Seven years ago, the Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton welcomed a third-grade class from Holyoke Public Schools. After a quick talk by an educator, just before she led the gaggle of children toward four miles of trails, an eager student raised her hand.
“What does ‘hike’ mean?” she asked.
Jonah Keane, then the director of Arcadia and Mass Audubon’s other Connecticut River Valley sanctuaries, stood quietly in the background, marveling at the launch of Arcadia’s Discover Nature program. The kids went to school eight miles away in a dense city where the woods were another world. Yet when he was their age, he’d started on the path that led to these trails.
What does hike mean? A hike is a worthwhile journey.
All roads lead home
Keane, who earlier this month stepped down from the position he held for over 11 years, remembers this moment with joy. To him, his job was a mission to help people make a connection to nature – something he felt deeply while growing up in Delhi, New York, and Shelburne Falls. In both places, his house was surrounded by woods, and he would walk and walk. While his mind wandered along with him, each step felt like a homecoming.
His stepfather, an environmental chemist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, influenced Keane’s studies in high school and college at the University of Vermont, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences, but it was his fellow students who taught him that nature would welcome him wherever he went. After graduation, he traveled across the United States exploring all the national parks. “Spending time in nature builds a love of nature,” he explains.
When he joined the Peace Corps as a volunteer coordinator in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the arid landscape rekindled his love for New England. (“We are fortunate to have this very humid climate here with plenty of water, dense forests with diverse understories, and mature trees with tall canopies,” he says admiringly.) This motivated him to earn a master’s degree in forest ecosystem science at the State University of New York and return to Massachusetts to direct the Student Conservation Association. Based in the Kenneth Dubuque Memorial State Forest in Hawley, he helped AmeriCorps members from all over the country to “build their sense of place” – and to feel like they were coming home.
Expanding Arcadia
In 2014 Keane was hired by Mass Audubon, operating out of Arcadia, which spans 751 acres between Easthampton and Northampton. He loved the idea of managing sanctuaries for both wildlife and people. (Mass Audubon currently monitors more than 107 sanctuaries statewide.) And he was excited to join a team motivated by that same love. “It felt very comfortable for me to get started and know that I wasn’t alone,” he says.
Keane began his tenure during the Obama Era, when tending to the environment was the country’s priority. “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” President Obama said in his State of the Union address in 2015. But at the time, Keane’s work at Mass Audubon felt locally driven, tapping into the Valley’s unique resources to advance initiatives, expand staff, and extend Arcadia’s impact area. The first Western Mass Youth Climate Summit was sponsored by Arcadia and the Hitchcock Center for the Environment in 2017. And the Youth Climate Leadership program became an Audubon mainstay, thanks in part to funds from the Northampton Education Foundation and the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts.
One of Keane’s goals was to reach the urban population of Hampden County, and in 2018 a generous donor made the Discover Nature program possible, which introduced all third graders in Holyoke Public Schools to Arcadia via educators’ visits to classrooms and field trips to the sanctuary. Thanks to American Rescue Plan Act funds allocated in 2021 to support economic recovery from the pandemic, Keane was able to launch a similar program for Springfield students at the Laughing Brook Wildlife Sanctuary in Hampden and hire educators exclusive to the city. “That type of progress felt really meaningful to me,” he says, “like we were able to move things forward.”
‘First annual’ Folk Festival
For Arcadia’s 75th anniversary in 2019, Keane’s team wanted to honor the milestone and engage the community. Someone suggested connecting with Signature Sounds in Northampton, and the partnership behind the annual Arcadia Folk Festival was born.
Billed as a day of live music and an ode to the environment, the first annual festival, held in the fall of 2018, became a litmus test for what is now Arcadia’s biggest event of the year, drawing 1,800 people for a day of dancing in the woods.
“We didn’t know quite what to expect,” says Keane, whose highest hopes were to bookend the anniversary with a festival in the fall of 2018 and the fall of 2019. “The posters did say ‘first annual,’ but we weren’t too convinced it was necessarily going to be annual. We never anticipated that it would become such a big hit.”
Our patch of the Earth
During the pandemic, Arcadia’s momentum slowed, and a new president took the reins at Mass Audubon, whose focus was the organization’s statewide impact. (Keane’s title became Director of Special Projects in 2021.) But thanks to tremendous community support, Arcadia rebounded and “has seen nothing but growth since.” The staff at Arcadia is larger, and the statewide budget is higher, despite pushback at the national level by President Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax.” A restrictive executive order in April sought to limit individual states’ “burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies.”
“When we do get bits of bad news, particularly when that news feels out of our hands at a global or national level,” says Keane, “knowing we can be working and seeing progress on our little patch of the Earth is enough to inspire hope and keep plugging away.”
He doesn’t know what his next steps are – or where they will lead. But he looks back upon his time at Arcadia with gratitude. “I don’t think I can take credit for any of the successes these last 11 years,” says Keane, who believes that Arcadia’s mission to protect nature is a community effort. “People are giving large amounts of money, and large amounts of time … As a community we should feel proud of our generosity and our commitment to important work” – motivated by compassion for the next generation.
He remembers the third-grader’s hand rising, a beacon of hope.
Melissa Karen Sances lives in western Mass, where she is working on a memoir and writing stories about extraordinary people. She can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.