This commentary is by Michael Snyder, a forester and former commissioner of Vermont’s Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation.
Vermonters care deeply about forests — for clean water, wildlife, recreation, climate resilience, locally sourced wood, and the very character of the places we call home. That shared concern helps explain the appeal of H.276, a proposal to designate large areas of state land as “wildlands.”
But as introduced, the bill would move Vermont in the wrong direction — not because it values forests too much, but because it defines conservation too narrowly.
Vermont’s public lands are already conservation lands. They are managed to serve multiple public purposes at once: ecological integrity, climate resilience, recreation, education, research and thoughtful stewardship of forests as living systems.
For decades, Vermont state forests have been managed under a multiple-use framework grounded in science, public input and transparency. That approach has allowed Vermont to protect sensitive areas, foster older and more complex forests, welcome recreating Vermonters and visitors from around the world, and practice ecological forestry under public oversight.
H.276 would replace that diversified approach with a rigid mandate that prohibits all active forest management — including ecological forestry — on large areas of our existing state lands. Even carefully planned harvests intended to improve forest health or resilience would be barred, based on the assumption that allowing so-called “natural processes” to prevail is always the best form of conservation.
That assumption, while simple and appealing, is misleading and deserves closer examination.
Vermont’s forests are not untouched wilderness. They reflect centuries of land use, recovery and change, and today face new pressures from climate change, invasive species, altered disturbance regimes and fragmentation. In many places, forests are simplified and less resilient than they could be. Ecological forestry — carefully restoring diversity, structure and vigor — is one of the tools we use to help forests adapt over time.
Eliminating that option on public lands does not guarantee healthier forests. It simply removes our ability to respond thoughtfully as conditions change.
Some supporters of H.276 have argued that forestry on state lands is economically insignificant because it represents only a small share of Vermont’s annual harvest. That argument misses the point. The importance of public-lands forestry has never been about volume — or even revenues — alone.
Even modest, consistent levels of ecological forestry on state lands play an outsized role in rural communities. They sustain local logging and forestry capacity, maintain skills and infrastructure, and demonstrate how high-quality stewardship can be done transparently and responsibly. These operations support far more than timber production, including habitat improvement, water-quality protection, recreation and invasive species control. They are stewardship in the fullest sense, with positive effects rippling outward across the landscape.
If state lands currently contribute only a small share of Vermont’s wood supply, that should concern us. State lands are precisely where we should be doing more of our best ecological forestry, in full public view. That they contribute so little reflects not ecological success, but years of delay, conflict and discomfort with the idea that forests can be both protected and managed locally and intelligently.
Meanwhile, our demand for wood hasn’t disappeared. When we reduce responsible forestry here, we simply push production to meet our needs elsewhere — often to places with weaker environmental standards, less accountability and significant emissions associated with long-distance transport.
None of this argues against wildlands or old forests. Vermont needs more places where forests can grow old and complex with minimal intervention, and we can — and should — expand those conditions thoughtfully.
But conservation is not a single-use proposition. Protecting forests requires flexibility, humility and a willingness to use a full conservation toolbox — including careful stewardship. It means reserving some areas from intervention, actively managing others and recognizing that forests are dynamic systems, not static museums.
H.276 would replace that helpful flexibility with a one-size-fits-all mandate that simply does not fit. Vermont can do better by trusting science-based management and maintaining the balanced approach that has for decades served our forests — and Vermonters — well.
