The staff and the Board of your Northwest Conservation District are very sorry to announce that the 38th Annual Earth Day Plant Sale has been cancelled, both for pre-sales and our in-person weekend sale.

The Goshen Fairgrounds has let us know that they understandably need to close for large gatherings until further notice, following CDC and CT Public Health protocols to promote social distancing. This includes our NWCD Annual Plant Sale.

In full disclosure, we had been in discussions all week regarding possibilities for maintaining the sale while minimizing risks to staff, volunteers, and customers. However, under the new circumstances, we have no choice but to cancel the event entirely.

We are disappointed, as we know you are, as it is an event we all look forward to all winter, drawing hundreds of people from the region together to celebrate Earth Day, spring, and native plants while supporting the NWCD. However, public health is of the utmost importance at this critical point. 

We will continue to explore safe deliver the orders already received and paid for. If this is not possible, we will be in touch with those who have pre-purchased plants.

Finally, we would like to thank all of our regular and new volunteers without whom the plant sale could never take place. We could also not do our work without the support of the community for Northwest Conservation District’s programs and services conducted with our partners across Connecticut throughout the year.

Cynthia Rabinowitz
Executive Director

The Gaia hypothesis* proposes that Earth is self-regulating and that living and non-living matter interact to form a synergistic and complex system that perpetuates the conditions necessary for life on the planet. The stunning beauty of our blue and green watery planet seen from space by the first astronauts, dazzled them and all of us when we saw the photographs. Earth Day and the environmental movement came from the realization of the uniqueness of our home.  A new awakening is needed to appreciate the balance of systems which keep Earth habitable for life. We are each responsible for protecting the systems that provide us with clean air and water, healthy soils teeming with life and which make agriculture possible. We are each responsible for our daily choices. 

I try to think daily about my actions – how I can do with less – what events happened to make a product and how was the planet affected.  Each one of us does something every day that damages the earth in some way – driving cars, eating food grown in ways that damage the soil and release greenhouse gases, flushing toilets, digging soil, cutting trees, watering lawns, spraying pest control products and in all the ways we put our own wants ahead of the planet’s capacity to support them.   

Wendell Berry proposed “17 Rules for a Sustainable Community” (Conserving Communities” from Another Turn of the Crank 1995). Here are a few: 

Sustainable Rule #2: Always include local nature – the land, the water, the air, the native creatures – within the membership of the community. 

Sustainable Rule #7: Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy. 

Sustainable Rule #8: Strive to produce as much of the community’s own energy as possible. 

Sustainable Rule #13: Account for costs now conventionally hidden or “externalized.” Whenever possible, these costs must be debited against monetary income. 

*Dr. James Lovelock, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Dr. Lynn Margulis, MIT