The greater glories of George Wislocki

George Wislocki

George S. Wislocki, the Resources Council's founder and president, retired last December 31 after a 34-year tenure devoted to the "greater glories of the Berkshires."

Wislocki filled those years with passionate commitment to the causes of conservation and environmental advocacy, delivered with vision, humor and inimitable style.

Ultimately, it was all in the service of getting to hear the sweet sound of the time stamp at the Registry of Deeds, signalling another piece of land permanently protected.

To that end, Wislocki's achievements can be measured in numbers: At his retirement, the Council owned 6,444 acres, held conservation restrictions on 5,326 acres, and had acquired, protected and conveyed 3,541 more.

Berkshire patriots

Wislocki came to the Berkshires in 1967 at the invitation of Donald B. Miller, publisher of The Berkshire Eagle. Following in the tradition of his father, Kelton B. Miller, Don Miller had long been an active and generous advocate of land conservation and parkland. He hired Wislocki, and became himself the Council's first chairman.

Wislocki seized the opportunity, and was mindful throughout his career of those great Berkshire patriots like the Millers, and the Cranes of Dalton, who preceded and inspired the Council's work, and who lent the organization authority and credibility in its early years.

Along with the conservationists, there were the environmental cage-rattlers. Bill Tague was perhaps the ideal, instilling in Wislocki a nearly religious zeal for defending the Berkshires, and particularly Mount Greylock, against the grotesqueries of various entrepreneurial and political follies.

Tague tutored the younger environmentalist in the tactics that would make Wislocki the movement's most formidable advocate. You can hear echoes of Tague in one of Wislocki's most notorious one-liners. After a 1990 meeting with John Silber, Wislocki emerged to tell The Boston Globe that on environmental issues the gubernatorial candidate was "one of the great minds of the 14th century."

Wislocki's gifts for verbal assault were exceeded by his talents for persuasion. Sarah Bell, one of the generous souls whose pro bono work has done so much to advance the Council's mission, put it this way:

"I suspect there are a hundred of us, probably more, who did what he asked, in part because he asked so nicely, and in part because he made you feel the success of the whole environmental movement in the Berkshires was hanging on your response."

'Beautiful Berkshires'

Wislocki had a telephone habit of introducing himself as "George Wislocki out in the beautiful Berkshires," and in the end it was his love of this place, and his persistent impulse to promote the Berkshires and their "greater glories" that defined his career and led to its considerable triumphs.

There are the thousands of acres that would not have been saved without his efforts. There is the visionary Scenic Mountains Act, a piece of legislation Wislocki wrote and pushed through in 1974 that today is being adopted in nearly a dozen Berkshire towns.

There are the overblown ideas like the Monterey bypass, Hinsdale landfill and Greylock Glen resort that never came to be, and then there is the idea of an accessible trail network on Yokun Ridge, that did. (Always up for fun, Wislocki brought llamas, laden with champagne, to one trail dedication.)

A noble hope

It was on one of those trails, heading deep into the hemlock-shaded Stevens Glen, that Wislocki voiced his great and romantic hope for this gentle wilderness we call the Berkshires.

Wild turkeys, once gone from these hills, are back, he noted. Black bear and moose haunt the forests and swamps.

Wouldn't it be fine, he wondered, if some late afternoon down in the glen, one were to feel an over-the-shoulder presence and turn to see a mountain lion, keeping watch from the rocks above.