That Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in Grafton County is still standing amid the Trump administration’s “restructuring” ( clear-cutting?) of the U.S. Forest Service is welcome news, as is the possibility that the Bartlett Experimental Forest in Carroll County might gain a reprieve.
Both are essential resources whose research benefits all New Englanders who have a stake in the health and continued vitality of the forested landscape, which is to say virtually everyone.
As our colleague Alex Hanson noted in a recent story, Hubbard Brook was established in 1955 as a center for hydrology research. The effects of acid rain were first documented by scientists at Hubbard Brook, leading to regulations that reduced harmful emissions from burning fossil fuels. Research conducted there includes studying how invasive pests wreak havoc in New England forests and how cycles of flood and drought affect forested land.
Hanson’s reporting suggests that Hubbard Brook owes its exemption from the restructuring in part to support it receives from Dartmouth College and the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation, a private nonprofit whose leadership comes in large part from the Upper Valley. That and bipartisan political clout exerted by Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, and U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat who not incidentally sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The beneficiaries of the work done at Hubbard Brook include not only foresters, loggers, ski areas, maple sugar makers and land owners who want to manage their forests sustainably, but also anybody who finds in a quiet forest walk a deeply satisfying connection with the natural world.
The “restructuring” of the Forest Service, which administers 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands encompassing 193 million acres, threatens all of these interests. Its headquarters will be moved from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah. Most of its research facilities, which maintain records compiled over many decades, are being abolished, and regional hubs dismantled. Losing that data, or even interrupting its collection, would cause irreparable harm.
Among the facilities being shuttered is the Forest Service’s research and development office in Burlington, based at the George D. Aiken Forest Services Laboratory at the University of Vermont. The office employs five full-time researchers and over the years conducted studies of maple syrup production, forest health and the effects of acid rain, VtDigger reports.
The 2,600-acre Bartlett Experimental Forest in New Hampshire, which is described as playing a key role in providing information to foresters and other researchers, is also ticketed for closing, although that decision is said to be under review.
Given the administration’s general hostility to science, the closing of research stations comes as no surprise; as in other fields, the damage will be lasting.
The ostensible reason for this reorganization is to move the agency’s leadership closer to “the forests and communities it serves,” which are predominantly in the West. Further down in the press release heralding the restructuring is perhaps a key to unlocking the actual motivation. It discusses “promoting policies that boost timber production” and managing “a healthy and productive forest system that provides affordable, quality lumber.”
Timber production has been in the Forest Service’s DNA from its beginning under Teddy Roosevelt at the dawn of the 20th Century. In an illuminating piece in The New Yorker magazine recently, Bill McKibben, a leading environmental journalist who lives in Vermont, writes that the service’s first director, Gifford Pinchot, believed in protecting and using natural resources to fuel economic growth. Pinchot’s contemporary and sometime antagonist John Muir represented a very different ethos: “saving forests not for their industrial potential but for their intrinsic meaning and beauty,” according to McKibben.
As this tension has played out over the years, the Forest Service has come to encompass many designated “wilderness” areas along with timber production and recreational uses.
The Trump administration is playing the short game here, but trees play the long game. The irony of shutting down research stations in the rush to harvest more timber is that future timber production may be imperiled in ways that could have been avoided through the work of the U.S. Forest Service as currently constituted and its scientists.
That is not all that could be lost. McKibben quotes Aldo Leopold, father of conservation biology, who long ago noted “the benefit that comes from slowing down and taking the time to listen to nature. In today’s world, being quiet is a valuable commodity; taking time to stop and listen for those minute details outdoors that weave a tapestry of stories all around us is a rewarding experience if we but stop and pay attention.”