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 story in which an uninhabited natural landscape is settled and stewarded by a choosen people. For centuries, settlment and stewardship have marched hand in hand. The appropriation of land for development continues to be cloaked in a myth of stewardship. The Greenbelt Outsider explores the land, ecology and history of Essex County, Massachusetts with the hope of breaking through this myth and seeing the Dawnland more clearly.