REDDING -- Looking at a land-use map, Bill Toomey and Bill Labich can seen the large blocks of dense green -- the state forests in Newtown and Danbury, the Terre Haute land in Bethel, the combination of state park land and town land in Ridgefield.

There's the land owned by the Redding Land Trust to the south. There's the swath of woodland and meadow at Tarrywile Park in Danbury. Often, the green flows from town to town.

Then, they talk about the bigger map -- the vast swath of green that runs along the Appalachian Mountains, up through Pennsylvania and New York, then into the Berkshires in Massachusetts, the Green Mountains of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

"This is where the link is the narrowest," Toomey said of the Fairfield County map.

Toomey is the director of the Highstead Arboretum here, and Labich is the arboretum's regional conservationist. Their vision is finding ways to preserve the crucial, narrow links of forested and open space land, and all the good it does for the region, whether providing habitat for wildlife or trails to give people exercise.

They are now taking the first steps to do that by creating the Western Fairfield County Regional Conservation Partnership -- a coalition of town land trusts and conservation commissions in Bethel, Danbury, Newtown, Redding and Ridgefield.

The idea is that with such a partnership, the region can preserve and protect the forests that do exist, and help in regional

efforts to preserve more land.

"We may be able to do more collectively than we can do on our own," Toomey said.

So far, the members of the partnership have met twice, learning what's unique in each town and where they might have shared interests.

Out of these meetings, the group has begun planning a conservation and woodland workshop as well as a regional trails day. In turn that could lead to creating new links between existing trails to form a much larger system that could run throughout the region.

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