As a conservation biologist, I have viewed the debate over the future of the Northern Forest, including the forests of the Northeast Kingdom, with a tremendous amount of interest. The original focus of the Northern Forest Lands Council (and the Governors' Task Force and Northern Forest Lands Study that preceded it) was primarily on trends in land conversion and the economic health of the forest-products industry. However, concerns expressed by residents throughout the region about the ecological health of the forests forced the Council to focus also on biological diversity and forest practices. Although some viewed this as a deviation from the Council's mission, the truth is that ecological health and social well-being are intimately linked, and any attempt to discuss one without the other is, at best, a waste of time. Now that the Council's work is drawing to a close, and discussions on forest policies will most likely continue within each state separately, it is important that all citizens of Vermont continue to work towards improved ecological and social conditions in our state.
I speak with little authority about what the specific elements of social well-being are, but I feel they probably include such basic features as the development of diversified employment opportunities that can be maintained over the long-term, the development of an economic infrastructure that maximizes the retention of profit within the region, and the promotion of cultural traditions.
As a biologist, however, I am certain of the importance of biological integrity. Promoting biological integrity is more than just protecting a few high-profile endangered species or maximizing the number of species on every acre of land. It involves promoting the existence of all native species and ecosystems in their natural patterns of abundance and distribution, as well as the ecological and evolutionary processes that connect them over the landscape and over time. Any conservation strategy that hopes to achieve biological integrity must:
(1) Maintain healthy populations of all native species in natural patterns of abundance and distribution;
(2) Represent all native ecosystem types and successional stages across their natural range of variation;
(3) Maintain ecological and evolutionary processes;
(4) Provide for responsiveness to short-term and long-term environmental change; and
(5) Maintain of the evolutionary potential of all organisms.
It is important to understand why each of these characteristics must be met, lest we fall into the trap of believing that protecting one or two small populations of a few charismatic species is enough to succeed at conservation. First, populations of all species live within communities, each species connected to others by processes, such as predation, competition, symbiosis, and decomposition. Changes in the composition of a community, either by adding or removing species, or changing their numbers beyond their normal ranges, can have enormous consequences for everything else living there. One only has to consider the impact of increased abundance of deer (with their tendency to carry brain worm) on moose, the introduction of Eurasian milfoil on native aquatic plants, and the local extinction of fishers on the destruction of trees by porcupines to see why we need to consider the natural world as an interconnected set of species that function together as a whole.
Although some species in a community might well be unnecessary to the operation of the whole, we do not have nearly enough knowledge to know for certain what those species might be. By emphasizing the conservation of only a few native species at the expense of all the others we run the risk of managing communities to collapse.
Similarly, communities are connected to the non-living parts of the environment, such as air, water, and sunlight, to make ecosystems. Some species are restricted to specific ecosystems, and their loss or degradation, such as is occurring to alpine ecosystems on Mt. Mansfield and Camel's Hump, leads to the extinction of many species together. Many animals spend parts of their lives in different ecosystems, and the loss of one or the presence of barriers may also cause catastrophe. Atlantic salmon, for example, depend on both lakes (or the ocean) and streams to carry out their entire life cycle. When barriers like dams, such as the one on the Clyde River in Newport, are built, populations of Atlantic salmon that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands virtually disappear.
Of course, ecosystems themselves are not static entities but change over time. Young spruce-fir forests become old spruce-fir forests, bringing about changes in a whole host of characteristics, such as light levels, composition of understory communities, and soil conditions. Many species of organisms are specific to forests of a particular age; for example, several species of hardwood-forest lichens are known only from large stands of old-growth. Therefore, protecting forest ecosystems based solely on tree species composition and ignoring such features as age may also lead to the loss of biological integrity.
The loss of any ecosystem or successional stage is of concern, yet in the Northeast Kingdom one of the greatest problems is large-scale clearcutting. For example, in Concord and Lunenburg, at least 25% of the forests have been cut in the last few years, creating conditions for large expanses of even-aged, juvenile forests with none of the diversity found in forests that are older and of mixed-age. The ecological issue here is not that trees were cut, but rather that so many were cut over such a large area that the maintenance of successional types and their affiliated communities has been made all but impossible for the two centuries.
The final three characteristics emphasize that the goal of conservation is not simply to maximize the number of species, but to allow natural processes to operate as well. Connections within and between ecosystems, such as predation, competition, decomposition, nutrient and water cycling, and soil retention, are essentially the processes of nature. Without these, ecosystems tend towards collapse, and society is forced expend time, energy, and money to prevent it from happening. These processes can operate either over short periods of time, like minutes and days, or longer periods, like centuries or millennia. What happens to vegetation when the average yearly temperature increases? In the past, plants migrated northward by the slow process of seed dispersal. After the retreat of the last ice sheet from Vermont about 10,000 years ago, tundra vegetation, such as is now found 1,000 miles north of us migrated into the area from the south. A few thousand years later, coniferous forests arrived and the tundra migrated northward. Later, northern hardwood forests replaced the conifers in many places. A goal of any successful conservation strategy must be to insure that barriers to migration or any response by species to environmental change do not exist.
As the Northern Forest Lands Council ends its discussions, the work to craft a new and better future for all of Vermont goes on. Recognition that the protection and restoration of biological integrity is a fundamental necessity for any sound future is a must. Failure to begin discussions without these characteristics clearly articulated casts our future in doubt and guarantees endless bickering by warring special interests over who is to blame for our social and environmental problems.
VNRC now has the opportunity to decide where to place its efforts concerning the future of the forests and the forest-dependent communities of Vermont. I am certain these efforts will continue to be characterized by community participation and grassroots partnerships. Beyond that, however, we must not lose sight of the fundamental importance of protecting and restoring biological integrity. Addressing the issue of abusive forest practices is an obvious place to start. Clearcuts half the size of townships do little to promote ecological health, and make it more difficult for foresters who practice sound stewardship to counter negative public reactions to any form of timber harvesting.
But limiting the size of clearcuts addresses only part of the problem. We must look at the entire landscape of forests in Vermont as a matrix of forest-use types, in which large tracts of land where cutting and development do not occur exist along with tracts of working forests. We must begin to reintroduce species to the region that have been driven locally extinct, such as the timber wolf. We must permit the restoration of older-aged forests. We must minimize the barriers to the movement of native species, such as roads and dams. We must, to the best of our ability, remove species introduced to the region from other areas.
All of this, and much more, will be easier to achieve than one might think. What it requires, however, is our recognition that biological integrity is a fundamental necessity, and our agreement to adopt political and economic traditions that operate within, rather than apart from, the laws of nature. Then we will truly have created a society that promotes both a healthy environment and healthy human communities.