field trips, Guided Recess activities, and an After School program, the project was designed to provide social and emotional support, engaging and caring adult mentors, and carefully cultivated activities and experiences to promote character building, resilience, and community development. Wild Earth is now piloting the Middle School Nature Connection & Experiential Education project in other Title 1 school districts, including Rondout Valley Central School District and Ellenville City School District. Wild Earth has also received requests and provided multi-year project proposals to the Rondout Valley and Poughkeepsie City School Districts.

Wild Earth serves as a leader among like-minded wilderness schools in its region, and has led the way in forming a network of over 40 schools in the northeast U.S. and Canada called the “Nature Connection Network” to share best practices and resources as well as scale and replicate high-quality, effective programming across the region. Each January, Wild Earth co-hosted an annual “Nature Connection Leadership Conference” for these schools to strive toward best organizational and community practices, develop strategies to improve and demonstrate the effectiveness of nature-based programming, and expand their reach and impact to challenged communities. Recent years’ conference has included indigenous leaders and community stakeholders to present strategies for authentic engagement of historically and systemically under-resourced and underrepresented groups.

Wild Earth is stewarding 135-acres of wilderness in Ulster County. Although the Wild Earth property is large (over 130 acres), it is itself a fragment of a larger interconnected, coherent body of land and water. Based on our observations and research, we believe that the intersection of conditions that are particularly affecting current conditions on the land, as they relate to Wild Earth’s goals for use, are: bedrock geologies, landforms, soils, water, and forest history.

The property sits on an extremely dense, impermeable slab of Shawangunk quartzite caprock, sloping southeastward towards the Stony Kill. Shawangunk quartzite bedrocks are so dense and resistant to weathering that landforms on these formations tend to sit in large, relatively gradually sloping blocks (due to a low level of weathering since their formation) that abruptly break at fissure points. Similarly, streams such as the Stony Kill have cut comparatively very narrow channels in these bedrocks across high gradients, in many cases with little or no sediment accumulation in those channels. These processes are visible in the Stony Kill corridor on the south end of the property, particularly at the scenic overlook to the west of the swimming/wading access point.

Overall, most Shawangunk traprock slabs assume a flat or convex shape, shedding water and sediments towards narrow incised drainages rather than accumulating water or sediment. As a result, most Shawangunk landforms that are either convex, or flat and sloping, feature notably shallow to bedrock soils compared to comparable elevations and land positions on sedimentary bedrocks (such as in the neighboring Catskills). The Wild Earth property sits on one very such landform and features very shallow to bedrock soils in certain areas (under 1’ soil depth in the shallowest locations), particularly on the upper and western sides of the property.

These shallow-to-bedrock soils are occupied by plant communities well-adapted to these conditions, with shallow-soil tolerant Ericaceae shrubs such as Mountain Laurel and Huckleberry particularly abundant. However, these soil conditions are very vulnerable to disturbance and compaction from vehicles and logging. In the site’s forest history, recent1 logging events have (in addition to altering forest composition) created widespread soil disturbance and compaction in the dense network of logging roads and landing areas, substantially slowing the movement of water through shallower-to-bedrock soils in these areas in particular. These compacted, disturbed areas have in turn been predominantly occupied by Japanese Stiltgrass (Migrostegium vimineum), an introduced species which is thankfully benign to skin contact but does inhibit regeneration of other native plant community members.

Through a holistic site-plan, Wild Earth is stewarding the Rock Haven property to conserve and protect the ecology of the site while restoring diversity and supporting the regeneration of forest and other habitats.