A taste for local food and wild places.

• Author: Levin, Dan
• Position: From The Editor - Editorial

Once, in another life, on the terrace of an apartment 12 stories above New York City's East River, I filled a number of plastic tubs with store-bought soil and managed to eke out a meager crop of stunted red peppers. But they were my peppers, they were 20 seconds from a salad bowl, and they had a sweetness that all the money in New York could never buy.

On foggy nights, as I squinted down at the swirling currents of the river, it became the West Branch of the Penobscot--a product of my yearning for wild places. With the little farm behind me and a wild place out front, I was content, which leads to the themes of this issue--CLF's Natural Resources and Agriculture Projects.

Wild places and thriving small farms that grow fresh local food are harder to come by with each passing year in New England. Natural Resources and Agriculture work to preserve both, and the stories in this issue of Conservation Matters lend eloquent and authoritative testimony to the worthiness of those goals.

The subject of our opening feature, "Ah, Sweet Wilderness (page 16)," is the network of "Core Ecological Reserves" that Natural Resources is helping to establish across northern New England. Writer Alan Pistorius begins the story with a hike through a wilderness area, and how many other writers could have told us that the bluejays would "stick around this fall as long as the hazelnuts hold out"? He goes on to introduce the CLF advocates involved in the project, and details its complexity--including the still unwritten fate of the much struggled-over Nulhegan Basin.

Another focus of Natural Resources is battling pollution in great bodies of water. A CLF ally in that crusade is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., scion of a legendary political family and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a coalition devoted to protecting threatened U.S. waterways. In "A Guardian for Troubled Waters" (page 22), Kennedy--with writer Dick Russell--speaks of his family's dedication to environmental causes; takes the Bush Administration to task on that subject; and describes the workings of Waterkeepers--including his role in helping CLF to establish a new Lakekeeper program for Lake Champlain.

"A Bold New Hope for Lake Champlain" (page 26) is a message from the new Lakekeeper himself, Illinois native Rob Moore, who looks at the "charisma" of the lake, its compelling history, the incredible diversity and numbers of its fish, and the...