For the past two years, Jon Bruce has been authoring Updates from the Trail for our Brewster Conservation Trust website. Now, he’s hitting the trail, and we’re wishing him a fond farewell as he heads off to graduate school and the bright future that awaits him.
Reminiscing on his tenure with BCT, Jon recalled his “gangbuster” attitude when he first stepped into his Land Stewardship Coordinator position. It was February of 2020 and Jon had just completed a term with AmeriCorps NCCC and then a stint with Wilkinson Ecological Design. He was ready to roll up his sleeves and lean into his work with BCT when two things happened. First, COVID-19 had other plans. Second, he was forced to learn the value of incremental progress when doing conservation work. “People don’t instantly get on board with an idea, even if it’s a good one,” he said. “It takes time. It takes patience.”
That patience has proven to be an especially useful ally in what Jon calls his most fulfilling project with BCT, the meadow at Hay Conservation Center. “The first year it looked awful!” he admitted with a chuckle. Laughing is something he can do now that the meadow is three years in and ablaze with summer color and happy pollinators. Jon said he felt fortunate the BCT Board members supported his vision for a meadow even though he suffered their good-natured ribbing through its early stages.
“The amount of supportive people who came before me, that’s what has surprised me most about this job,” he said. And it’s part of what sustains him and motivates him to continue working in the conservation field. He sees a turning point in people’s awareness of environmental concerns and a growing momentum for restoration projects and other issues of ecology.
Restoration projects especially excite him, Jon said, which is why he is heading west to Colorado to earn a Master’s in Natural Resource Stewardship with a specialization in Restoration Ecology. After ticking off the toll taken by years of haphazard and wasteful development – climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, threatened water quality – he points to the increasingly urgent need for conservation, especially in an oceanside area with a blue economy.
This pulls him back to the topic of land stewardship, a practice he has been studying, implementing, and refining over the past three years with BCT. Stewardship, for Jon, is very much about nurturing a relationship with the land. “It’s more like working for the land rather than trying to make it work for you,” he says. It’s about understanding what a piece of land needs and how it inherently wants to behave, a mindset he carries with him when making decisions about mowing, removing dead wood, and trimming growth on trails. He sees his job as assisting, not controlling, the natural expression of an ecosystem, which, in the end, preserves habitat, conserves natural resources, and saves time.
Jon’s contribution to BCT will be felt long into the future. His passion and dedication will be observable each spring in the blooming of the meadow and witnessed each fall when it turns from green to golden. And as he sets off on his own trail of adventure, we wish him well.