Sportsmen vs. the Northern Forest

Thinking sportsmen in the region were ecstatic. In December 1998 forest-products giant Champion International, having cut the guts out of 296,000 acres of what it aptly called "industrial forest" in northern New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, unloaded it to the public for $76.2 million. The deal--set up by The Conservation Fund, based in Arlington, Virginia, state and federal agencies and the sporting and environmental communities, showed what advocates of wildness can do when sufficiently frightened. It was a monumental coup for fish and wildlife. An opportunity like it may never come again; and part of the reason it may never come again is that thinking sportsmen are outnumbered by sportsmen who believe everything they heard from the last person who spoke to them.

The man who made this fabulous land purchase possible was developer Claude Rancourt, a.k.a. New Hampshire's "Trailer Park King." Ten years earlier he had scared the bejesus out of even the most environmentally insensitive citizens and politicians by acquiring options on 92,000 acres in Vermont and New Hampshire, including the beautiful and pristine Nash Stream watershed north of the White Mountain National Forest. Everyone had assumed that this land—owned by Diamond Occidental, another forest-products giant—was safe from the tacky development in which Rancourt specialized. But Diamond had fallen into the clutches of British corporate raider James Goldsmith, who had dissolved the company and was hawking its holdings. Easterners had learned to live with clearcuts. Hideous as they are, they eventually heal. Not so with trailer parks. With sportsmen and environmentalists screaming into the faces of their legislators, the US Forest Service and the State of New Hampshire purchased 46,000 acres from Rancourt, leaving him with a 25-percent profit and gravel-mining rights along Nash Stream.

The Champion lands deal was better executed, but an emergency action also. Management plans could come later. In 1998 the land had to be saved from what the forest-products industry seriously calls "higher and better use" (HBU), i.e., commercial development. Remote trout water is a magnet for HBU. Suddenly, the yodeling of loons and the caroling of hermit thrushes are replaced by the bleating of boom boxes and the howling of ATVs. Wild trout vanish. The woods remain, but they are spiritless. It's the saddest death I know.

In the East the moniker "northern forest" refers to a specific biome--the 26 million acres draped across the shoulders of Yankeeland from Machias, Maine to Syracuse, New York. It's a zone of contrast and transition, rugged and delicate, where temperate hardwoods mingle with boreal conifers, where bobcats prowl with tabbies, and eagles pick off Peking ducks, where moose, at the southern fringe of their range, winter on north-facing slopes while, in valleys lit by the slouching sun, starving whitetails huddle under black growth at the northern fringe of their range. What makes the northern forest even more special for angler/naturalists is that it is America's last best refuge for large, inland brook trout. Our gaudy Yankee char—the 0"dweller of springs"—is an old-growth species, dependent on the shade of thick forest canopies. You cannot manage for it without also managing for thousands of other old-growth species from pine martens to spruce grouse to liverworts; and you manage for these organisms best by leaving their woods alone. That doesn't happen much in the Northeast.

In Vermont 133,000 acres of the Champion lands were protected from HBU development at a cost of $26.5 million through a joint investment by Essex Timber Company, the Freeman Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the State of Vermont and small private donors. Of that $26.5 million, the state chipped in only $4.5 million, this for a public-access and sustainable-forestry easement on Essex Timber's 84,000 acres. A 22,000-acre Wildlife Management Area around West Mountain—containing an ecological reserve or "core area" that sustains wild brook trout and the rarest plants and animals in the state—was a gift to Vermonters from the Mellon Foundation and the federal government. The conservation easement, jointly held by The Nature Conservancy and the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, guarantees use by anglers, hunters, trappers and even snowmobilers in the entire 22,000 acres, including the core area.

One of the deal's disappointments was that the precedent-setting easement on Essex Timber Company's 84,000 acres requires that the land be logged forever. Essex and all future owners will be in violation if they do not log. In the stump field that is northern Vermont the state had an opportunity to recover a rare and diverse ecosystem. Instead it elected to spin 84,000 acres back into industrial forestry. "It's absurd that we'd lock in an economic use that totally precludes alternatives," declares Tom Butler of the Wildlands Project. "It's as if a century ago a steam-engine factory was purchased with public funds on the condition that it produce steam engines for eternity. Now when I go to conferences I keep hearing the forest-products industry say: 'This is great. How can we get a forever-logging easement?'"

Another major disappointment was that the core area, where logging (but, again, not fishing, hunting, trapping or snowmobiling) would be prohibited, is only 12,500 acres. Wild brook trout simply cannot survive in industrial forests. Sometimes when I find myself in the northern forest I look for the flower-laced mountain rills where, in the distant days before beaver fever, I'd stoop to drink, scattering trout fry. In many of these places water and fish are gone now, dried up and crushed by giant forest mowers called "feller-bunchers." Another sad death.

The ecologists assigned to study the former Champion land had wanted a core area of at least 40,000 acres. One of them—Jeff Parsons of Sterling College in Craftsbury--explains: "Ecosystems are hit regularly by natural disturbances—microbursts, hurricanes, insects, disease, ice storms. . . . An ecological reserve needs to be bigger than the size of the average disturbance in the region (40,000 acres in this part of Vermont), otherwise there might not be adequate seed sources to regenerate the forest."

The West Mountain Wildlife Management Area is Vermont's only expression of true boreal forest. There are boreal trees such as black spruce and northern white cedar, boreal mammals such as rock voles, boreal birds such as gray jays, bay-breasted warblers and black-backed woodpeckers, boreal flowers such as bog aster and white-fringed orchid, boreal lichens, boreal sedges. Boreal bryophytes--mosses and liverworts—abound in unmatched diversity. Nowhere else in the state is there such a high concentration of bogs and fens. The area provided a reservoir of moose when they'd been extirpated everywhere else in the state. It is drained by "reference streams" so unpolluted the state uses them as a standard of what clean water should be. Remote ponds (rare in Vermont) provide refuge not just for brook trout but for lake-shore plant communities largely lost elsewhere. Ledges provide denning habitat for bobcats. Deer, severely winter stressed in northern Vermont, are limited by lack of thermal cover, not lack of browse. Before conifers reach a height where they can protect deer they're clearcut. What thinking hunter would want to perpetuate this cutting rotation?

I tracked down a thinking sportsman in Vermont—state Rep. David Deen (D-Westminster), the conservation conscience of the Vermont House, a leader in the fight to save the Champion lands from HBU and an Orvis-endorsed fly-fishing guide. Deen gets into the West Mountain Wildlife Management Area a good deal and knows its waters intimately. Paul Stream, partly in the core area, is a wild brook trout factory. "Every pool has a brookie in it," he told me. It's also one of the most productive nursery areas for Atlantic salmon fry in the entire Connecticut River watershed. But perhaps the most important function of this and other core-area brook trout streams is the icy, oxygenated water they pump into the Connecticut, providing summer refuge for the biggest trout in the region.