The Laurel Hill Association to Feature Noted Forester Starling Childs at Laurel Hill Day, August 26th
For the past 170 years local Stockbridge residents and other friends have gathered in front of a rock outcropping in Laurel Hill park located behind the Stockbridge Town Offices. This year the keynote address will be delivered by Starling (Star) Childs. Childs has spent a lifetime managing forest lands and teaching young people about the challenges facing them.
“We are delighted to have Star speak at Laurel Hill Day. He has had a distinguished career as a hands on forester and as an advisor to his alma mater’s Yale Forest School . Star’s expertise, insight, and easy, humorous manner guarantees that our program will be especially engaging this year.”
Childs in Great Mountain Forest in Northwestern Connecticut
Childs has worked with state and local governments as well as many private clients to assess and administer their lands for ecologically sensitive development, forestry and wildlife management, recreation, natural resource extraction, bio-energy and land conservation strategies.
His specialty areas include hydrology, sediment and erosion control, land and forest restoration, mineral and aggregate resource extraction, and the emerging markets related to the science of carbon sequestration and forest offsets.
Childs has helped to finance and launch several successful enterprises in historic building renovation and adaptive reuse, biomass power generation, advanced water treatment technology, energy conservation, telecommunications, iron sand and rare earths mineral exploration, and even yogurt production and sales, the latter being the most successful with Stonyfield becoming a nationally known brand.
He has served as Chairman of the External Advisory Board of the Global Institute for Sustainable Forests at Yale Forest School and currently serves on the advisory board of the New England Forestry Foundation. Childs is a 1976 graduate of Yale College and holds a BS degree in Geology and Geophysics and a Master’s degree in Forest Science from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. After graduating in 1980, he worked for Great Mountain Forest, a family owned working forest in Norfolk, Connecticut.
For the past thirty years, Childs has served as a founding board member and officer of the Great Mountain Forest Corporation which is a 501(c)(3) operating foundation that oversees scholarly research and educational programs as well as the ongoing, long-term management of his family’s 6,500 acre working forest and wildlife preserve in northwestern Connecticut.
