Places Volume 6: On Assignment with Jerry Monkman, Spring 2021

Above: Land recently conserved by the
Southeast Land Trust of New Hampshire
protect the waters of Merrymeeting Lake.
Left: White-tailed deer in the fog on land
conserved by the Northwest Connecticut
Land Conservancy.
Land conservation efforts are alive and
well during the pandemic.
Despite the pandemic, conservation
organizations have been hard at work
conserving farms and forests across
New England. During the past year,
I have shot projects from western
Connecticut to far northern Maine
for local land trusts, statewide land
trusts, and national organizations.
These projects conserved farms,
recreation access, wildlife habitat
and working forests.
Close to my home in New Hampshire, I
continued working with the Southeast
Land Trust of New Hampshire (SELT),
who completed two big projects
adjacent to Merrymeeting Lake.
Despite being ringed by summer
homes, Merrymeeting Lake has the
cleanest water of any lake in the state,
and by protecting several thousand
acres of forest above the lake, SELT is
helping to insure that water quality.
As a bonus there are some great
hiking and mountain biking trails in
their new preserves.
By far, the biggest tracts of land that
I worked on were in northern Maine,
where projects I photographed for
The Conservation Fund, The Nature
Conservancy, and the Forest Society
of Maine totalled close to 50,000
acres in size.
SPRING 2021 ECOPHOTOGRAPHY 5