Dear Editor,
We applaud Mr. Riley’s excellent opinion piece on ecological forestry. We share his love of forests.
Forest loss and fragmentation diminish both the vast biological and ecological functions of forests and all the benefits we humans derive from them. Permanent conservation is needed to keep forests as forests.
Ecological forestry, which we fully endorse, is an approach to both maintain forests and to produce the products we need locally.
We also need more wild forests, forests that are allowed to mature with free will, under natural processes and evolving over time. As forests mature, they become more complex biologically and structurally, store vast amounts of carbon and are scientific benchmarks for bettering our understanding of forest ecology and management. Moreover, wild forests and all their inhabitants simply have inherent value. We have a responsibility to protect them.
Wild forests are rare in the region. The 2023 report Wildlands in New England: Past, Present, and Future identified only 3.3 percent of the region as protected wildlands. Both this report and Vermont Conservation Design call for at least 9-10 percent of the landscape to be protected as wildland or old forest. The 2024 analysis and report Beyond the “Illusion of Preservation” identifies three steps for our forests’ future: 1) protect forests (at least 10 percent of the land as wildlands, 70 percent as managed woodlands), 2) reduce consumption by 25 percent, and 3) expand ecological forestry.
We need more wild forests and more ecological forestry, and we have plenty of room for both.
Eric Sorenson, Calais
Brett Engstrom, Marshfield
Liz Thompson, Williston
