The Liberty Trail on Mt. Chocorua is one of the most popular hiking paths in the White Mountain National Forest. The trail, flanked by thick woods, laces through the Sandwich Range, a swath of public land along the forest’s southeastern ridge that’s beloved by hikers for its acres of undisturbed wilderness.
“This forest, it’s unique ecologically,” said Zack Porter, a local conservation advocate on a recent hike along the Liberty trail. “It's unique regionally for having much older and healthier forests than we have on private lands around New England.”
But the recent approval of a logging project in late June in the Sandwich Range has animated long simmering tensions over the best way to manage the national forest.
The project will log more than 600 acres, a relatively tiny portion of the Sandwich Range’s more than 35,000 acreage. But it will cut trees near spots popular for hiking, bringing logging trucks to normally quiet slices of the forest. In certain tree stands, clear cuts are planned.
Colloquially, many Granite Staters may see the White Mountain National Forest as similar to a national park — a place of nature protected from development and extraction. But in reality, national forests like the one in the White Mountains are managed with economic considerations front of mind — which means supporting local timber industries as well as recreation-based tourism.
“National forests are not national parks,” said Deputy Forest Service Chief Chris French. “They are intended to work under a multiple-use mandate, which means that we're providing for sustainable timber harvests, that we're providing for preserved areas like wilderness all in the same location.”
Opening up the national forest to private logging companies has long been a commonplace Forest Service practice. But as the effects of climate change have intensified in recent years, logging has been facing increased scrutiny from environmentalists and many scientists, who say it’s limiting a key tool in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
While scientists across the spectrum agree older trees keep the most carbon out of the atmosphere, experts disagree about the best practical way to manage the forests amid other — often competing — concerns like promoting biodiversity, species conservation, wildfire prevention and meeting society’s high wood demand.
Private vs public timberlands
Porter began his career out west with the Forest Service two decades ago, but now as the head of the Vermont-based nonprofit Standing Trees, he often finds himself at odds with his former employer. Founded by Porter in 2020, the group aims to protect New England’s state and federal lands from development and logging. Earlier this year, the group sued the Forest Service over two other logging projects in the White Mountains, claiming the agency failed to follow federal regulations.
Porter said his group does not aim to curtail all logging but to reduce logging on public lands. He said less than 4% of the region’s annual timber harvest comes from publicly held forests, with private forests providing the vast majority.
“We don't need wood from these public forests — especially these mature and older public forests — to satisfy our wood product needs and demands,” he said.
Local critics of the newly proposed Sandwich Range project questioned why the land already used for hiking and other outdoor pursuits was selected when the state has abundant private timberlands.
“These national forests, in terms of the lumber industry, are a drop in the bucket,” said Isaiah Thompson, an Albany resident who has been working with Porter. “But they're so precious for these other uses.”
The project’s current start date is Sept. 1. It is expected to extract 6 million board feet of timber.
About 600 people submitted comments during the project’s comment period, and the vast majority were critical of the plan. In its final decision, the Forest Service addressed some of the concerns, including incorporating a 66 foot buffer zone between any trails and tree cutting areas: That’s a few feet more than the distance from pitcher’s mound to home plate. Some locals, however, said that’s still too close and bristled at the Forest Service’s insistence that the project will not be particularly disruptive.
“Obviously the impact is going to be significant,” Thompson said. “Anybody can see that. You just stand in the woods, imagine logging trucks coming through and think about whether that's significant or not.”
Saco District Ranger Jim Innes pushed back against these concerns, saying only a small sliver of the forest will be affected.
“We're logging less than 1% of the forest every year,” he said.
The Forest Service claims that the project will help support different wildlife habitats by creating a forest with trees of different ages. The Forest Service also says logging helps make the area more resilient to climate change: Innes called logging “the instrument” to achieving these goals.
“We’re going to do some clear cuts, and that'll create areas of young forest among old forests, which is good habitat for wildlife,” he said. “We want to have a diversity of species of trees. We know diversity creates strength and resiliency,” he added.
But Porter and others said logging in the Sandwich Range could cause more harm than good, raising concerns about potential impacts to endangered species, water quality and carbon stored in the trees.
Lisa Doner, a professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Plymouth State, said the U.S. Forest Service is held to rigorous environmental standards. But she said, having once herself lived near where cutting is planned in the Sandwich Range, the project risks disrupting a vibrant wilderness.
“I do think there's room for looking at how forests that are not cut, like those in the Sandwich Range, might serve a better longer term purpose if they're just left alone,” she said.
History, aims, and limitations of the US Forest Service
Doner has been mulling for decades the best ways for federal agencies to be environmentally conscious in how they manage public lands. She describes the Forest Service’s mission as something of a paradox: It is expected to protect public lands while also extracting timber from them.
“I think that's where this tension zone lies between what the public think the forest is being managed for and what the Forest Service thinks the forest is being managed for,” she said.
The Forest Service was founded at the start of the 20th century, in response to the unregulated private logging that razed vast portions of the country’s native forests, including in New Hampshire. Jim Furnish, a former deputy chief of the Forest Service and current environmental activist, described the agency’s early decades as its “custodial era.” During this period, it largely prevented logging on the land it controlled, often at the behest of the timber industry, which feared an overly saturated market driving down lumber prices. But the housing and development boom after World War II boosted demand for building materials, which led to national forests becoming a crucial timber supplier, with the agency opening up the previously protected lands to private companies. Furnish said the Spotted Owl crisis of the 1990s slowed logging on public lands, but the Forest Service still works closely with logging companies today.
“The Forest Service still maintains a pretty strong collegial relationship with the timber industry,” he said. “In many locales, the timber industry relies on the national forests for timber supply, and the national forests rely on the timber industry to get work done.”
By “get work done,” Furnish means the labor of cutting and thinning forests, which Furnish said the agency sees as a public service.
Richard Birdsey, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts, worked for the Forest Service for more than 40 years. He said the long history of collaboration between the agency and the timber industry makes environmentalists suspicious.
“Managing forests for timber production is pretty well embedded in the agency,” he said.
Doner said the guiding principles of the Forest Service are largely out of step with current scientific understanding of climate change.
“You can't really use the U.S. Forest Service as it exists as a climate tool or even as an ecosystem stability biodiversity tool,” she said. “It's not designed for that.”
She said there can be ecological benefits to forest rejuvenation efforts – cutting down trees to grow new ones – but that the forest service may be particularly focused on getting the timber extracted from these operations.
Some foresters see the agency’s approach as more balanced, given that they are tasked with managing public lands for a public that prioritizes different goals. Tony D’Amato, a forestry professor at the University of Vermont, said that everyone has “diverse values” when it comes to forest management.
“In the context of a landscape like a national forest, where they really are managing at larger scales and factoring in trying to balance those values over that landscape, they might have some areas where they really are focused on old growth forests and other areas where they're focused on trying to sustain those species that might need younger forests,” he said.
He commended the agency for integrating such varied perspectives into its management strategy, and said it is “not celebrated enough.”
Carbon, old growth and mature trees
In general, the older a tree gets, the more carbon it keeps out of the atmosphere. At the urging of the Biden administration, the Forest Service is currently finalizing a policy that will make it harder to cut the national forest’s oldest trees, which it calls “old growth.” The White Mountain National Forest already has protections in place to protect old growth, written into its 2005 Forest Plan.
Yet in New Hampshire there are barely any trees old enough to be considered old growth – less than 1% of all forestlands. Instead, on public lands in New England, there are far more middle-aged and mature trees, which are between 75 to 120 years old. The Forest Service’s current draft policy and the White Mountain National Forest plan do little to protect these trees, which if left alone would continue to store more carbon as they age and become old growth.
Birdsey, who studies how forests absorb carbon, called for more action to be taken to protect existing carbon stored in these trees and let them remain standing.
“There really needs to be a concerted effort to let more forests grow into old conditions,” he said.
Porter expressed frustration about the lack of protections for mature forests in the Forest Service’s proposed policy change.
“They've completely left mature forests, like the one that we're standing in, out of their proposal,” he said, showing a stand of mature trees slated to be cut near the Liberty Trail. “The Forest Service doesn’t want to change anything about the way that they are currently managing older forests that are on their way to becoming old growth.”
Other experts see the issue differently. D’Amato explained that in a tree’s life cycle, young growth stores carbon at a faster rate and then slows as it ages. Young growth may sequester carbon faster, but old growth stores more of it.
“You can hijack one of those two facts,” he said. “So if you're all about cutting trees, you're going to go, ‘Young forest is best for sequestration.’ If you're all about stopping people from cutting trees, ‘you're going to say old forest is best for storage.’”
“But ironically, the objective look at that is they're both good for different things,” he continued. “And we need a balance across the landscape because we still need to have some areas that are rapidly growing and sequestering. We definitely need to protect and maintain large stocks.”
Reconsidering wood consumption in New England
D’amto and representatives of the Forest Service said that the agency cannot change its wood harvesting habits if society at large does not change its wood consumption habits.
“I'm just as worried about climate change as anybody,” Innes said. “I have children and I'm not excited about them looking at the future. And so, I think that a better question is ‘what are we doing to reduce consumption?’ ”
D’Amato argued that logging in national forests offers the most environmentally sound option because the Forest Service is subjected to far higher environmental standards than private timber companies.
“When wood comes from that national forest, I view that wood as coming from the highest standard possible as a consumer that you could purchase,” he said.
D’Amato and Innes said that curbing timber harvesting in New England without changing consumption habits could actually have an adverse climate impact because it would mean wood products would have to be brought in from further away, which could have a large carbon footprint.
But others disagreed with this framing.
“I find it a little self-justifying that they argue that you shouldn't protect the White Mountain forests because you're just forcing the cutting somewhere else. That seems disingenuous,” Doner said.
The Sandwich Range project is slated to start at the end of the summer, but Porter and his allies said that doesn’t mean they are giving up their fight any time soon.
