Doug McLane is a resident of Plymouth and in my view one of New Hampshire's environmental heroes. His work in the battle to halt climate change is well known and acknowledged, but he has also been deeply immersed in the fight to restore the American Chestnut.
Doug is a board member of the NH/VT Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation. He is fond of saying that "before the chestnut blight - running from about 1904 - 1950 - decimated the North American chestnut tree population, that "A squirrel could travel from Maine to Georgia on chestnut tree branches without ever having to touch the ground." So I guess you could say that for a squirrel, the Chestnuts were the Appalachian Trail of its world.
