Updated Friday, March 3.
WOODBURY — Inside 30 million acres of the largest forested region in the eastern U.S., in a heavily wooded stretch of northeastern Vermont and on more than 6,000 acres of freshly protected land in Woodbury, ecologist Shelby Perry sat cross-legged atop a mossy knoll. Carefully, she bore a thin, hollow rod into the heart of a red spruce tree.
After extracting a sliver of the tree’s pale flesh, she counted its segments, each marking a cycle of seasons in the tree’s life. As of September 2022, it had been standing for about 100 years.
[The Deeper Dig: In the forest, a patch of common ground]
Perry works for the Northeast Wilderness Trust, which bought this land last year and named it the Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve. That day in late September, she was hunting for some of Vermont’s elusive old forests, which she suspected might exist on the land.
But the number of old trees that stood there pale in comparison to the forest’s projected composition years from now. Unlike other land trusts and conservation organizations in the region, the Northeast Wilderness Trusts’ “forever-wild” easements permanently protect forests from human intervention, including logging. Easements on this land and thousands of other acres owned by the organization are all but guaranteed to eventually grow old.
Across Vermont, where 74% of the state is covered in forest, only around 3.7% of the forests are permanently protected in what are called wildland reserves, according to a forthcoming report by forest research and conservation groups including Harvard Forest, Highstead and Northeast Wilderness Trust. In recent years, environmentalists have made a push to increase those numbers, and in some areas, it appears they’re gaining ground.
The definition of the term “old growth” is hotly debated on a global scale. Most agree that forests qualify if they have never been logged or impacted by disturbance events, but others think the term should be more expansive. Across the region, scientists consider less than 0.1% of land in New England and New York to be occupied by old growth forests. European settlers are responsible for this scarcity; they cleared the majority of the landscape in the 1800s to create agricultural land.
“There’s a very, very small portion of the Green Mountain National Forest that has never been logged,” said Chris Mattrick, the forest’s Rochester and Middlebury District ranger. Untouched areas are usually small pockets in ravines or on extremely steep slopes, he said.
Advocates for the so-called “rewilding” or “proforestation” movement — which argues, in short, to leave the forest alone, forever — say the approach allows an abundance of different species to flourish. Wildland reserves, advocates say, help the forest, its inhabitants and its surroundings adapt to climate change while simultaneously sequestering and storing atmospheric carbon.
“For me, wilderness is about humility,” Perry said. “It’s about saying, ‘maybe I don’t know what’s best for this place,’ and stepping back and letting what happens happen.”
The story is older than most of the trees in the state, and as vexed as it is timeworn. Across the country, environmentalists have long fought to protect old growth forests and allow logged woodlands to fully regenerate. Others say there are good reasons for humans to actively manage forests. Those advocates include loggers and foresters, who earn their livelihoods from the land, but also scientists and other members of the environmental movement.
Some scientists warn against a false dichotomy: that forest must either be entirely set aside in wildland reserves or intensively managed by people. Some recent studies show that humans can carefully but actively manage forests in ways that help the ecosystem and climate. Meanwhile, much of the environmental community remains resolute that ecology benefits most when forests are left unchaperoned by people.
Many of the entities engaged in the debate don’t endorse one singular approach. While focusing on re-balancing the amount of “forever wild” forest that exists in the region, staff at the Northeast Wilderness Trust, for example, believe their work complements that of a healthy timber industry.
Even amid heated debates among scientists, where climate advocates feel desperate about the fate of the planet and where loggers feel the public harbors animosity toward their livelihood, there appears to be a small but fertile patch of common ground.
‘People need to have choices’
On a Monday in January, up a winding road in Tunbridge, loggers arrived at their job site after working through the weekend. A record-warm winter had severely restricted the number of days they’d been able to operate machinery on the muddy forest floor, and workers had switched their schedules to make the most of frozen periods.
The air smelled of pine. Neat, sorted stacks of cut trees, limbs removed, sat waiting for transport trucks to move them to local mills, where they’d become paper, lumber and construction materials, wood pellets and firewood, and other products.
Sam Lincoln, formerly the deputy commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation and owner of Lincoln Farm Timber Harvesting, based in Randolph Center, said irregular weather patterns of the last several years have challenged the business.
In 2021, there was so much rain that his crew worked only five days in July, he said, and conditions were similar in August, putting a sharp pinch on the operation’s finances. During the summer of 2022, the eastern part of the state, where Lincoln primarily operates, was bone dry. Flash forward to the recent unseasonably warm fall and winter, and conditions have remained tough.
“The only reason we got in five days this last week is because the guys worked both Saturday and Sunday,” Lincoln said. He said it was only their third full week since the beginning of November.
Some environmentalists argue that, because large trees store and sequester carbon, a reduction in local logging could help the state meet its climate goals. But Lincoln cites the necessary uses for wood products and the frequency with which most people use them — in goods such as medical packaging, shipping boxes, tissue paper and food packaging.
In Vermont, forest-based business, including maple syrup, Christmas trees and the forest products industry, contributes $861 million in sales to the state’s economy each year, according to the Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation. The industry employs about 6,600 people.
Lincoln believes the industry is helping to fight against climate change.
In Vermont, many shoppers now carry their groceries home in paper bags instead of single-use plastic bags, which have been banned by the state. Wood fiber can replace products made with plastic and fossil fuels, Lincoln said.
There’s an opportunity to continue on with careful forestry and be “a huge part of climate change and these discussions that are going on,” Lincoln said. “We can play a role.”
Asked about conserving old forests, Lincoln echoed a sentiment also expressed by environmentalists: It’s a balance.
“I don’t think the forest economy, economics, have to override everything,” he said. “We don’t want to damage our environment with what we’re doing, but as humans, we are here and consuming things, so we have to balance.”
While he doesn’t necessarily oppose setting some forest aside in wildland reserves, he said the approach needs to carefully consider data about the consumption of wood products, which he said seems to be increasing.
“Reducing the number of trees harvested in Vermont does not result in a reduction in the number of trees harvested to feed a supply chain of human needs,” he said.
Lincoln worries about public rhetoric that simplifies the conversation about logging and sometimes villainizes his profession. He walked through his crew’s careful work on a job site: observing wide buffers between harvesting sites and waterways, leaving dead trees alone to help wildlife, wielding expensive machines designed to pluck one tree from a stand without touching any others. Many of his jobs don’t involve clearcutting large swaths of land, he said, though those cuts are talked about widely in debates about forests.
One common example of a time he’s been called to clear a patch of forest is “to create more pasture for organic dairy farms,” he said. “Is that a bad thing? I mean, if an organic dairy can expand and be more economically viable because they’re not importing more feed, I don’t think that’s a terrible thing.”
An advocate for individual property rights, he said timber harvests can be an important source of revenue for landowners.
“I think people need to have choices,” he said. “I don’t necessarily think it should be dictated to them what they do or don’t do, as long as it’s within the bounds of appropriate environmental protection.”
Nearly 90 minutes north of Randolph, in Albany, most of the products at Goodrich Lumber are used for building homes.
Colleen Goodrich, who owns the store with her three sons and serves as vice president of the Vermont Forest Products Association, said most Vermonters want an array of different things from the forests: “clean air, clean water, forest products, recreational activities, wildlife habitat.” Forests might be one of the state’s best tools to mitigate climate change, she said.
She, too, said it’s important to maintain a balance in Vermont’s forests, and pointed to conservation easements that already exist in the state. She compared forests to gardens: “If it’s not tended and weeded, it does not produce, in the long term, anything like what you would want it to.”
Goodrich said Vermonters should exercise caution, particularly as people feel increasing urgency to solve the climate crisis.
“We all need to do our part,” she said. “But I think we need to be careful about words that we use in talking about it, or even in legislation that could somehow stop the weeding of the garden in a responsible way.”
A catalyst
It’s widely accepted that forests help fight climate change. Trees — particularly old ones — sequester and store immense amounts of carbon.
“Old forests are like carbon reservoirs,” said Bill Keeton, a professor of forest ecology and forestry at the University of Vermont. “This is carbon in the bank. And we need to think of carbon storage as the work of sequestration past. This is the outcome of hundreds of years of sequestration. We now have the storage. Carbon is down here, and not up in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.”
Forests also offer a refuge for a diverse range of species. When stretches of forest remain intact, wildlife can move freely, both in terms of direction and elevation. Scientists expect many species to migrate as a changing climate alters their habitat.
With these considerations in mind, climate change has acted as a catalyst, pushing environmentalists, with some success, to pursue a new balance of forest protection in the Green Mountain State.
The movement has arrived at the Statehouse in the form of H.126, which sets a goal of conserving a total of 30% of the state’s land by 2030 and 50% by 2050.
The bill would require Vermont to make a plan to implement an oft-quoted state-issued document, Vermont Conservation Design. It proposes setting 9% of Vermont’s forests aside to grow old and returning between 3% and 5% “to the pre-European abundance of young forest.”
Members of the House Environment and Energy Committee voted 9-2 in favor of advancing H.126 on Feb. 28, but the bill awaits further consideration in the House. If it’s passed from the chamber, members of the Senate would need to consider the bill before it lands on the governor’s desk.
The bill includes three categories of conserved lands with varying levels of permanent protection, all of which would count toward the requirements.
In the first category, ecological reserve areas, forests would “maintain a natural state” with minimal human intervention.
Regular and active human intervention would be allowed in the second category, “biological conservation areas,” but only “to address the needs of particular species or to maintain or restore habitats.”
The third category, “natural resource management areas,” would include active management in the form of sustainable forestry.
Gov. Phil Scott vetoed a similar bill last session. Earlier this year, Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore, a member of Scott’s administration, expressed concern to lawmakers “that the emphasis is on permanent conservation in these definitions, and that it ends up feeling unnecessarily narrow.”
Moore pointed to programs that help incentivize landowners to maintain healthy ecosystems on their land without permanent conservation easements. But Rep. Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury, told VTDigger there’s good reason why her bill emphasizes permanent conservation.
“If it’s not permanently protected, it’s not protected.” she said.
Sheldon, who introduced the bill and chairs the House Environment and Energy Committee, said the bill will direct state officials to inventory the different types of conservation that are already in place across the landscape to see how far the state would need to go to meet the new conservation goal.
Lincoln submitted testimony on H.126, and while he said isn’t wholly against the idea of conserving forest, he thinks the bill ignores the fact that many landowners have long engaged in voluntary protection of working forests, through current use and forestry plans.
A nuanced debate
Across the state — in and away from the Statehouse — forest conservation advocates have been gaining momentum over the last several years.
The Northeast Wilderness Trust has purchased more and more land across New England, all of which is entered into its forever wild easements. In total, the organization currently protects more than 15,000 acres in Vermont and nearly 76,000 acres across New England and New York.
Bob Linck, conservation director at the Northeast Wilderness Trust, said the organization is receiving a steadily increasing number of inquiries.
“We’re able to take advantage of opportunities more than we were even a couple of years ago,” he said.
Last year, state lawmakers established Act 146, which adds a new “reserved forestland” category to Vermont’s widely adopted current use program.
Current use allows landowners to be taxed a lower rate based on the value of their undeveloped land, rather than on its marketplace value. Historically, that incentive had applied only to working land that was actively farmed or logged. Under the new category, landowners can enter into the program and manage their land strictly for environmental benefits.
About 80% of Vermont’s forest is privately owned, making current use an important tool for land management in the state.
In a separate development, the state’s Agency of Natural Resources recently announced it would begin a process to guide the way state-owned land is managed. That announcement came in response to a lawsuit and a petition brought by environmentalists who want to see more land managed for ecological benefits. It’s too soon to say whether the process would significantly change forest management on a broad scale.
In April 2022, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that, among a list of forest policy updates, calls for conserving mature and old growth forests. It builds on an earlier call-to-action by the Biden administration to conserve 30% of land in the U.S. by 2030.
Specifics of the policy, set to be published this spring, may change the proposed course of the Telephone Gap Integrated Resource Project, which spans eight towns in Rutland County. There, more than 11,800 acres of Green Mountain National Forest could be harvested, including 8,760 acres of mature trees between 60 and 119 years old, and 2,095 acres of “old” forest 120 years old or more.
In Oregon, officials stopped a logging project that was set to take place on federal land, due largely to the executive order, according to Eugene Weekly.
Mattrick, the ranger with the Green Mountain National Forest, said his office is waiting for policy details stemming from the executive order to make any decisions about the Telephone Gap project.
“That project will be adjusted to comply with any new direction coming from the Washington office,” he said. “So, we’re flexible. When that policy does come out, and if it does come out, we’ll adjust.”
Not all proposals have been a success, however, and Vermont’s dire housing crisis adds another layer of complexity to the debate. Forest products, and sometimes the land where forest previously stood, are used to build much-needed homes. Conservation advocates say policies should incentivize developers to build new housing in designated downtown areas wherever possible.
In May 2022, concerns about the housing crisis drove Scott to veto a bill that would have updated Act 250, Vermont’s robust land use law, to more strongly protect forests. Environmentalists said the bill would have struck the right balance, relaxing Act 250 in designated downtown areas while adding protection for forest blocks.
Of Vermont’s 4.2 million acres of forestland, more than 12,600 acres are converted for other uses each year, according to a 2020 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The debate about forest protection is nuanced. Wood heats buildings, makes furniture, creates local jobs and provides fuel for biomass plants such as Burlington’s McNeil generating station, Vermont’s largest — and one of the most controversial — in-state energy sources.
If Vermont moved away from sourcing its wood products locally, more would likely come from further afield, increasing the carbon footprint of those wood products and exporting Vermont’s needs to a place that could have less stringent environmental regulations.
By keeping forests intact and including provisions that much of the land would remain open for timber harvests, Sheldon believes H.126 could be a win-win for both environmentalists and loggers.
“We hear all the time from the forest products industry that subdivision and parcelization make it very hard to do a logging operation,” Sheldon said. “To me, again, this is entirely supportive and compatible with the forest products industry.”
‘Not a this-or-that scenario’
When forestry professionals say they’re frustrated by strident environmentalists working to move the public opinion against logging, they’re often referring to Standing Trees, a Montpelier-based organization that advocates for a long-term vision where logging doesn’t take place on public lands in New England.
Standing Trees’ founder and executive director, Zack Porter, has been widely quoted in state media outlets and has successfully pressured the state to open its public land management rules. He’s also provoked the ire of loggers and state officials.
Porter, too, says he’s an advocate for balance in Vermont’s forest, and stresses that Standing Trees isn’t an anti-logging organization. He believes the pendulum has swung too far in the timber industry’s direction, and sees New York as a good example of what Vermont should aspire to, with 2.6 million acres of protected wilderness in the Adirondack Park.
Porter acknowledges that the organization acts as a thorn in the side of advocates for working land.
“If we are disrupting the status quo, then we are doing our job,” he said, adding that he saw a hunger among members of the public for more balance in forested lands. Standing Trees claims a mailing list of about 2,600 people.
He and other members of Standing Trees generally take the position that human intervention, while necessary for the human economy, doesn’t do much for the health of a forest.
“What absolutely isn’t true is to suggest that our forests need to be logged to be healthy,” Porter said. “New England’s forests, or the forests of the Adirondacks, have proven one thing over the last 150 years: It’s that they are incredibly resilient. They have come back from, essentially, devastation.”
Research by scientists at the University of Vermont complicates this argument — and sometimes refutes it altogether — suggesting that some managed forests can store and sequester more carbon, and that forests that have been intensively managed in the past can benefit from more sustainable management.
Charlie Hancock, who runs a forestry and natural resource consulting group and serves on the Vermont Climate Council, has testified multiple times in front of lawmakers on H.126.
Lurking just beneath the surface of the bill, Hancock said, is a debate between advocates of passive rewilding and advocates of sustainable management. But he said the bill “does a really nice job of not endorsing any singular approach.”
The idea that Vermont’s forests shouldn’t be dominated by a single approach isn’t new, he said, but “seems to have been lost a little bit in the recent conversation about these things.”
In an interview, Hancock said he’s been frustrated by conversations that have played out in forums and in both local and national media that don’t encompass the full debate, and sometimes echo half-truths.
He acknowledged that there’s been a shift in public perception as fewer and fewer Vermonters make their living off the landscape.
“All of that is good,” he said. “But it takes the paradigm and the worldview, collectively that we have, and it starts to shift it in ways that we haven’t seen yet. All of these kinds of trends have us now in this place where we’re having a really tough conversation about what our forests are, what they mean to us and what we want from them.”
Asked whether more forests should be set aside in reserves, Hancock said, “Yes.”
“Some of the terminology we use is really dividing the community at a time when we really should be promoting both the creation of forest reserves and the improvement of forest management,” he said. “It’s not a this-or-that scenario. It’s a yes, and.”
What does balance look like?
Keeton, the UVM professor of forest ecology and forestry, has studied old growth forests for the majority of his career, and considers himself an advocate for old growth conservation.
While he believes that wildland reserves are important and should be prioritized, he also believes that certain types of active management can give northeastern forests old growth characteristics.
“I’ve always been a believer in this idea of complementarity,” he said. “These are not mutually exclusive approaches. Sustainable, active forest management can complement the wildland and protected-areas based approaches. They work hand-in-hand.”
Forests that have been profoundly altered by human activity, he argues, may need specific types of management. He points to forests that are regrowing following widespread cutting; that have been inundated with invasive species; or that are being touched by the extreme weather that comes with climate change.
“Those are situations where a little bit of careful intervention and stewardship and adaptive management could go a long way, and could actually help us sustain forests,” he said.
Hancock gives another example. Deer and moose eat sugar maple, oak and ash trees.
“There’s certain activities that we can do to stimulate regeneration in ways where we can try to essentially control the impact of browse to maintain certain species in the forest,” he said.
Keeton is one of 24 scientists to co-author a report called Wildlands and Woodlands, which proposes permanently protecting 70% of New England’s forests. Of those protected lands, 10% would be “wildland reserves.”
In Vermont, Keeton has tested a system where he altered a forest — creating small gaps to encourage new growth, for example — to speed up natural processes and disturbances with a goal of creating characteristics often seen in old forests.
In an essay called “Restoration of Eastern Old-growth Forests: There is no one-size-fits-all approach,” he reported that, after 13 years of monitoring, the technique had worked. It resulted in “diverse and abundant regeneration,” and could “at a minimum pay for itself and, when site and market conditions are favorable, generate enough profit to make it attractive for some landowners,” Keeton wrote.
His research also showed that carefully managing forests can increase the amount of carbon they sequester and store.
Keeton said he supports H.126 because it balances “approaches that have been presented to the public as though they’re competing, when in fact, they’re complementary.”
Does folding many approaches into one model mean that everyone wins? It’s not that simple, according to Keeton. Scientists and environmentalists are still hard at work debating the details.
“We want balance, but should we be tilted more towards one approach or another?” Keeton asked. “I think there is disagreement about that. I don’t think that that’s a bad thing. I think that we need debates. That’s how the science advances, and that’s how the policy will advance.”
On its own terms
At the highest point of elevation on Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve, Perry scaled a steep, rocky ledge with her dog, Mia, trailing at her side. She took note of her surroundings: a spongy layer of earth, decaying logs, lichen covering the bark of short, stubby trees.
“All of that together makes me feel like we’re in an old forest — although it is not really what you might imagine it to be — like big, giant trees,” she said.
The trees that surrounded her were likely around 100 years in age or slightly younger, she guessed. She speculated that a hurricane in 1938 might have blown them down. They had grown back stubby, and seemed to be successfully weathering difficult conditions. The ecosystem appeared to be wholly intact.
Shelby said there’s value in places that are not molded by the human hand.
“Baby trees might get shaded out and die, or they might grow bigger. It might take a long time. It might take longer than it would if we went in there and did something about it, for the forest to look really old,” she said. “But it gets to do it on its own terms.”
In Western culture, the debate about whether humans should be part of nature has been around for a long time. But before European settlers cleared Vermont’s landscape in the 1800s, Indigenous people carefully subsisted off the region’s forests for thousands of years.
“Maybe that’s something that we can learn from,” Keeton said. “We can say, OK, well, maybe if we limited our influence and went a little bit lighter on the land in that way that ecosystems are adapted to, because they’ve co-evolved with that level of human influence, then maybe that would be appropriate.”
Rich Holschuh, a member of the Elnu Abenaki tribe and director of the Atowi Project, supports Sheldon’s effort to conserve 30% of Vermont’s forests by 2030.
Holschuh spoke about the challenges of bringing an Indigenous perspective — where humans are “part of the circle, not the top of the pyramid” — into a conversation that prioritizes Western systems.
In order to manage the forest for the forests’ sake and take part in a reciprocal relationship, Holschuh said, people need to loosen themselves from a mindset focused on extraction. He sees sustainable management as a small step in a direction that could eventually lead to a more hands-off approach.
“There’s going to be some transition time,” he said. “We’re not flipping a switch here. It’s not about technology. We have to grow into this, and we’ve been going in the other direction for a long time. People need to be a part of it — they definitely need to be a part of whatever is done, but we need to be coming from a proper place of respect and understanding.”
Speaking by phone during a string of unusually warm February days, he said acting on climate requires urgency.
“The time is now,” he said. “Look outside the window.”
