This commentary is by Zack Porter, the first executive director of Standing Trees. He lives in Montpelier.
On Monday, July 10, Vermonters became painfully reacquainted with the power of water. The slow-motion storm wreaked havoc on homes and businesses and displaced the unhoused, yet again.
Now is the time to volunteer, to donate, to focus on getting people and businesses back on their feet. But it’s not too soon to learn from this flood and prepare for the next.
Just one month before the storm, researchers at Dartmouth and the University of Vermont published a paper predicting that extreme precipitation in the Northeast will increase more than 50% by 2100 due to climate change. The future is already here. On July 10, 5.28 inches, or nearly two months’ worth of rain, fell in Montpelier, setting a single-day record.
As bad as the flooding was, I shudder to think what might have happened to Montpelier, my hometown, without the forests and wetlands upstream of the city that slowed, spread and absorbed much of the recent rainfall. Wrightsville Dam, built for flood control after the Great Flood of 1927, came within inches of releasing water over its spillway, doubling the amount of water that would have inundated the city through the North Branch of the Winooski River.
Although much appreciation has been directed at the dam, we owe a debt of gratitude to the natural reservoirs that kept water levels within Wrightsville’s capacity. How much more floodwater reduction could have been possible with healthier headwater forests, wetlands and floodplains?
In this day and age, we are quick to blame climate change for disasters. But even if the extreme rain is attributable to climate change, the extreme damage caused by a storm is largely a result of land-use decisions.
Before European settlement, old forests with pockmarked topography and full of downed logs, as well as extensive beaver-created wetlands, acted as sponges and traps for rain. Then came colonization. Montpelier and other towns hit hard by recent flooding were built within floodplains. Deforestation, intensive agriculture, and ongoing logging and roadbuilding have resulted in degraded forests that perform only a fraction of their flood mitigation potential. More than half of the wetlands in the Champlain Basin have been filled in.
Turning the climate into a convenient scapegoat risks absolving us of our culpability in local land-management decisions that exacerbate or invite disasters, and blinds us to important steps that we can take to make our communities more resilient, whether by restoring forests and wetlands, reducing impervious surfaces, or moving vulnerable people and businesses to higher ground.
Even if society outperforms all expectations at reducing atmospheric carbon, extreme weather will plague Vermont for decades or centuries to come. While lowering emissions is critical, local and regional land-use decisions will always have a more direct impact on human safety, and — compared to climate change — they are variables that we have significantly more control over.
Standing Trees recently sued Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources over its failure to develop binding regulations for the management of state lands, as required by law. The litigation calls out the agency’s failure to consider the recommendations of a 2015 report that the state commissioned in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene to improve flood resilience.
The dirt roads, skid trails, and simplified structure of logged forests reduce their ability to slow, spread and sink water into the ground. The report states:
“The quality of (today’s) forests is not the same as the pre-Settlement old growth forests. The legacy of early landscape development and a history of channel and floodplain modifications continue to impact water and sediment routing from the land. Landscape modifications have had the effect of increasing the connectedness of land to the river network. It is this enhanced connectivity that needs to be addressed to make our landscape more resilient to flooding and the impacts of a changing climate.”
Instead of transparently analyzing the report’s recommendations, the state released a management plan for the Camel’s Hump Management Unit in 2021 without even acknowledging the report’s existence. Records requests revealed staff at the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation feared the curtailment of the state’s commercial logging program if the report’s flood mitigation actions were implemented.
The CC Putnam State Forest, upstream of Wrightsville Reservoir and Montpelier, may soon have its management plan revised. Will state agencies continue to give short shrift to flood risk reduction? Or will they embrace their unique ability to protect downstream communities by allowing forests to grow old and removing logging roads?
Restoring degraded ecosystems is among the most cost-effective and rapidly scalable strategies available to increase the resilience of our towns and cities, improve carbon sequestration and storage, enhance water quality, and support Vermont’s most imperiled species, from brook trout to bats. It’s a win-win-win-win.
That’s why Standing Trees helped conceive and pass the Community Resilience and Biodiversity Protection Act, championed by state Rep. Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury. And it’s why we must do even more to put Vermont’s forests, wetlands, and floodplains on a path to recovery.
