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The First Stewards
The Susquehannock were the original placemakers
Before there were county lines, development rights, or zoning codes, there were the Susquehannock. For centuries, this Iroquoian-speaking people lived, farmed, fished, and traveled along the river that now bears their name — a name derived from the Algonquian phrase meaning 'people of the Muddy River,' first recorded when explorer Captain John Smith encountered them in 1608. They navigated the Susquehanna in dugout canoes, cultivated the valley's fertile soils, and built their communities in relationship with the land rather than in opposition to it.
The earliest known Susquehannock settlement in this region was a palisaded village in what is now Lancaster County — the very county at the heart of my NNN pilot vision. Their presence here was not incidental. The Susquehannock understood this landscape as a living system long before that language existed in planning or ecology. Their practice of moving when an environment became depleted, of merging with other tribes, of organizing as fluid inter-tribal communities rather than rigid settlements, reflects a sophistication about human-land relationships that modern placemaking is only beginning to rediscover.
Their story did not end peacefully. Wars, epidemics, displacement, and ultimately the Conestoga Massacre of 1763 — in which Paxton Boy vigilantes slaughtered the last known Susquehannock community in Lancaster — represent one of this region's deepest historical wounds. Yet the Conestoga-Susquehannock Tribe endures. They are not a people of the past.
"The Susquehanna River had all the resources our people needed. This river, the nature, it just resonates with my soul. It resonates with who I am and who I've always been." — Tiffany Johnson, Benson Family Descendant
Those words carry the essence of what Nature Nested Neighborhoods aspires to restore: a relationship between people and place so deep it feels like identity. Any honest effort to reimagine how we inhabit this land must begin with acknowledgment — of who was here, what they knew, what was taken from them, and what their living descendants still carry. The Susquehannock are not a chapter in a history book. They are a living voice in the conversation about what it means to belong to this land, and they deserve a seat at the table as this region decides what it will become."
Image Credit: SRBC
KEY WATERWAYS
The Susquehanna River
The Susquehanna River
The Susquehanna River
The Susquehanna River is the spine of South Central Pennsylvania — a waterway so fundamental to the region's identity that it is difficult to imagine the landscape without it. Stretching nearly 450 miles from upstate New York to the Chesapeake Bay, it has powered mills, floated timber, carried canals, and shaped the growth of every commun
The Susquehanna River is the spine of South Central Pennsylvania — a waterway so fundamental to the region's identity that it is difficult to imagine the landscape without it. Stretching nearly 450 miles from upstate New York to the Chesapeake Bay, it has powered mills, floated timber, carried canals, and shaped the growth of every community along its banks, including Harrisburg, the state capital that rose on its eastern shore.
Today I know this river from three vantage points: the running path, the fishing bank, and the inside of a power plant. My professional work in the energy sector has brought me face to face with the Susquehanna's role as an energy source — infrastructure that keeps the region's lights on. It is a river I have come to understand as both wild and deeply managed, both natural heritage and working infrastructure.
The Susquehanna asks something of us. Agricultural runoff, climate change, and the pressures of a densely populated watershed have left their mark — not as indictments of the river, but as a reflection of how far we have drifted from our responsibilities as stewards of the systems that sustain us. The river is not broken. It is waiting for us to show up differently. And that tension — between what this watershed is and what it could be with our care — makes the Susquehanna not just a backdrop for my fieldwork, but a living argument for everything I am exploring in My Field.
The Yellow Breeches
The Susquehanna River
The Susquehanna River
Running through the heart of Mechanicsburg, the Yellow Breeches Creek is more than a waterway — it is a living thread connecting this community to its natural heritage. For centuries it shaped the land, supported agriculture, and powered the mills that defined early settlement in the region. Today it is internationally recognized as a wor
Running through the heart of Mechanicsburg, the Yellow Breeches Creek is more than a waterway — it is a living thread connecting this community to its natural heritage. For centuries it shaped the land, supported agriculture, and powered the mills that defined early settlement in the region. Today it is internationally recognized as a world-class trout fishery, drawing anglers from across the globe each season and sustaining a quiet but significant outdoor recreation economy.
But that distinction comes with responsibility. The creek's reputation depends on careful stewardship — stocking programs, habitat monitoring, and the ongoing negotiation between human enjoyment and ecological integrity. It is a place where the tension between access and preservation plays out in real time, season after season.
For me, the Yellow Breeches is also personal. I grew up floating its currents on inner tubes, jumping from rope swings into water cold enough to take your breath away. Long before I had words like 'biophilic design' or 'ecological well-being,' I understood in my body what it meant to belong to a place. That creek is part of why I believe, without reservation, that restoring the relationship between people and nature is not a utopian idea — it is a memory worth building toward.
The Swatara Creek
The Susquehanna River
The Swatara Creek
The Swatara Creek — the 'Swattie' to those who know it well — winds through the heart of South Central Pennsylvania before emptying into the Susquehanna near Middletown. I have run its trails in every season, logged miles alongside it in the early morning quiet when the only sounds are water and footfall. I have paddled it with friends on
The Swatara Creek — the 'Swattie' to those who know it well — winds through the heart of South Central Pennsylvania before emptying into the Susquehanna near Middletown. I have run its trails in every season, logged miles alongside it in the early morning quiet when the only sounds are water and footfall. I have paddled it with friends on lazy summer afternoons when it felt like the most generous place in the world. It is a creek I have known in my body, not just on a map.
Which is why what I have found in the data is difficult to sit with. The Swatara is struggling. Sediment runoff from accelerating land development is reshaping its banks and smothering its bed. Abandoned mine drainage carries a legacy of industrial extraction into its current. And 2025 water quality monitoring from USGS indicates that water quality standards were met less than 60% of the time — with fecal coliform contamination frequently detected during the summer months when people are most likely to be in and near the water.
The Swatara does not need to be this way. Its condition is not inevitable — it is the accumulated result of choices made upstream, literally and figuratively. A creek that I once trusted enough to paddle is now a creek that I find myself studying as a case study in what happens when communities lose their sense of responsibility to the living systems around them. The Swatara is not a cautionary tale. It is an invitation — to understand what broke, and to imagine what restoration could look like when a community decides the water is worth fighting for."
vanishing ground
Pennsylvania is losing its farmland. The question is not whether to build — but how.
Pennsylvania is farm country in its bones. From the rolling limestone valleys of the southeast to the ridge-and-valley landscapes of the center, agriculture has shaped this state's identity, economy, and food culture for centuries. But that heritage is quietly disappearing beneath cul-de-sacs and subdivision streets.
Between 2001 and 2016, Pennsylvania lost 347,000 acres of agricultural land — 70% of it to low-density residential development. The state ranked eighth in the nation for this kind of farmland conversion, a pattern sometimes called 'pop-up neighborhoods': scattered, car-dependent housing that consumes land at a rate 23 times more likely to trigger surrounding urbanization than other forms of development. The land doesn't just change hands. It changes character, permanently.
Pennsylvania has not been passive in the face of this loss. Since 1988, the state has preserved 6,673 farms and over 662,000 acres of farmland through voluntary conservation programs — one of the most robust efforts of its kind in the country. As recently as October 2025, the state invested $5.7 million to protect 24 additional farms. These are meaningful victories. But they are victories won one parcel at a time, against a tide that does not slow between transactions.
Underneath this pressure lies a genuine human need: Pennsylvania, like much of the country, is grappling with a serious housing shortage. The demand for homes is real, and the people who need them are real. The question that drives my research is not whether to build, but how — and where — and in what relationship to the land that remains. That question has no better laboratory in this state than Lancaster County.
Lancaster is Pennsylvania's second most productive agricultural county, a place where working farms, Amish communities, thriving urban spaces, and some of the most fertile soils on the continent exist in close proximity. It is also a county under pressure — from population growth, tourism, and the slow creep of development from surrounding metros. For all of these reasons, Lancaster is where I intend to bring the Nature Nested Neighborhoods concept from vision to practice. It is a place that deserves to be grown carefully, and I believe it can be.