‘Stay Connected with the Natural World’: New Canaan Land Trust Opens ‘Silvermine-Fowler Preserve’ [PHOTOS]

Jim Fowler describes himself as the type of person who promotes the natural world as important. An award-winning zoologist and New Canaanite for more than three decades, Fowler doesn’t mean saving animals alone by that, but also preserving open space and wilderness. “We need, in a community like this, to stay connected with the natural world,” Fowler said on a warm, sunny Saturday afternoon, seated in a foldout camping chair in the middle of the woods off of Silvermine Road as more than 200 locals gathered on the 6.35-acre property he purchased in 1984, arriving by shuttle bus or by way of leafy footpaths he knows intimately. “And that is why it gives me great pleasure. Look at this original forest around here.