A
Lifetime in Natural Resources
By Elizabeth Webster, Penn State Forest Resources Extension Writer
Posted: August
18, 2003
Robert
(Bob) Ackerman goes about his daily chores, letting his wife, Margaret's,
pet pigmy goats out to pasture and taking the dog for a walk. It's
a beautiful day and a beautiful walk, past the garden where Bob has
planted Japanese larch and white pine seedlings, through the apple
orchard, and into a tract of mature forest where Bob's most impressive
tree stands, a massive 155-year-old Northern red oak. The Ackermans
live on a 140-acre tract in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. It
barely resembles the place Bob encountered for the first time seventy
years ago.
He remembers, "When I saw it as a seven-year-old in 1932, it seemed like a ghost place from the old Wild West. I now understand that at that time it was actually an environmental disaster. Pit holes covered the sides of the surrounding hills, the streams ran bright orange with acid mine water pollution, and all the land, buildings, and equipment were idle and in disarray."
The property had been coal mined by the company his mother worked for as a secretary and bookkeeper. It was during the great depression, and his father had just lost his job as an engineering draftsman. Ackerman's parents bought the abandoned property with the intention of growing mushrooms on it. Having paid for the land with a $12,000 mortgage, Bob's father began commuting fifteen miles everyday to his new farm in the New Alexandria area.He successfully cultivated mushrooms until he died in 1960.
Meanwhile, Bob went off to college, became a chemical engineer, and found employment with Aramco (Arabian American Oil Company) first in Manhattan and then in Saudi Arabia where he lived for ten years. He found the work fascinating, and he earned a nice living as an American working overseas. But he was not immune to homesickness. "You're isolated. You're way out in the boondocks in a desert area in a country that's very foreign. There was very little mixing with the locals. The cultures were so different. We just lived in our own little compound; it was like a military base surrounded by a long, high fence." In his 32 years as a chemical engineer, Ackerman switched companies several times, working in Iran, London, Borneo and Papua New Guinea. Now retired, Ackerman is listed among the world's most influential people in Marquis' Who's Who in the World for his contributions to the field.
In 1984, when he returned to New Alexandria, the big red oak tree was just where it had been. But other things-for example, the deer population-had changed. Ackerman shot his first deer in 1942. He was seventeen, and it was one of the only deer he had ever seen. Since then, Ackerman says, the deer population in his area has exploded. He points to the seven-foot-high deer fence around his vegetable garden, as proof. "It's ridiculous. My dad would never have believed that you would have to do that."
Heavy deer browse stifled Ackerman's attempt to reforest a surface mining contour strip on his property. On this barren strip of land, he planted twenty tree species: oaks, hickories, maples, and pines hoping to recreate continuous woodlands. Ackerman says, "I'm fighting a battle all the time here to try to save the few little remnants of those 15,000 trees I planted. I mean, I'm looking at individual little trees and when I spot one that's still alive I put a wire cage around it. Then I can save it, because it still has a tremendous root system. It's just the top is getting chewed off all the time. Once you've stopped that browsing, that tree is just going to shoot up. But you have to keep the deer away."
Ackerman is not only concerned for his own property, but also for the fate of Pennsylvania's forests. Deer overbrowsing poses a great obstacle to reforestation and regeneration statewide, Ackerman says. As president of the Westmoreland Woodlands Improvement Association, and as an active VIP-Coverts volunteer since 1992, he has written articles and spoken out about the issue in the local media.
Ironically, Ackerman admits that deer browsing helped to shape one of his favorite trees, a young red maple he planted in honor of his parents. This special maple is a descendent of a tree that grew at Walden Pond near Henry David Thoreau's cabin, purchased in 1994 from the American Forests' Historic Tree Nursery. When the seedling reached the top of its plastic deer protector tube, a deer came along and chewed off the top. The result was a trunk split in two: "One branch for my mother and one for dad."
Ackerman's stewardship plan allows for forester-regulated logging on 78 acres of his land, but calls for preserving the 12 acres of mature second growth that surrounds the house. He plans to protect this area for the future with a conservation easement. In his lifetime, Ackerman has witnessed the resiliency of Penn's Woods: from a polluting and disfiguring early coal mining operation to a vibrant and recovering woodland. He's working to keep it that way.
