This commentary is by Zack Porter, the executive director of Standing Trees, a Montpelier-based nonprofit working to protect and restore forests on New England’s public lands.
Standing Trees volunteers recently led a public hike near Rochester to examine logging in the Green Mountain National Forest’s Robinson Integrated Resource Project. The photos they brought back were jaw-dropping.
Here in the Green Mountains, in one of the nation’s most important regions for carbon sequestration and storage, in forests that pump clean, cold water into phosphorus-laden waterways, in habitats that support threatened and endangered wildlife, we are liquidating our children’s future.
Don’t be fooled by Forest Service and timber industry marketing ploys. While climate change, insects, fire and disease are favorite scapegoats, the facts prove that logging is the single greatest threat to public forests in New England. Your climate-saving forests are worth more standing. It’s time for Vermonters to build a coalition to end reckless logging in public forests.
Under the guise of “climate-smart forestry,” and using the misleading rationale of creating forest “age diversity,” public land managers are leveling forests that have been recovering since land abandonment in the mid-1800s.
In the past several years, in an about-face from the previous three decades of management, the U.S. Forest Service has approved over 40,000-acres of logging, an area equal to four cities of Burlington, or ten percent of the entire forest.
The Telephone Gap Integrated Resource Project proposes another 11,000 acres of logging straddling the Long Trail near the scenic Chittenden Reservoir. More than half of the forest in the project area is over a century old. A new report highlights Telephone Gap as one of the ten worst logging projects for the climate in the U.S.
The U.S. Forest Service has made a habit of submitting to special interests, conducting cursory environmental reviews that put expediency ahead of transparency, accountability and public participation. In just one example, a group that advocates for logging to benefit game birds gave the Green Mountain National Forest $80,000 to develop a project to clearcut 15,000 acres near Manchester with minimal public input. This winter, logging is set to commence in 160-year-old forests and within the beloved White Rocks National Recreation Area, designated by Congress in 1984 with the leadership of Sen. Patrick Leahy, to “preserve and protect (its) existing wilderness and wild values.”
Science tells us that old and wild forests are exceptional for accumulating and storing carbon, supporting native flora and fauna, and purifying our water. And yet, old-growth forests are functionally absent from Vermont’s landscape, with only 3% of Vermont managed to grow old once more.
Consider these five revealing statistics:
- Logging is New England’s leading cause of tree mortality, more than all other causes of mortality, combined;
- Eighty-six percent of carbon lost from Northeast U.S. forests, per year, is from logging, (more than from fire, insects or disease, combined);
- The largest 1% of trees in the U.S. store 30% of all aboveground carbon;
- Protected wildlands in the Northeast, covering just 5% of the landscape, store 30% of the region’s aboveground carbon;
- Old forests are most resilient to climate change.
President Joe Biden issued a monumental executive order on Earth Day of this year, placing protections for mature and old forests at the top of the priority list for the U.S. Forest Service. Despite repeated pleas from Standing Trees to pause logging of mature forests and within inventoried roadless areas that harbor many of the region’s most intact ecosystems, the U.S. Forest Service continues to race headlong into a crisis of our own making.
There is no choice to be made between producing wood products and protecting public forests. Public forests, covering nearly 20% of Vermont, provide just 3.4% of the state’s timber supply. And arguments for creating “age diversity” are baseless: the only forest age that is grossly out of the historic range is old forest, which requires a commitment of permanent protection. Public lands are best suited to recovering old forests at ecosystem scales.
At Telephone Gap, a recovering forest is at a crossroads. Will we allow it to grow old, benefiting the public good, or cut its future off for private gain?
The U.S. Forest Service still has time to put the brakes on the Telephone Gap project and come into compliance with President Biden’s executive order. Now is the time to raise your voice.
Here are three things you can do: 1) Submit a comment by Aug. 30 to tell the Forest Service to take action to implement President Biden’s executive order; 2) call Vermont’s Congressional delegation and express your outrage at the destruction of Vermont’s National Forest; 3) and finally, sign up for our email list to stay informed about the first official comment period for the Telephone Gap project, expected this September.
