Explore the Greenbelt

The Essex County Greenbelt Association has acquired more than 8,000 acres of protected land and manages more than 10,000 acres of conservation restrictions. When I set out seven years ago to visit every Greenbelt property, I believed I was watching an epic struggle between those who would preserve the natural ecosystem and those who would destroy it. With time, I came to understand that preservationists and developers are two sides of the same coin. Often they are the same people.

The European settlers who colonized this land were devoted to a guiding myth that an uninhabited natural landscape was to be settled and stewarded by a choosen people. Since Europeans first arrived on this continent, settlment and “stewardship” have marched hand in hand. The appropriation of land for development continues, even today, to be cloaked in a myth of stewardship.

The Greenbelt Outsider explores the land, ecology and history of the Pawtucket Homeland, renamed Essex County Massachusetts by the settlers colonizing this homeland. The Pawtucket are an Algonquian people who for countless generatons gathered each spring to fish at Pawtucket falls, at what today is the City of Lowell.

With the hope of breaking through the myth of stewardship and establishing a deeper connection with the Pawtucket Homeland, the Greenbelt Ousider explores history, ecology and possibilities for a conserving a greenbelt that extends from Kwaskwaikikwen (Newbury) west along the Mold8mak (Marrimac) River to Wamesit at the confluence of the Musketaquid (Concord) River. The Pawtucket are allied with other Pennacook people in an alliance that extends north up the Mold8mak as far as Lake Winnipesaukee.

The Pawtucket have alliances with neighbors such as the Massachusett to the south and the Nipmuc to the west. Despite the myth that the Pawtucket are gone, their claim on this land and her claim on them are just as valid today as they were before Europeans arrived. The Greenbelt Outsider focuses on the continued integrity of this reciprocal relationship between the Pawtucket and their homeland.

South of the Mold8mak, the Pawtucket Homeland extends along Agawam Bay, past the Great Marsh of the Quascacunquen (Parker) River estuary, past Agawam (Ipswich) River and the Chebacco (Essex) River estuary, and east across the Annisquam River to Wanaskwiwam (Gloucester and Cape Ann). Rather than a static set of boundaries delimiting the Pawtucket Homeland, it is better to focus on networks of alliance and kinship that continue to evolve through the present day.

The Essex County Greenbelt Association was founded in the 1961 to conserve forests and wetlands, and slow the pace of development, as Route 95 was carved through the towns of Middleton, Boxford, Topsfield, Rowley and Georgetown. Originally focused on blocking development at Bald Hill in Boxford, the association developed a vision of establishing a belt of contigous conservation land extending from Plum Island in Newbury to Harold Parker State Forest in Andover. This greenbelt corridor now forms the northern quarter of the Bay Circuit Trail which circles the Boston Metro Area moving southwest to Marlborough and then southeast to Duxbury.

This website is not affiliated with the Greenbelt Association but explores the properties, ecology and history of the Greenbelt from the perspective of an outsider who walks the land and seeks to acknowledge and honor the Pawtucket People.