After years of debate, the U.S. Forest Service issued a draft plan this week for managing more than 72,000 acres of public and private land, called the Telephone Gap Project, in Rutland County. The controversy largely focused on how much of the land should be opened to logging.
The plan, which spans Brandon, Chittenden, Goshen, Killington, Mendon, Pittsfield, Pittsford, and Stockbridge, has been controversial due to the amount of land it proposed for logging. Green Mountain National Forest land accounts for 45% of area. The Forest Service expects a final plan to be adopted in March, after the public has one last opportunity to make objections.
U.S. Forest Service chose a version of the plan, called Alternative C, that differed from previous versions by focusing more on protecting old growth forest and prioritizing timber harvests that are ecologically sustainable.
While there was only a small overall reduction in the almost 12,000 acres originally proposed for timber harvest, the “big change,” Forest Service District Ranger Chris Mattrick said, is the “types of treatments that were applied to those stands being proposed for harvest.”
Across the region, less than 0.1% of land in New England and New York is occupied by old growth forests, experts estimate. In the 1800s, European settlers cleared the majority of the landscape to create agricultural land. That means many trees are the same age, which can have some ecological drawbacks.
“We want to go in and be able to make canopy gaps, make small openings,” so that the forest has a more complex structure as it ages, Mattrick said. In some places, the land would be managed solely for ecological purposes, with any cut trees left on the ground to decompose and mimic natural processes, he said.
The plan, issued Tuesday, won praise from a group of environmentalists, including the Vermont Natural Resources Council, Audubon Vermont and William Keeton, a professor of forest ecology and forestry at the University of Vermont, whose comments on the plan influenced the final product, Mattrick said.
The organizations had partnered to “offer a roadmap to the Forest Service on a new model approach on how to manage for old growth protection, how to identify older forests where it would be appropriate to have a lighter touch, to do ecological forestry and try and accelerate the improvement of old forest conditions,” said Jamey Fidel with the Vermont Natural Resources Council. Their proposal also identified suitable areas for commercial forestry, he said.
“To our understanding, this may be one of the first projects nationally to step out and test this approach,” Fidel said.
The partnership of environmental groups made comments because they were concerned the original proposal could have harmed existing old growth stands, he said.
Keeton, with UVM, said he’s “strongly supportive” of the Forest Service’s new plan.
It accomplishes three elements needed to restore old forests on public lands, he said. The new plan protects old forests in the project area, allocates more than 1,000 acres to a new category focused on restoring characteristics of old growth forests and includes multiple uses for middle-aged forests, “which include management for different kinds of wildlife habitats and, very appropriately, timber,” he said.
“So we have the old forest conservation, we have restoration, and then we have management on some of the remaining mature forests,” Keeton said. “This kind of triad or three-pronged approach is exactly the kind of holistic, forward looking management that we need on national forests.”
Not everyone agrees. In Vermont, a debate about how to best protect forests has heated up in the last several years. While some environmentalists and scientists see ecological benefits in certain types of forest management, others believe protected forests should be left alone so nature can take over.
Zack Porter, executive director of Standing Trees, a group that advocates against logging on public lands, said “despite claims that (the plan) is an improvement” over the original proposal, the plan “is still an enormous logging project.”
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Porter objects to logging in areas that are currently roadless and to forest management that’s set to take place in areas with older trees. Activities in the project area are expected to produce 254,556 metric tons of total carbon emissions for the 15-year project, or equivalent to 4,039 gas powered passenger vehicles driven annually, according to the plan. That “flies in the face” of Vermont’s Global Warming Solutions Act, which requires the state to reduce emissions, Porter said.
He is also concerned about flood risks that could come from timber harvesting.
Throughout the last several years, versions of the plan have received thousands of public comments, which was far more than other similar plans proposed on Green Mountain National Forest land in the past, Mattrick said.
Mattrick said it’s likely the new attention came from “the interest in carbon stewardship and climate impacts,” which are “much more in the forefront of people’s thinking today than they were even three, four or five years ago.”
“A lot of comments brought that up,” he said.
Mattrick said it was a challenge to balance differing views in public comments, along with the broader goals of the U.S. Forest Service’s planning process. The mission is to plan for a wide variety of uses on the land, including “recreation and wildlife and timber management and roads and trails and special uses,” Mattrick said. The Forest Service also took a recent executive order from the Biden Administration into account that called for increased protection of old growth forests.
Still, he was happy to see the plan get more public attention than others have.
“It’s yours and everybody else’s public land, and everybody gets the opportunity to have input into the management of that land,” Mattrick said.
Members of the public can object to the plan until Jan. 17, 2025 on the project’s website. A final version is set to be published in March 2025 after potential objections are addressed.