This past September, I gave my first public speech in many decades. It was to the members of our sister group, Save the Pine Bush, in Albany. It was called Saving the Pine Bush All Over Again.
This essay is taken from that speech, as these points all apply just as well to our situation.

In 1985, I published an article in Defenders magazine called Retreat in the Barrens. It contained the first list of the pine barrens regions of the Northeast. Since then, a few more inland barrens areas have been discovered and documented, mostly in northern New England.
Almost all of these areas have one or more public interest groups defending them. It is long past time for us to unite. Our challenges are shared, and so are our experiences. We could also become much more effective together politically, something now sorely needed in light of the truly scary trends outlined below. Our expertise is needed globally.
That is because the whole world has become pine barrens, in the sense that it is burning more and more, due to the pernicious effects of rapidly accelerating global warming. This year, almost the entire Amazon dried up. There were horrific wildfires throughout what once was the world’s premier rain forest. We all directly experienced the smoke from the Canadian taiga, also originally almost fireproof, burning last year. This is the biggest boreal forest remaining in the world, other than parts of Siberia, which themselves burned in the past few years. Huge fires have broken out now on every continent but Antarctica. The situation will only get worse, as we have not gotten our political act, and will, together to stop burning anything containing carbon. We have the means, but our attention is scattered.
Obviously, rapidly accelerating global warming has accelerated the Sixth Major Extinction, too. This is the only one we humans caused, and accelerated, over the past 50,000 years, starting with the slaughter of the Pleistocene megafauna. It has now reached the point, with so much severe seasonal cue disruption as a primary cause, that common lifeforms worldwide are dying off, in droves. Up here in my place in the Catskills, to give just one example, I found a June bug in November. That’s as far off as once-natural seasonal timing can get – six months. These once-common beetles usually came out starting in late May. Of course, that bug died in a freeze the following night, without reproducing.
So we need to renew and gird ourselves for a second round of hard work. It will be different this time. The first round will end with whatever we can salvage of the “Best of the Rest” list of remaining parcels containing and/or linking pine barrens. Then it will be time to regroup and rebuild for what’s to come.
What’s to come can be best symbolized by something I presented in one of the earliest white papers that followed the publication of Moths of the Past in 2020, the one called ‘Big Imps‘ for short. It’s called The Triangle of Peace, otherwise known as The Triangle of Survival.

That diagram encapsulates the three big things we need to do to save our planet and ourselves. We are destroying our biosphere. We have completely disrupted our climate, and that is accelerating the physical destruction we have wreaked on our life-sustaining biosphere. And, most of all, we have technologically enabled ourselves to increase our population to a level at least an order of magnitude beyond what our biosphere can support in an ongoing way.
What we need to do is simply said, but hard to do, because we have to do it all together, each and every one of us, worldwide, all at once. We have to completely stop burning all fossil fuels and anything else containing carbon, like wood and peat, immediately, and replace our energy supplies with renewable sources. And we have to remove ourselves from much of the biosphere as quickly as possible. These actions will help to restore our ecosystems and renew their biodiversity. We have to act globally and think locally.
For the Pine Barrens Society, this first and foremost means active recruiting of young people. The Boomers can no longer carry this group. Younger generations must step up. We have to figure out ways to make that happen. We need to start thinking of the next stages of our mission. Long Island is dreadfully overpopulated. The traffic is unlivable. It remains a notorious ‘cancer alley,’ one of too many across the country, and one of the biggest. It is increasingly unaffordable for more and more, particularly the young.
The new campaign has to unfold in stages. One of the first will be ‘reverse infill,’ a project to reconnect major parcels and chunks of ‘preserved’ pine barrens to form a larger, easier-to-manage whole. “The Best of the Rest” is attempting to do this. This will be increasingly important as wildfires threaten the island’s structures in the future. Bigger, more whole preserves are not only easier to fire-manage, they are far more capable of preserving biodiversity and restoring ecological and evolutionary processes and adaptations.
We need to start an ‘undevelopment’ project to extend the pine barrens preserve westward and eastward along the recharge spines of the island. This is a long-term, multigenerational project. As housing stock and other structures inevitably age and crumble, opportunities will open for planning and execution of a human pullback in these areas. This is ‘undevelopment,’ or ‘rewilding,’ on steroids. It will have to be done everywhere, but we can start here and once again become a ‘cradle,’ not of aviation this time, but instead of our own temporal salvation here on this little, still-beautiful in many respects, corner of Planet Earth. An inspiration for all.
Finally, and most importantly, we need to get back in the saddle on extensive public outreach and education to even have a prayer of getting such a large-scale set of changes underway and make them both successful and sustainable for the long term. This means building on the work of Dick and Robin, who dedicated the second halves of their lives to leading the Society over decades of amazing growth and success, and that of many others, past and present, some of whom are no longer with us, who took a tiny little naturalist group tilting at bigger and bigger windmills, and built this organization into an island-wide powerhouse. You know who you are. It’s time to tell all of your stories, in relation to what we have been able to get done. And it is time, for some of us, including me this one last time, to hand our batons and our swords over to those who will take our places and carry this fight forward to its proper, and only, end: Victory. Equals not only planetary and human survival, but true thriving.

By John Cryan, Long Island Pine Barrens Society Founder