Environmental Ed Returns!
This week Jon Patch welcomes back his brother, Environmental Ed Patchcoski to chat about what’s going on in the environment including Climate Change, Human Encroachment, Forests, and more!
BIO:
Ask Ed Patchcoski if conservation works, and you’re likely to get an unqualified thumbs up.
The man who has served as Wyoming County’s federally designated District Conservationist since May of 1983 is stepping down at the end of this month.
Patchcoski’s love for the outdoors started in scouting, and he readily admits that unlike most of the people he initially served, he did not grow up on a farm.
With his dad a World War II veteran and mother a seamstress, Patchcoski grew up in the South Scranton/Moosic area and very much stayed close to the enduring values of family, which served him well in understanding why family farmers he would later serve stayed so close to the land.
He achieved the pinnacle of scouting by becoming an Eagle Scout in his teens, and by the early 1970s, he signed up for a Youth Conservation Corps program that essentially hooked him on the environment, and helped him see his role in helping to sustain it.
Patchcoski noted recently that he enrolled in Keystone College’s environmental science program run by Howard Jennings, and then went on to Penn State University’s main campus for a program in environmental resource management.
He said his first job was with the Lackawanna County Conservation District, and later went to Susquehanna County, then Westmoreland County in the western pat of the state before settling down in Wyoming County.
Patchcoski said he quickly learned that what had been taught from a textbook often bore little resemblance to what he faced in the field, and he realized that in order to succeed he would have to acquire some of it through a great deal of self study.
“What’s been so unique about my job is I’ve been able to work hands-on with private landowners, many of them farmers, in seeing how the soil can work for them,” Patchcoski said.
“There’s never been a dull moment, and each day presents itself with new challenges,” he added, noting that later in the day he would be visiting with a farmer who was concerned about a gas pipeline coming through that would disrupt some drain tile which had been put in years earlier so the farmer’s dad could successfully farm a field.
And, so it goes.