THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

In 1947, Mr. Kernan’s father, Henry Kernan, a Yale-trained forestry expert, and his wife, Jody, bought nearly 1,000 acres of forest and wetland property straddling Delaware and Otsego Counties. Since then, the land has remained under the close stewardship of the Kernan family, the parents passing it down to their five children as the proud centerpiece of a family of naturalists.

The forest has been intensively studied and documented by environmentalists and ecologists, including Henry Kernan himself, who wrote about it in two books and in numerous conservation articles.

But now, the family says, the forest is threatened by the construction of the Constitution Pipeline, a $700 million, 124-mile conduit designed to transport natural gas from the Marcellus Shale fields of northeast Pennsylvania to Wright, N.Y., 80 miles southwest of Albany, where it will connect with two other pipelines to serve markets in New York and New England.

The project calls for workers to clear a mile-long, 75-foot-wide swath through the forest, and for the path to be kept clear for perpetuity, at 50 feet.

Dev Kernan, 68, described this as a gaping wound that would fragment the forest. His family has refused to grant an easement to the pipeline’s developers, who say they may soon pursue eminent domain proceedings so that work on the project can begin this summer.

The Kernans say they have practiced careful forest management over the years to keep the property intact and the ecosystem undisturbed.

With no public access, and no public roads running through it, the forest has become one of the biggest pristine parcels remaining in the area, according to the Kernans and the many environmental experts and consultants they have hired to make a case against the pipeline. The pipeline, the forest’s protectors say, would cause irreversible ecological damage by leaving the property vulnerable to invasive species of plants and insects, and alter the hydrology of the wetlands.

Dr. Bernd Blossey, an invasive plant species expert at Cornell University’s Department of Natural Resources, said that unfragmented forests and wetlands were a rare occurrence in New York State. Pipeline construction, he said, would “compromise the immune system” of this forest’s ecology.

“We have to protect these places,” Dr. Blossey said.

Constitution Pipeline officials said they had gone to great expense to minimize any negative environmental impact the project might have.

More than a dozen different routes for crossing the Kernan property were explored before the least intrusive one was chosen, said Christopher Stockton, a spokesman for Constitution Pipeline, a partnership of four companies. And instead of cutting a much wider path for construction — other stretches along the pipeline route required up to 120 feet — the passage through the Kernans’ property had been reduced to 75 feet across, he said.

Mr. Stockton said that Constitution had also established “a robust management plan approved by state and federal agencies specifically designed to address concerns related to invasive species.”

// posted by montag @ 1:48 PM