From the Wall Street Journal via the Post Gazette, by James Sterba
To understand the latest threat to one of the largest naturally reforested regions on the planet -- the Northeastern U.S. -- it helps to drop in on "volunteer day" in the town forest of this wealthy community outside of Boston.
A local tree surgeon gives chain-saw lessons. Brian Donahue, a college professor, offers log-splitting tips. Volunteers stack split wood to dry. The logs are from a handsome black oak, perhaps 70 years old, dismembered with a chain saw two days earlier while a class of Weston High School seniors watched. Each year, the town topples about 200 trees in its 1,700-acre forest and sells them, mostly for firewood, but occasionally for lumber.
No, this isn't the threat. Just the opposite. Weston's token logging effort was designed to teach children and their parents that it's OK, even wise, to cut down local trees and use them.
That's a tough message to sell in exurbia, the semirural areas where affluent Americans are moving in growing numbers. Most of these newcomers abhor tree-cutting, foresters say. But Mr. Donahue, a 49-year-old environmental historian at Brandeis University, has been selling this message for 25 years in Weston: The best way to save forest and farm land from developers is to get local residents to value it by using it in a hands-on way. They become part of a "working landscape" like farmers of old, he says.
Besides, lumber has to come from some place. Producing more of it locally, he says, is more environmentally responsible, than, say, pillaging wilderness. And, tree-cutting done right doesn't have to cause environmental damage or ruin views and property values, he says. Cutting some trees can boost a forest's overall health, promoting regeneration, improving wildlife habitat and increasing species diversity.
Mr. Donahue is one of nine authors of a paper released this week by the Harvard Forest, a research unit of Harvard University, outlining the same approach for protecting the forests of Massachusetts, and the rest of the Northeast, from exurban sprawl.
Environmentalists in the 1970s advocated saving forests by getting people out of them. That was naive, Mr. Donahue says. It's easier on the planet for people to make more and better use of local resources -- from vegetables to trees -- than importing them from afar, where ecological safeguards can be minimal, he says.
Beginning in the 17th century, European arrivals destroyed American forests to create farms. Today, Americans are destroying forests by eating into them like termites with housing tracts, roads, malls and parking lots. The irony is that once they have their little patch of nature, many people become ardent anti-tree-cutters.
Most exurbanites are two or more generations removed from hands-on rural life, Mr. Donahue says. Many grew up hearing logging is bad for redwoods, spotted owls and the climate. "They don't have a clue" where their wood comes from, Mr. Donahue says -- but consume it in record amounts. Is it responsible, he asks his students, to build and furnish homes in a giant New England forest with wood cut from Canadian wilderness or Borneo's tropical rain forest?
Many residents of the Northeast don't know they live in one of the greatest natural reforestation success stories in modern times. Not since the collapse of Mayan civilization in Central America more than a thousand years ago has such a vast landscape reforested itself, says David R. Foster, director of the Harvard Forest unit near Petersham, Mass., and lead author of its new report.
Because fights over logging have occurred in the West, Americans tend to think that's where the trees are. In fact, originally, an estimated 75 percent of the forests in what became the U.S. were in the eastern one-third of the country, says the U.S. Forest Service. European settlers cut or burned trees to clear land for pasture and crops. But in the 19th century, as richer, flatter, less-rocky land in the Midwest opened up, farms in the East were abandoned. Over the past 150 years, much of that forest grew back. In some states, such as New York, it's still growing, at a rate of thousands of acres a year.
In the 12 states of the Northeast, an estimated 72 percent of the land that was forested in 1630 was reforested by 1997, according to the forest service.
In Massachusetts, the nation's third-most-densely populated state, about 60 percent of the land is covered with forest today. But now, after more than a century of re-growing, Bay State forests have begun to shrink in recent years as developers gobble them up.
Massachusetts loses 40 acres of open land daily to development, says the state's Audubon Society. Thus, the window for saving Northeast forests from this second cutting, as it were, is beginning to close. The result this time will be "hard deforestation," says Mr. Foster, meaning the landscape will look less like farm fields and more like asphalt parking lots.
The goal of the Harvard Forest proposal is to keep 50 percent of the state forested -- forever.
Under this 30-year plan, about 250,000 acres, mainly on public land, would be set aside as undisturbed "wildland reserves," including old-growth forests. An additional 2.25 million acres of public and private land would be called "woodlands." About one million acres of these forests are already protected from development by various covenants or are government-owned.
The idea is to use government restrictions, tax relief, easements and other incentives for owners to keep the forest intact -- in much the same way farmland-preservation incentives work. Some owners want to keep forests as a part of the "natural infrastructure" in their lives, says Mr. Foster. They're often willing to give or sell land to governments or private foundations to keep it undeveloped.
"People aren't doing this (saving forest) for true market value," says Mr. Foster. "They want a nice place to live."
In many places, it's more lucrative to sell forest land to developers. But there is some economic upside to not paving over forest, the proposal's authors say, including increased real-estate values and limited lumber sales. The "woodlands" would be managed for recreation, preserving views, environmental protection and "sustainable forestry" -- that is, harvesting trees for economic use without damaging the forest's ability to regenerate.
The proposal says "high-quality timber" could be harvested "in planned and sustainable fashion using low-impact logging methods that do not damage remaining trees, lower the future timber value of the stand, degrade wetlands and streams, or leave an unsightly mess." Low-impact logging means avoiding clear-cutting and so-called high-grading -- cutting the best trees and leaving the rest. Instead, it means selectively harvesting trees with the long-term health of the forest in mind.
Major lumber companies aren't likely to rush into forests in the Northeast, because most of it is privately held by hundreds of thousands of different owners. Indeed, nobody has figured out yet how small a forest is worth cutting trees on. Ten acres is probably a minimum. Fifty acres or more is seen as ideal.
Landowners in the Northeast won't get rich allowing selective logging. Now, they can sell their trees to small logging outfits who will cut them and haul them away. Or they can pay to hire a licensed forester to assess the lot and develop a long-range plan to cut trees down in an environmentally friendly way. Under the Harvard Forest proposal, owners would have trees cut in a coordinated plan, with guidance from governments, foundations and academics.
Still, the idea of helping the forest by cutting some trees -- an argument similar to ones used by giant lumber companies -- runs counter to widely perceived environmental wisdom. That's because logging has been done so badly in the past that the very word conjures up images of a devastated landscape of tree stumps, says Harlan C. Clifford, who grew up tapping maple trees for syrup in the Weston forest. He's now editor of Orion, an environmental and cultural magazine.
Mr. Clifford thinks environmental arguments in the 1960s and 1970s for getting man out of the forest and leaving nature to itself were a response to ruined forests. Now, he says, people are more receptive to "re-integrating ourselves into nature," as ideas about forests change.
But it's touch and go. Anti-tree-cutting sentiment is so high in some places that people who want to "manage" woods don't bother for fear of invoking local wrath. Projects can get tied up in protests and litigation for years.
That's what happened at the 4,300-acre McLean Game Refuge in northern Connecticut five years ago. The refuge was left to a public trust by U.S. Sen. George P. McLean, who died in 1932.
The refuge forest had grown untouched since then. The trouble is, as forests mature, they turn into bad habitats for some plants and wildlife, which dwindle or disappear. After paying for seven studies over more than two decades on how to restore bird habitat, the refuge's trustees announced pilot projects on 157 acres that involved cutting down some mature trees to create clearings for younger ones. The cut trees were to be sold as timber to help pay for the project.
Protesters put up tables in front of the Giessler's supermarket in nearby Granby, Conn., collecting signatures under a banner that read "Save McLean: Stop the Logging." The refuge spent tens of thousands of dollars on legal and consultant fees. After a delay of nearly two years, a probate judge decreed in 2001 that the project could go ahead.
William Schuster, executive director of the nonprofit 3,785-acre Black Rock Forest preserve 50 miles north of New York City, says students who come there bring an almost universal abhorrence of logging. In forest-management classes, when he discusses options, he says students almost always say, "Don't cut the trees."
Then he asks where they will get the wood products they need. Only then do they start to become receptive to the idea of harvesting local trees, he says. He also explains the preserve's forest has been cut for lumber several times in history, only to regenerate.
In a 2002 study, "The Illusion of Preservation," Harvard Forest scientists reported that because of tree growth in the Northeast, "We now have the opportunity to cut trees locally, in a heavily forested and ecologically resilient landscape, in order to reduce the impact on often more fragile and globally threatened forests."
The problem, it said, was anti-logging attitudes. "A majority of people believes that logging is worse than non-management for the environment and favor increased protectionism." Yet many ignore "the reality that using wood means cutting trees -- somewhere," the report said, as well as the facts that wood is a renewable resource less costly or environmentally damaging to produce than construction materials such as steel, concrete and aluminum.
Massachusetts forests contain more wood than they've had in 200 years and could supply 50 percent of the state's wood-products consumption, instead of the current 2 percent, say Harvard Forest scientists. With "judiciously increased harvest levels," combined with reduced consumption, this could be done without environmental damage and without reducing overall forest acreage in the long term, they say.
Americans consume 2.5 times as much wood and paper than Europeans, according to United Nations statistics. Since 1970, average family size in the U.S. has decreased by 16 percent, while average new-home size has increased 48 percent, Douglas W. MacCleery, a U.S. Forest Service senior analyst, has written.
Weston, Mass., has a population of about 11,500 and consists of 11,073 acres. By around 1850, some 90 percent of the land had been cleared for crops and pasture. But the trees came back. Today, 4,241 acres are classified as forest, most of it privately owned. Starting in 1955, the town began buying up land to thwart developers. Today, it owns 2,250 acres, including about 1,700 acres of woods.
Getting the town into farming was relatively easy. In 1970, a farm was started on public land to grow vegetables and interest students. This evolved into a nonprofit community farm. In his 1999 book, "Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town," Mr. Donahue recounts hiring middle-school students to tend crops, and, in the process, teach them where their food comes from.
Growing and selling vegetables was popular with residents. "Cutting into the town forest is another story," Mr. Donahue wrote.
In 1981, "firewood thinning" -- cutting, at first, only dead or dying trees, began. Then, gradually, live trees were cut, too, in part to make space for young ones to grow. Calls and letters from outraged residents poured in. That's when Mr. Donahue began taking people for walks in the woods, explaining how forests work and how cutting firewood can actually help them. Soon, the town's community farm, called Land's Sake, was cutting and selling 50 cords of firewood annually.
In 1989, John Potter, a local student, came back from the Yale School of Forestry, and devised a long-range forest-management plan that involved harvesting mature pines and hardwoods for timber, cutting 10 acres a year heavily enough to sprout seedlings, and thinning out dense clumps of trees and brush to help forests regenerate.
That plan has been more difficult to put into place. The current director of Land's Sake, Lelia Orrell Elliston, is against cutting trees for lumber unless the wood is sold and used locally. Firewood production goes on. But she has put tree-cutting for lumber on hold until a local lumber outlet contracts to buy and sell the wood in Weston.
Nature's Comeback
Much of the forest in the Northeastern U.S., destroyed by European settlers, has grown back in the past century.
Estimated acreage, in millions
1630: 117.9(1)
1907: 59.6
1938: 72.2
1963: 81.6
1977: 84.3
1997: 85.5
(1)Based on current estimates of forest cover and historic land-clearing information in 12 states.
Source: USDA Forest Service
