It was disturbing to read your interview with Jonathan Yeo, director of water supply protection for the state, in the story headlined, “State conservationist, tree advocates spar.”
Forty thousand acres of public land “managed” by the Department of Conservation and Recreation is cut every 100 years to leave a stand of trees with the average age of 50 years. He says this protects the water supply, but it’s hard to imagine how clearing the trees and disturbing the soil to allow more runoff protects the water supply.
He says that cutting the trees creates habitat, yet clearly, creating one type of habitat comes at the expense of destroying a different habitat.
The one habitat we are markedly short of in Massachusetts is old-growth forest. We don’t need more young-growth habitat.
He says the trees capture carbon, but a forest with trees 300 years old holds a lot more carbon than the recently logged trees left by DCR.
Also, logging increases the loss of organic carbon from the soil, and older forests capture carbon at a higher rate. Sending our trees off to Quebec so they can be sold back to us as pellets and burned does not lower our carbon footprint.
Leave the carbon in the trees. He doesn’t mention how logging accelerates the incursion of invasive species. Every time the trees are cut, it opens the land to an invasion of alien species, which crowd out native plants and create a habitat to which our local fauna are not adapted.
If Yeo wants to manage something, he could gather an army to fight the alien horde which DCR’s previous management practices have invited in.
He says this is a forest. It’s not. It’s a tree farm. A real forest is more than a collection of trees – it’s a whole ecosystem of relationships. It is utter hubris to think that we can manage a forest anywhere near as well as nature can do herself. An old-growth forest would be a blessing for our descendants.
Daniel Grubbs
New Salem