The Babcock Nature Preserve is located in Eden, Vermont. The preserve comprises a 1,000-acre (1.4 km²) tract of boreal forest land owned and maintained by Johnson State College and the Vermont State Colleges for scientific and educational study.
The preserve is named for Robert and Anne Hanchett Babcock who donated the tract to the Vermont State Colleges. Robert Babcock was the first provost of the Vermont State Colleges, a member of the Vermont House of Representatives, and a lieutenant governor of Vermont serving under Governor Robert Stafford.
The landscape is dominated by three large ponds and a large, environmentally significant bog, providing a natural laboratory for field biology, ornithology and environmental science courses. A summer field program features a number of such courses designed to provide field experience in the environmental and natural sciences.
Famous quotes containing the words nature and/or preserve:
“A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.”
—P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy)
“The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy’s mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)