A Vermont Forest Tries a New Model of Growth, Diversity and Logging – Inside Climate News

Each year, Justin Lindholm uses about two-and-a-half gallons of gasoline to get through the winter. It’s just enough, he said, to power his chainsaw to chop the four to five cords of logs that fuel his wood stove and heat his home through the season. 

“I love working wood, I always have,” he said. 

At 71, Lindholm has spent his life nurturing a relationship with the woods and land surrounding his home in Mendon, Vt. He doesn’t like to hike as much as to wander the forest, paying attention to moss and ferns and intricate branch formations of the beech and spruce trees that dominate this stretch of the state. He talks to the animals he passes, in a voice smoother and gentler than he uses with humans. Several times, he’s found himself in a thicket and decided, “I’m not going home, I’m going under a low tree and I’m going to sleep.”

Now, as the board president of the Vermonters for a Clean Environment, Lindholm is devoted to keeping these Vermont woods as they are: deep, unruly, and untouched.

In Vermont, the question of how to do that has come to a rearing head as the U.S. Forest Service produced a plan to manage 72,000 acres of private and federal forestland, straddling the Green Mountain National Forest, in the middle of the state. 

In June, after two years of discussions, the Forest Service approved the final plan for the parcel. While some see it as an advancement in balancing competing needs from the forest, others,  including Lindholm, have challenged the plan’s proposal to cut down trees in the name of ecological balance. 

This forest’s future has become a microcosm of a bigger and profound land debate: how to balance human values and needs on a landscape marked by generations of human interference and new climate-driven challenges? How much can we intervene in the forest’s fate? Can the forest survive if we do not?

Telephone Gap and The Triad

The Forest Service has been reviewing the 72,000-acre area known as the Telephone Gap since 2018 and issued proposals for the land beginning in 2023. Its initial plan followed a practice of clearcutting typical in federal forest land—cutting down whole sections—without much protection for old growth or mature trees.

That riled environmental advocates as well as scientists who offered comments and revisions to the plan. The Forest Service went back to the drawing board and essentially flipped its initial logic. The plan now isolates areas of old growth forest as off limits, identifies specific sections for timber harvest, and places stretches of woods in an “ecological forestry mode” where foresters will intervene—planting trees and cutting down others—to bolster diversity and to mimic old-growth forests.

The plan is the first instance of the U.S. Forest Service adopting a unique model called the “triad approach.” Designed by a University of Maine forester and conservation biologist in the 1990s, the triad essentially strives to balance competing priorities: the desire to protect trees and still harvest timber. Think of the approach as a three-legged stool. One leg leaves old growth entirely untouched, a second sets aside parcels for logging, and a third serves as a sort of buffer zone for foresters to actively encourage the forest’s vitality.

“It really does offer a different paradigm or a different approach to forest management on the national forest,” said Jamey Fidel, the forestry director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council (VNRC), a nonprofit advocacy group that was instrumental in pushing for the updated plan.. So far, the triad model has been implemented in parts of Canada, including Quebec and Nova Scotia, and Oregon’s Elliott State Experimental Forest.

The idea for using the triad at Telephone Gap struck William Keeton, a forestry professor at the University of Vermont, during a run. After the VNRC and Audubon Vermont approached him for advice, “I was just really meditating on the complexity of this issue and how we could convince the Forest Service to move away from this very heavy-handed approach towards something that would protect the old growth and would be more ecologically sustainable,” Keeton said.

The Forest Service’s new plan is a sign of a “generational change,” said Richard Donovan, an independent forester from Jericho, Vt., who has no involvement with the project but has followed its process. “Rather than being driven by the same old industrial models, for timber and high volume harvests, [this is a shift] to embrace more ecologically driven forestry.”

Forest Service project leaders did not respond to questions but provided a statement that the revised plan was good for the Green Mountain Forest and the public. 

“This project will provide sustainable high-quality saw timber and improved public access on a safe and sustainable road and trail network. The project also addresses serious threats to forest health resulting from insects and disease, invasive species and declining tree growth. Through responsible management, this project will ensure benefits to the public and the landscape for many generations to come,” the statement said.

Still, for some, the project doesn’t strike an ecological balance. “It’s really been a poster child for what’s wrong with Forest Service management,” said Zack Porter, the executive director of Standing Trees, an advocacy group for the protection of forests across New England. The proposal wrongly allows for timber harvests, he said.  

The plan allocates 7,743 acres to be harvested from a total swath of 10,959 acres. Of the trees to be cut down, 4,112 acres of middle-aged forest will be logged in familiar harvest methods, opening space for younger, more diverse stands known as “early successional forests” to grow. 

The remaining 3,631 acres are designated as “late successional enhancement harvest” areas, where the Forest Service can cut trees and leave downed logs to enhance habitat or add plantings to make middle-aged forest areas resemble old growth woodlands. 

Porter sees some efforts of ecological forestry—which allow for intrusions such as building roads—as worse for forest health than the disease and disasters planners are trying to prevent.

Clearing land for young forests is a “driving myth” of the forest and timber industry, used to justify additional logging, Porter said. “If you look at the Catskills (or the) Adirondacks, nobody is making an argument that those forests are going to hell in a handbasket,” he said.

“The only time that you see these arguments made is when somebody is trying to justify going in to do logging,” Porter said.

But not all forests are created equal, explained Keeton, the UVM scientist. Most follow a kind of biodiversity U-curve. 

Young forests offer vast diversity as saplings fill in open, sunny areas and compete for survival. Old forest canopies create a tall, shady “microclimate” that facilitates a thriving habitat for bird species, fungi, and lots of younger plantlife below. When old trees die, they fall, leaving a sunny opening for saplings to grow and a downed log teeming with insect life. Middle-aged forests are dark and dense and sit at the bottom of that U-curve. They are “stem-exclusionary” forests, without much species diversity or structural diversity, Keeton explained.

“We need to think of all that as genetic diversity that confers evolutionary potential,” Keeton said. “The more diverse plant functional traits, the more potential there is for forest ecosystems to adapt to climate change.”

The Art and Science of Forestry 

Keeton likened ecological forestry—at a time of increasing climate change—to spreading evolutionary risk. There is no guarantee that the adapted areas will or can withstand a spate of future floods, invasives, or temperatures, he explained. The same goes for the old growth areas.

Donovan, the independent forester, said forestry demands a bit of this faith in the unknown. “Silviculture, strictly speaking, is the art and science of managing a forest,” he said. “The joke among foresters and ecologists is, if you go out to a particular tract of forest land and you take 15 foresters and ecologists, you’ll get 15 different recipes on how to manage that forest. And to be blunt, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

That calculation, he said, is complicated by today’s shifting environment—and human demands.

“The forest, whether we like it or not, responds to changes in precipitation; it responds to changes in temperature. And guess what? That’s just biological dynamics,” Donovan said. “Ecological evolution has never stopped, and now climate change is just making some things happen faster than they would have under the level of pressure that humans are putting on the forest today.” 

Porter and Lindholm, among others, have suggested that the best approach to Telephone Gap might just be to stop intervening altogether. “If humanity takes the lesson from climate change that we need to insert ourselves and assert ourselves even more across this fragile planet, we have taken away the wrong lesson,” Porter said. “It’s the height of human hubris.”

Some scientists suggest that the landscape and climate have already been so profoundly changed that it’s irresponsible not to intervene. 

“Not only have we meddled by creating climate change and spreading invasive species, but we’ve also meddled through our land use history,” Keeton said. “The forests we have on the landscape today often look very different from the forests that were here 200 or 300 years ago. These are not natural, primary forests. A little bit of stewardship, a little bit of tender care could go a long way towards helping restore the natural dynamics and the old forests.”

Vermont’s forests are relatively young. Through the 1800s, the state deforested over 80 percent of its lands to make space for its robust dairy and farming industries. Slowly, trees have returned to the landscape. Today, Vermont is one of the most forested states in the country. 

But Vermont’s forests did not grow back as the healthy, diverse stands they once were, explained Austin Himes, a forestry professor at Washington State University who has written extensively about the triad approach. After the legacy of logging, what returned were swaths of trees uniform in age and species. They may not be as diverse or even as productive for logging. And humans have always had reciprocal relationships with their woods, whether by foraging, maple-tapping or even logging, he said.

“When we really get down to it, our culturally constructed ideas of pristine forest or old growth forest or wilderness are all fictitious,” said Himes, who was not involved with the U.S. Forest Service plan. “Even the West’s primordial forests, which were never cleared, were still under the influence of Indigenous people for tens of thousands of years prior to settlers.”

Timber is but one example of modern-day realities, he said. “If we want to meet societal demand for wood and wood products, then we’ve got to harvest wood,” Himes said. “If we don’t do it, it’s going to come from somewhere else. But if it comes from somewhere else, it’s likely coming from somewhere that doesn’t have as good environmental protections, which means that we are exporting our environmental costs.”

Porter, the executive director of Standing Trees, thinks Vermont already cuts down enough timber. In 2020, he points out, Vermont produced 147 percent of the wood it consumed, meaning that more wood was harvested than used by Vermonters that year. The Forest Service doesn’t need to increase local timber production, he said.

There are needs beyond Vermont, however, that are significant and within miles of its forests. New England, including Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, produced 76 percent of the wood products used in the region—meaning Vermont’s neighbors could benefit from its timber production.

Fidel of the VNRC and others see possibilities for Vermont to produce even more wood products for the region as an alternative to fossil-fuel-heavy materials. Mass timber could replace steel or concrete in buildings, and wood stoves—like the one Lindholm uses—could heat homes now fueled by gas, he said. 

“We have hugely embraced the value of eating local food. That’s part of our identity here in Vermont—to support local farms and to eat healthy food from the lands that surround us,” Fidel said. “We can embrace the mindset that we do have a forest land base here that’s conducive to meeting more of our local needs for wood.” 

Donovan said the triad offers a path to protect forest health and accommodate people’s needs.

“To the extent to which you divorce people from the forest, you contribute to a negative dynamic, which means we don’t share destinies,” Donovan said. “I would suggest that it should be the opposite. That we should share destinies, that we should consider our part of the ecosystem, and consider ourselves a very influential—sometimes to the positive, many times to the negative—part of the ecosystem.”

To Lindholm, whose whole life has been intertwined with the woods, it’s all about humility. “This whole idea that we think we can improve on it and get nature to balance itself faster by us doing it is overblown,” he said. “Nature is all about balancing things, and when we get in there, we unbalance it.”