A September to Remember: Lessons from the Old Growth Conference, Public Lands Day, and more
- Chris Gish
- 7 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
From a major nation-wide comment period to an academic conference and a community-driven Public Lands celebration, it's been a rich, generative September for New England public wildlands advocates. As we move forward with advocacy, research, outings and organizing in October, we wanted to take a moment to take stock of — and share with you — what learned over the course of a few key events and organizing opportunities.
Northeastern Old Growth Conference
On September 17-20, we joined advocates, academics, organizations, and land management agencies at the biennial Northeastern Old Growth Conference. We celebrated the work of Sophia Galuppo, a Middlebury College intern who wrapped up an in-depth project about policy for public participation in state lands management, and cherished the opportunity to learn and make new connections across the wildlands advocacy community. We also came away with a keen awareness of the limits of a conference like this to actually advance the kind of principled advocacy we need — and a renewed commitment to our work at Standing Trees to better protect public forests and put the public back in public lands management.
On the exciting side, there were clear signs at the conference that momentum is shifting for greater wildlands protection. David Foster, one of the co-authors of the 2023 Wildlands in New England Report, emphasized that New England's goal should be restoring wildlands across 20%, rather than just 10%, of the landscape. Upping the regional goal to 20% makes our work for public wildlands even more necessary - there is no imaginable way we can get close to 20%, from New England's current figure of 3.3% wildlands, without protecting vastly more of our public lands. Nationally renowned author and journalist Lynda Mapes, meanwhile, made clear that the fight to protect mature and old forests on public lands here in New England is a worthy goal, comparable to the fights to protect old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest.
In terms of key information, there was widespread agreement among presenters, attendees, and experts at the conference that developing criteria to define "old growth" is a fool's errand. Dr. David Orwig presented his extensive research from old forests across the Northeast, showing that there are no clear structural characteristics the define "old growth" — specifically noting that commonly-cited characteristics like basal area and coarse woody debris are "not good indicators" of old growth. This research, and other presentations like it, came as a breath of fresh air to us, who have been arguing since the beginning of Standing Trees that the focus on "old growth characteristics" and old growth definitions obscures the much more important issue — how we need to let a much greater portion of our forests grow old and develop into "old growth," regardless of their exact current condition.
The conference — organized as it was by a combination of Forest Service, state agency, and non-profit staff that didn't include advocates from groups like Standing Trees — also highlighted the limits of mainstream agency and organizational approaches to forest protection. Presenters were clear about how far New England is below its wildlands goals, but used this fact more as a way to levy support for specific projects and status quo relationships, rather than as a basis for a comprehensive, clear-eyed conversation about everything it will take to come close to our wildlands goals.
Ecological representation mapping, for example, received a lot of discussion at the conference. The commendable idea behind this approach is to make sure we protect rare natural communities that support the region's full suite of biodiversity, rather than designate wildlands only in certain parts of a state or region. When applied narrowly, however, the ecological representation approach obscures other essential benefits of wildlands, and risks passing over major opportunities we have, right now, to protect wildlands on places like our public lands.
Protecting rare natural communities is essential, but it is by no means the only reason to protect wildlands. Wildlands also bring unbeatable benefits for climate mitigation, flood protection, cultural identity, climate adaptation, and (as on public lands) taxpayer savings, regardless of whether they happen to encompass a rare natural community. Moreover, many benefits of wildlands can only be realized across large "patch sizes," where landscape-scale processes like uninterrupted evolution, climate adaptation, watershed restoration, and adequate area for wide-ranging species can actually occur. Vermont Conservation Design, the 2018 blueprint that current Vermont ecological representation mapping efforts are based on, recognizes this, noting that patch sizes of at least 4,000 acres are preferred for old forest recovery. Vermont Conservation Design is also clear on another point that got lost in the ecological representation conversations — that recovering 10% of Vermont as old forest is a minimum, not a cap that we need to make sure not to exceed.
Practically, there are additional key considerations as we think about where we can recover more wildlands: the fact that only certain landscapes — including many of our public lands — provide realistic, timely opportunities to protect the large areas of wild lands we need; the fact that the cost and current condition of potential wildlands varies greatly, with public lands generally being much more cost-effective to protect and in better ecological condition; and the risk that focusing only on mapping and analysis — much of which mirrors work already done decades ago — can provide a convenient reason to delay or avoid the more consequential work of actually protecting wild places. We look forward to continuing to follow the conversations about ecological representation in wildlands, and hope that these efforts can be complimentary to, rather than a replacement for, practical, cost-effective, landscape-scale rewilding opportunities like the Vermont Wildlands Act.
What we learned:
We're done with definitions. Specific definitions of "old growth" don't hold up scientifically, and they are a convenient way for agencies and organizations to justify logging thousands of acres of wild forests that don't fit a chosen definition of "old growth." It's not enough to protect existing old growth — we need landscape-scale rewilding and old growth recovery, starting with core public lands across New England.
It's up to the public to move the needle on wildlands advocacy. The state and federal agencies and mainstream organizations who were well-represented at the Old Growth Conference, however good their intentions, are not going to make the level of wildlands protection we need happen, in the timeframe we need it to happen, without increased public advocacy and pressure. Many organizations, agencies, and academics have a built-in incentive to preserve the relationships that allow them to access funding, recognition, and relative power — even if that means scaling back their commitment to wildlands protection or sacrificing thousands of acres of uncommonly old forest in a public lands logging project. It's up to all of us, with continued advocacy and organizing, to build the political space necessary for land management agencies and well-established organizations to step up to take stronger stands for wildlands protection.
Public Lands Day Celebration
Just a week after the Old Growth Conference, we gathered with 50-60 advocates at the Great Falls Discovery Center in Massachusetts to celebrate National Public Lands Day. Joined by organizations including Wellspring Commons, the Atowi Project, Save Massachusetts Forests, Sierra Club MA, RESTORE: The Northwoods, and many more, we had a packed afternoon of teach-ins, art, action opportunities, and music from Tom Neilson and Lynn Waldron. Professors Bill Moomaw and Susan Masino, two of the co-authors on a grounbreaking 2019 paper on proforestation, provided detailed information about the immense climate, biodiversity, and human health benefits of wild places. Representatives from Save Mass Forests, Sierra Club MA, and Standing Trees filled people in on some of the priority actions we can take for wild forests in New England, including signing onto petitions in support of forest protection bills, and opposed to Watershed Lands logging in Massachusetts, and contacting Vermont legislators in support of the Vermont Wildlands Act.
What we learned:
We have an amazing opportunity to organize more for wildlands across our whole region. Water, climate, biodiversity, and our connections to wild places don't follow state boundaries, and our organizing need not either. The waters that flow out of our public lands in Northern New England sustain the rivers, estuaries, and oceans downstream. The same arguments for public lands logging that are now being deployed in one part of our region are making their way to others. We need to be organizing more across our region, and there are no shortcuts to building the trust and capacity that makes this possible. Public Lands Day was a great start to this movement-building project!
We can't wait to work more with our partners in Massachusetts. October stands to be a busy month for wildlands advocacy in Massachusetts. Two forest protection bills are having a hearing at the Massachusetts Statehouse on October 7, with written testimony due by October 21. Comments on plans to log watershed lands across the state in 2026 are due on October 16, while comments to the Resource Management plans for the "Erving Complex" (a collection of 11 state parks and state forests in Central MA) are due October 18. We're excited to get more involved in protecting Massachusetts state lands, following the dedicated lead of organizations like Save Massachusetts Forests, RESTORE: The North Woods, and Sierra Club MA. Click here for a complete guide on how to submit comments on the Watershed Lands and Erving Complex plans, as well as information on submitting testimony to support MA Forest Protection Bills.
Protecting Roadless Areas
September kicked off with a nation-wide push to oppose Trump's reckless plan to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule and strip protections for 45 million acres of wild public forests nation-wide. We focused our advocacy on the impacts of this proposal here in New England, publishing a StoryMap showing how the Roadless Rule (tenuously) protects 260,000 acres across the White and Green Mountain National Forests (WMNF and GMNF) from logging and road-building, including iconic landscapes like Franconia Ridge, Mount Moosilauke, White Rocks NRA, and the Pilot/Kilkenny Range.
In a bitterly ironic twist, we also found ourselves defending against local Roadless Area logging at the same time as we spoke out for the national Roadless Rule. On September 22, we filed detailed objections to the White Mountain National Forest (WMNF)'s Lost River logging project, the latest in a series of at least 13 logging projects across the WMNF in the last decade. Lost River threatens Roadless Areas on 91% of its total acreage, and proposes an astonishing 206 acres of clearcuts across a relatively small area of the Forest.
When the Roadless Rule comment period closed on September 19, the results were resounding. Over 625,000 comments were filed nationwide, and random samples indicate that over 99% of them were opposed to rescinding the Rule. Closer to home, over 1,100 people signed our community letter to protect the Roadless Rule, and 39 organizations from across the Eastern region — from the Adirondack Council to Tennessee Heartwood — signed onto our technical comments.
What we learned:
There is overwhelming support for wild public lands! 625,000 public comments filed on the Roadless Rule, in a public engagement process the Trump Administration tried to "sprint" through as quickly as possible, is impressive! In a 3-week period, in the middle of so maybe other urgent crises, the public provided over a third as many public comments as the all-time record for a Forest Service rulemaking (set over the course of 3 years, during the promogulation of the Roadless Rule).
Our work as a local federal lands watchdog is more important than ever. The Forest Service is already moving as quickly as it can to log Inventoried Roadless Areas in the White and Green Mountain National Forests that are unprotected by the 2001 Roadless Rule. As Trump moves to repeal the 2001 Rule, we can only expect that the Forest Service will also target these areas for logging— and that means that we will have to double down on local forest protection, from community awareness and comment-writing to legal defense and beyond.
