BNRC Old office, new technology

To finish up my requirement for my internship with the Berkshire Natural Resource Council, I finally made the big trip to Pittsfield to see the office and get a feel for what Doug Bruce does when he isn’t traversing mountains. To paint an accurate picture of the Resource Council office one must understand that it is in a cluttered office above Patrick’s Pub on a busy street in Pittsfield. One would not assume that an office that handles as much land in Berkshire County as the Resource Council does would be confined to such a small space, but it truly is.
I was fortunate enough to meet Tad Ames today, the President of the Resource Council and Narain Schroeder, the Director of Land Conservation for the agency. I had read about these two gentlemen on the Resource Council’s Website and knew that they were both well educated men who worked at the Council because they loved the outdoors. What I learned today that the website could have never taught me, is what nice people they were. In the brief exchange I had with these gentlemen, I was instantly impressed by their enthusiasm. Mr. Ames thanked me for being involved in the agency when I arrived and again when I left. I can honestly say that the Berkshire Natural Resource Council, aside from owning some pretty property, are very friendly people.
Focusing now on the office itself, as I mentioned before it is rather small, but well organized. The Resource Council has a tremendous amount of paper work that all needs to be kept in large, fire safe filing cabinets. What kind of paper work one may ask? For each piece of property the Resource Council owns, they have to keep a portfolio with various pieces of documentation. In these portfolios, which they have to keep so things like the government can inspect them, they have maps charting the type of habitat each property holds. Maps that indicate where the boundary markers are, maps that indicate what types of soil are found where on each property and finally maps that indicate where various type of habitat controls need to be or have been implemented on the land. The Council owns hundreds of parcels of lands all across Berkshire county and with each parcel requiring its own large folder, that creates a lot of documents that need to be organized. In addition to the paper work within the office, Doug stated that by law they are required to keep back ups of each file and he estimated that they have at least five copies of each individual file stored in various locations around the Pittsfield area.
What does the Berkshire Natural Resource Council office tell us about the agency? A good bit. For starters, the very atmosphere of the agency is enjoyable, and from that one can discern that the people who work there are all around good folks. What does the office tell us about conservation? The very idea that every single minute detail is so meticulously documented shows us that conservation is more than cutting trees and being outdoorsy. Conservation is a large tangle of paper work and legal matters. The detail and technology involved in mapping a parcel of land show us how evolved conservationist has become. People like Teddy Roosevelt were drawn to “Conservation” in part because of the unknown that the great outdoors represented. Modern conservations don’t deal with the unknowns, their GPS system will not allow them to. These systems do make it easier however, for a guy staring at a computer in Pittsfield to plan his day marking boundaries in North Adams weeks later.