‘A CHAMPION OF OUR VILLAGE’
Hundreds gather in Canton to pay tribute to beloved poet, environmentalist and public servant David Leff
CANTON — Hundreds of people encircled the Collinsville Green on Tuesday evening to memorialize the life of David Leff, a former deputy commissioner for the Department of Environmental Protection whose contributions as an environmentalist, lawyer, author, poet, public servant, historian, volunteer firefighter, friend and family man are an enduring legacy.
Leff died suddenly last weekend as a result of a stroke, according to family members. He was 67.
“My father was a man who lived a life greater than any of us could individually understand,” Leff ’s son, Joshua Leff, said. “He lived life to the fullest.”
One by one, the litany of speakers including family members, a lawyer, a former town first selectman, a firefighter, poets, educators and environmentalists, spoke to honor Leff, a man described by friends as a Renaissance man.
“One thing about David, he had lots of families, and the number of people here tonight is a testament to how much he meant in so many different areas of life, whether it be poetry, or maple sugaring, or nature, or history. He was very much a Renaissance man who I am proud to have called a friend for over 30 years,” said Jay Kaplan, who noted Leff ’s work with the Roaring Brook Concert Series.
Leff ’s contributions as a state employee included his hand in the largest land conservation acquisition ever, about 15,000 acres of what’s principally known as the Centennial Watershed State Forest, according to his sister, Elizabeth Leff.
Mark Brance, who attended Uconn Law School with Leff in the 1970s, said Leff was instrumental in the state increasing the percentage of land that has been designated as open space.
Leff had a profound love of nature, said Kaplan, showing up at the Hartford landfill before 6 a.m. to census grassland birds, as well as doing Christmas and summer bird counts at the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford.
Elizabeth Leff also recalled the notepads that her brother always had on him, where he would record the world around him.
“Observations of trees, rocks, turtles,” Elizabeth Leff said. “He called them ‘marvels hidden in plain sight.’ ”
Elizabeth said David’s attention to nature was on display when, while bird
with BA.2 accounting for 89% of cases diagnosed this week. Evolving subvariants will continue to drive transmission through the summer with a spike in the fall, Ulysses Wu, MD, chief epidemiologist for Hartford Healthcare, said in a post Thursday on Hartford Healthcare’s News Hub.
“Levels are not going to approach winter levels or last summer’s delta variant levels, but we also will not approach the lows that we would like to see,” Wu said. “We will continue to go through waves of ‘swells’ throughout the early summer at the least, with a likely spike in late fall.”
He predicted new surges could come from subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, which were detected in the United States in late March, and seem to evade immunity created by vaccines and previous infection.
With transmission still high, experts recommend people — vaccinated or not — continue to wear masks indoors and in crowded spaces.