A Forest’s Family Roots Stand in a Pipeline’s Path
“With snowshoes strapped to his feet and a fedora atop his head, Dev Kernan tramped deep into the snowy woods and finally stopped to admire a majestic red oak.
“Now there’s a beauty,” he said. Then he pointed to a black cherry tree: “There, with the scaly bark — that grows beautifully here.”
“Here” is the Kernan family forest, which covers a remote patch of upstate New York between Albany and Binghamton. Known as Charlotte Forest, it is a sanctuary of woods and wetlands that the family has maintained for nearly seven decades.
In 1947, Mr. Kernan’s father, Henry Kernan, a Yale-trained forestry expert, and his wife, Jody, bought nearly 1,000 acres of forest and wetland property straddling Delaware and Otsego Counties. Since then, the land has remained under the close stewardship of the Kernan family, the parents passing it down to their five children as the proud centerpiece of a family of naturalists.
The forest has been intensively studied and documented by environmentalists and ecologists, including Henry Kernan, who wrote about it in two books and in numerous conservation articles.”
Kilgannon, Corey. New York Times 12 February 2015.