About
EFLTV began in the winter of 2002, around a kitchen table, with a topographic map spread over the casseroles. Five neighbors — a retired fisheries biologist, a schoolteacher, two farmers, and a boatbuilder — had been watching a familiar stretch of tidal marsh lose ground, literally, to a combination of upstream development and a creeping invasive. They decided, without much ceremony, to do something about it.
What they started remains what we are: a volunteer organization without paid staff, operating season by season, learning the estuary by walking it. We hold no mystery about our methods. We write things down. We mark our mistakes. We share what we know with anyone who asks.
Decisions are made by a rotating steering circle of nine members, elected informally by the broader volunteer roster each January. Budget is modest and almost entirely supported by member households and a small handful of longstanding regional partners. Easements are held in trust through a parent conservancy; our role is to steward the land on the ground, year after year, in partnership with the landowning families who placed it.
On a given workday you might meet a ninth-grader who is new to the estuary, a botanist who has been mapping its sedges for thirty years, a welder who built our weir, and someone's grandmother in excellent rubber boots. We are not one kind of person. We are a slow, mixed, patient group of people who have decided this place is worth the trouble.
You will not find us on social platforms, and we do not send a newsletter. The work is the communication. If you are reading this and you know one of us, please come along on a workday. If you do not yet know one of us — we tend to meet people through the land, the libraries, the farm stands, and the schools. That is an old way to organize, and it still works.