Conservation campaign wants changes in feds’ plan for Green Mountain forest logging

The Green Mountain National Forest. Photo courtesy USDA

Maya Porter reported this story on assignment from the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost

Federal officials are set to disclose next month the environmental effects of a proposal to cut down trees on about 11,800 acres of the Green Mountain National Forest — and activist groups are hoping to see some changes to the plan amid campaigning to let trees stay up.

The U.S. Forest Service announced the plan — called the Telephone Gap Integrated Resource Project — back in January. Federal officials say the plan will create more types of forest ecosystems for more species to live in, provide timber for wood products and a host of other benefits. 

The effort involves cutting down trees in Addison, Rutland and Windsor counties across a roughly 32,750-acre stretch of the 400,000-acre federal forest. A preliminary environmental review is slated to go out to the public in mid- to late-October, said Ethan Ready, public affairs officer for the Green Mountain National Forest.

The Climate Forests campaign, a nationwide coalition of more than 120 environmental groups working to protect mature and old-growth trees on federal lands, opposes the plan and has been organizing against it. The group argues that preserving mature and old-growth forests is “one of the country’s most straightforward, impactful and cost-effective climate solutions,” according to its website. 

“These are forests that are holding vast amounts of carbon, and it’s sequestering more,” said Ben Levitan, an attorney for Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law group working on the campaign against the Vermont project. “The carbon that is stored in this project area is being kept out of the atmosphere, and more carbon will be drawn out of the atmosphere if these trees are allowed to remain standing, so they're really important to the whole world.” 

Levitan said the plan elicited a record 1,500 individual comments during the public comment period this past spring and that the campaign has gotten some 13,000 signatures on a petition to stop the project from going forward as proposed. 

The campaign believes its goals are consistent with and directed by an executive order from President Joe Biden last year that set a goal of strengthening forests on federal lands in light of the rise of catastrophic wildfires across the U.S. The order emphasized the importance of mature and old-growth trees to the health of those forests. 

But the groups behind the campaign, according to a memo released this year, say the Forest Service’s response to the order has been minimal and that agency officials are “dragging their feet” and going forward with logging plans in old forests they are supposed to protect. 

The Forest Service, however, does not believe the Telephone Gap project is out of line with Biden’s executive order. Ready, the public affairs officer in Vermont, said the plan “will strengthen the forest, local community and local economy” and is thus in line with the executive order. 

“The project includes improving wildlife habitat; enhancing forest health and diversity through timber harvesting that provides wood products for the local and regional economy; controlling non-native invasive species, restoring soil and wetland conditions; increasing recreation and scenery viewing opportunities; improving the trail and road network; and protecting heritage sites throughout the area,” said Ready, detailing almost exactly the same list that is on the agency’s webpage about the project. 

He also noted that the executive order triggered an inventory of all mature and old-growth trees “as a basis to consider possible policy changes that could affect management of these federal lands” and that the project will be modified if any further policy changes occur. 

Levitan expressed skepticism about that effort. “It seems that they're trying to defer actually issuing any policy and changing their practices on the ground as long as possible as they go through steps of saying, ‘First we're doing inventory, now we're analyzing.’ They're not actually translating it into protections on the ground.”

Zack Porter, executive director of Standing Trees, a New England–centered environmental activist group working with the campaign, said the Forest Service has also failed to disclose the locations of the mature and old forests it has cataloged. 

“We're certainly hopeful that there'll be more transparency and accountability with this whole process, and that the rulemaking will pick up steam as soon as possible,” Porter said. “In the meantime, (we’re hopeful that) projects like this one are put on hold or better yet scrapped.”

Levitan finds no comfort in the soon-expected environmental review, a requirement of the National Environmental Policy Act. He said the act itself of releasing an environmental review means the project is moving forward and that “the harm is getting even closer.” 

Levitan and Porter took their time explaining a laundry list of concerns about the project: the importance of old trees for carbon sequestration, the rare bats that live in the forest, the role of old trees in flood prevention, to name a few.

“The older a forest gets, the better it gets at slowing spreading and absorbing runoff,” Porter said. “And it's the kind of proliferation of roads through our forests, and the logging of our forests, that leads to a lot of the increased danger to downstream communities.”

Responding to the Forest Service’s claims, Porter said improvements for wildlife habitat and recreation really means clearing land to benefit common species that are popular for hunting. He also noted that the wood products that would be produced from the proposed timber operations would mostly be low-grade wood pulp and chips.

Climate Forest campaign groups are waiting on the release of the preliminary environmental review to see if their efforts have had any effect on the project so far. Levitan is hopeful, citing a similar project in Oregon that is being reconsidered due in part to large-scale public opposition.

Porter said he is trying to spread awareness about the project through hikes in the Green Mountain National Forest with members of potentially affected communities, reporters and even members of the Forest Service. 

“Standing Trees is working to put the public back in public land management,” Porter said. “We're rising up to the climate and extinction crises in leveraging public lands in a way that really benefits the public good.”