Two Forests in a Landscape of Consequences
Written in 2016 while I was Director of Great Mountain Forest
A love of wood shapes my story. The sound and smell of a split billet or a burning log, the fresh weight of a plank just off the mill, the revelation of beautiful grain in a newly planed board, all are important in the telling. And so too are the hints, spoken quietly by the wood itself, about what shape it would like to take – cabinet, box, table. Often you impose a need in woodworking, but the most satisfying moments undoubtedly come when you leave need behind and try to work with the wood. There is thankfulness there for what the tree has given to the work at hand, and thankfulness also for all the wooded places that supply our constant human need.
A love of forests shapes my story too, and home means trees at my back. It’s not that the grassy sightlines of western prairies, or the towers and arches of desert canyons aren’t compelling, but woods are where I have always lived. When they are not there, I miss their green overhead defining limits to the blue. I miss the sound of wind and rain in their leaves, or the contrast of dark branch and shining snow. In the subarctic, moving out above treeline, I miss the evergreen of black spruce and jack pine, the hush of boughs, their scent on the air. The tundra is sublime – as beautiful as the desert or prairie – but when it’s time to find home for the night I seek out the pockets of trees in the valleys and protected places, like a deer in winter hemlock.
There is thankfulness there too – and wood for the fire.
Being human is full of contradiction. It is all our condition that we must seek balance between our love for and our need to use the beauty, abundance, and biodiversity of the world that cares for us all. So it is with my love of standing forests and felled trees. Yet, while balance should be the goal, there are too many these days who proclaim a love of wooded places but forget the necessity of the working woods – a necessity residing in the furniture we use and the houses that keep us warm and dry. There are too many, too, who forget that thankfulness is crucial to meeting necessity in ethical ways, or simply count it as rational and practical to deny the need for any kind of gratitude. The results are troubling.
Ignoring the complexity of our situation leads to misuse, and to the spiritual danger of which Aldo Leopold warned almost a century ago – I mean the danger of believing that breakfast originates in the grocery, and heat comes magically from the furnace. One cannot love trees out in the forest and at the same time imagine “wood” to be another kind of substance that comes simply and endlessly from the lumberyard.
This was the heart of Leopold’s land ethic – that we must remember and respect the direct, working connection to the land that supports all of us; that we must also not become desensitized to our potential destructiveness in meeting those needs. And he made a compelling case, though we failed to heed it. When it comes to forests, we opted to push our unrepentant demand further out over the horizon, embracing spiritual sanctuaries and wooded playgrounds close to home. Now there are forests where we get our wood, and those where we don’t, those forests close to home and those physically far away. Yet distant forests are near at hand in the geography of a balance sheet or a global economy, close too in the historical landscape of our use of trees.
In this economic terrain, the forest outside someone else’s window can be closer than the one outside your own. This is a landscape of consequences, just as Leopold told us, and today the spiritual danger is much harder to see.
Home for me is the New England uplands, where I have lived all of my life – the mixed northern hardwoods, the white pines and hemlocks, the forest we associate most with western Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Where it dips into the hills of central Massachusetts was my childhood forest, and while the intervening years have been spent mostly in the north, I now live and work in one of its last southern outposts. This is the first woodland about which I want to speak, and particularly about 6300 acres at the tail end of the Berkshire Hills, just over the line in northwest Connecticut.
In the early twentieth century, regional deforestation here in the northeast drove changes in American land use, and Great Mountain Forest was born in that moment of newfound conservationism. This meant managing forests for timber, but with the growing understanding of what large, forested watersheds meant for the health of American urban centers too. People began to speak of managing the land for the “greater good,” and for the benefit of future generations, and GMF was guided by that philosophy from the beginning. The greater good is defined much differently today than a century ago, focusing now on healthy ecosystems, not just on water and timber resources. Yet stewardship for the future, manifested in active management, is still a central principle shaping this forest.
Because of this I regard Great Mountain as important in the landscape of consequences. Southern New England has stopped using most of its forestland, as both states and private owners have lost interest in management. This has not stopped a growing population from building houses, many of them surrounded by wooded lots. What it has done is make the region a huge importer of wood, even as its own forests have matured. This troubles me. Not because I think that every patch of wood need be managed for timber, but because a region which no longer understands stewardship and the use of woodlands is just what Leopold feared. It opens the door to abuse, whether we see it or not.
So we cut trees at GMF, and I believe in that work – how could I not, here in my office, at my wooden desk by the fire, surrounded by wood in every direction? That said, what we are really trying to demonstrate is the value of forest management as a dialog with the land, not a demand. Responsible cutting requires an ear and an eye for beauty, abundance, and biodiversity, not just timber. Sharing this set of values is our mission. This was a private matter for a long time at Great Mountain – a deep family commitment to conservation, research, and sustainable use. Today it is the responsibility of a nonprofit seeking to integrate human communities and the forested landscape.
For me this is a new interpretation of that early twentieth-century conservationism, and analogous to what small farmers have been doing to get hands and minds back on the land in responsible and sustainable ways. I’m heartened that people have grasped that this kind of agriculture means not only healthy food, but wider benefits to their communities. I’m concerned that while the forest has come back with great vigor in New England, too few make similar connections between local trees and local community.
At Great Mountain I know we are helping, by connecting human need with the necessity of caring for the forests we love. I also know that this is not enough. Ecological localism is not all that is necessary for good stewardship today, and as close as local trees can feel, when walking through a place like Great Mountain Forest, distant woodlands are never far away. There are trees in our lives that most of us will never see standing, but we must know them all the same.
Wampee Pond at Great Mountain Forest
Canada has a large share of the circumpolar boreal forest that rings North America and Eurasia, and one small part of these woods is a second home to me. The Canadians call it eastern James Bay, a region about twice the size of Pennsylvania, five hundred miles north of Montreal. My Cree friends call it Eeyou Istchee, “the people’s land.” This is where the Cree – the Eeyou – have lived since the end of the last ice age, and the name is recognition of long tenure and intimate understanding of their forest.
The name Eeyou Istchee is also a political statement about land and justice, because James Bay produces some of the most meaningful of those “other trees” in our lives. While wholly outside of most people’s experience here in the south, the Cree know our connection to the resources leaving their land. There, in a seeming wilderness, are some of the last intact forests on the planet, but which today are supplying vast quantities of wood to Canadians and Americans alike. None of this is benefitting the Cree or their land.
Woodland Caribou at Temiskamie Lake
When I first went canoeing in that country of black spruce and tamarack, jack pine and muskeg, I thought it was in a distant wilderness. Now, nearly forty years later, I find it hard to believe I ever felt that way. In that time, I have seen much of the forest clearcut, driven by government and industry which have ceased to value long-term ecological health in favor of maximizing short-term profit. I have watched one of the world’s biggest hydroelectric facilities – the James Bay Project – built and then expanded to provide “sustainable” power to meet growing demand in New England and southern Quebec. Flooding in the north and cutting to the south have been mirror images of developmental destruction and all of this has left Quebec’s boreal threatened. I don’t canoe much there anymore, travelling mostly by truck. On a couple of occasions logging roads have led me to vast clearcuts where previously I had known only forested campsites, places which had taken weeks of paddling to reach. These were personal moments of loss for me, but my feelings only scratch the surface of what my friends experience everywhere on their lands. Any comparison would be unjust, for mine was the loss of a memory, not of a home or a way of life. In addition to watching the forest disappear, then, I have also witnessed firsthand how an indigenous people have suffered along with their land. Today’s remaining boreal forest is still beautiful, but it’s a troubling place for me.
I therefore support wholeheartedly a Cree plan to conserve a place they call Mishagamish: an untouched area the size of Rhode Island, north of the Broadback River. This is some of the last intact old growth in the region, despite Cree use. Or we might even dare to say that because of Cree stewardship, this area is one of the last fully functioning boreal ecosystems in Quebec. There has been no industrial cutting in Mishagamish and there are still no roads. This is important for many species, but none more than the woodland caribou, which is endangered everywhere in the north. They rely on the unbroken and moss-festooned older forest to survive, and Mishagamish is one of the last of their breeding grounds in Quebec – an ecological ark.
Traveling the roads that now crisscross most of James Bay, and listening to people speak about the land, it’s easy to get emotional about protecting this remaining part of the boreal forest. I would call it a moral and ecological imperative. And my feelings are made all the stronger when I think about Great Mountain Forest, because the story of our woodland speaks directly to the forest of Mishagamish. The industrial forces threatening the north today are the same ones that wrecked our mountain a century ago, before there were other trees to cut.
My office is in an old farmhouse, and a hundred and twenty-five years ago the near view out my window would not have been of forest, but of overgrazed pastures in this high, rocky place. Beyond the fence-line the view would have been different still – a land stripped of trees. Hemlock fell for tanbark, used to turn hides into leather. Hardwoods fed the many charcoal hearths active here in the forest. This was our local variant on the deforestation caused by lumbering and industry across New England – the overuse that fueled the early conservation movement and the establishment of Great Mountain Forest.
Winter Camp at Lac Gadreau
In the nineteenth century colliers cut our mountain multiple times, making fuel for blast furnaces down in the Hollenbeck and Blackberry River valleys. The view out my window, like most of this region, is thus a postindustrial remnant of that nineteenth-century landscape. Its beauty is a hopeful thing, but nowhere in New England did we act quickly enough to save anything but tiny patches of the original woods.
We can debate the ecological and cultural significance of that loss, but I would like to see a different outcome in the north, when the gold rush of cutting finally depletes the resource and industry fails and moves on. We will still have to call most of the boreal forest postindustrial and wait to see if it’s as ecologically resilient as the forest here. In the midst of that wait, however, not cutting Mishagamish will save a region large enough to be ecologically meaningful for the future. For that alone it is worth doing.
Conserving Mishagamish would be meaningful in another way too, however. This is something I think about all the time when I look out my office window. I’m proud to be associated with the legacy of stewardship and regrowth of Great Mountain Forest, but I know that it was not just ecology that was lost with the original forest. A cultural landscape was destroyed as well, and ways of knowing that were unique to this place – ways of knowing which helped create the beauty and abundance described by early colonials when they first arrived. There are fragments of that knowledge surviving here in New England, but nowhere a complete record. This is our collective loss as we think about trying to be better stewards.
Mishagamish on the other hand is a nearly undamaged volume in the fast-shrinking global library of indigenous land management. This is as precious as ecology to me. It is part of our global human heritage. Beneath their smartphones and satellite dishes, the Cree are still a traditional hunting people, and we can learn a great deal from them. Mishagamish is one of the last places where they have not had to adapt their use to industrialization, where indigenous management practices are intact. When my friends speak about preservation this is what they emphasize, because they know how connected human use and healthy ecology are to one another in the history of their forest. The Cree know that Mishagamish is a cultural as well as an ecological ark. You can’t save one without the other.
Barrette Mill Chapais
If you visit the mills in the Quebecois towns of Chibougamau or Chapais, you can witness the efficiency with which modern industry turns truckloads of trees into bundles of lumber wrapped in neat white tarps. These are the mills that will benefit from cutting in Mishagamish and it will take little time to subdue an area the size of Rhode Island. In less than five years it will be fully impacted, and ninety-five percent of those trees will roll south by tractor-trailer or railcar over the US border. Two-by-fours labeled “Barrette-Chapais” and “Chantier-Chibougamau” will be used across the northeastern states, and boreal black spruce will continue to support the housing economy. In the midst of this, we will continue to enjoy our increasingly wooded landscape and our increasingly spacious houses.
The Cree man responsible for the traditional hunting lands on which the Barrette-Chapais mill sits – a territory about four times the size of Great Mountain Forest – is a friend of mine. Under Cree tradition David Mianscum controls community access and how much is hunted there; he is also now responsible for negotiating with lumber companies, to try and mitigate their impact on Cree use. It was a hard job even before the cutting, one he inherited from his father, but today it must seem impossible at times. It’s David’s responsibility to pass the forest forward in as good a condition as it came to him, but that will not happen over large areas now.
This system of hunting lands covers all Cree lands, and everywhere there are Cree hunters charged with caring for their territories. They are the embodiment of Cree traditional ecological knowledge and practice on the ground. In English they are called tallymen – a remnant of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s tenure in the north. The Cree word is Kaanoowapmaakin (pronounced Gah-new-whap-mah-gan) which translates as steward or guardian. This is a much better description of their responsibility.
I stay at a camp on David’s land sometimes. On my last visit I sat on the shore of the frozen lake the last afternoon, comparing the view to the one out my office window at Great Mountain. It was March, a calm sunny day, but the snow and cold were comparable to January here. There were no clear-cuts in sight, but I knew they were just walking distance from where I was sitting – each of them hundreds of hectares in extent. In any direction I looked I could see the high-tension lines that run the thousand miles betwee the La Grande Project and US and Canadian cities.
Late in the afternoon, when the sun started to set and people in the south turned on lights and started dinner, the transformer station near the mill began to emit the usual audible hum. The station is miles away, but it offers a constant reminder of industrialization close at hand, and makes it clear how difficult David’s job is today. The sound also emphasizes the material connections between north and south, pointing to the consequence of mentally disconnecting the woodlands we love from those which support our demands.
It also emphasizes the need to protect places like Mishagamish, though there is disturbing irony in saying that. I mean that, historically, Quebec already protected James Bay once before – Mishagamish included. It was at the same historical moment when conservation was taking hold in New England, and our now-regrown New England forest began, thanks to enlightened action. There was enlightened action in the Cree forest a century ago too, but it was forgotten, leaving only a haze of tragic irony floating in the black spruce, like morning mist.
Overhunting on all Cree lands left their forest quiet for lack of animals back then. Non-Native trappers had gained access, thanks to improved transportation from the south, and they stripped the land for the booming urban fur market. Their uncontrolled cut-and-run trapping threatened traditional Cree stewardship, much as logging does today, and forced everybody to scramble to get what they could before it was gone. This reached its height in the 1920s, and poverty and starvation came calling during the Great Depression, when both economy and ecology collapsed. It was a boreal Dust Bowl and is still remembered as a dark time by the Cree.
It was at the height of this that the Cree began working with both the national and provincial governments to establish a system of conservation. The bureaucrats involved were influenced by the same philosophy that informed work in New England, and they found common cause with traditional hunting in James Bay. Almost all Cree hunting territories were placed under official protection as “hunting reserves,” and management was given exclusively to the tallymen. David’s hunting territory now has the very unromantic designation O-52, thanks to this nearly forgotten moment in conservation history.
Mistassini Hunters circa 1960s
It was the success of both Cree stewardship and provincial conservation, then, which allowed me to believe I had entered a wilderness all those decades ago when I first went canoeing. It was not that I was entering a place that had never been touched, but a place where good management had restored the forest – what the Cree refer to as their garden – after abuse. Conservation was abandoned in James Bay in order to build dams, but the results were still isolated to areas I had not yet gone. It was the roads built for the James Bay Project that brought the logging and the mills, and moved Quebec to further abandon its support of Cree conservation.
This history highlights the cultural as well as the ecological need to protect Mishagamish. It also highlights the value of the work we do at Great Mountain, educating people about forests and their management. We are good stewards, demonstrating that caring use can have good ecological results, but my story also highlights that we are embedded in a geography where we may not be as good as we would like to be. This is something that concerns me greatly.
The last forty years in James Bay begs a difficult question, and this too involves history going back into the nineteenth century. When logging was done in New England, the industry moved first to the white pine forests of the Upper Midwest, then to the longleaf pines in the South. Later it set its sights on fir and spruce in the Pacific Northwest, and it was regulations there, driven by depletion and ecological damage in the 1980s, which opened an opportunity for Canadian softwood to fill a void in the market. That’s when trees really began to fall in James Bay.
Given that history, one must acknowledge that overuse, ending with cutting in James Bay, is what allowed our forests to regrow here in New England. Closer to home, one has to ask whether we could we have conserved Great Mountain for more than a century if timber had not been coming from elsewhere? The honest answer is likely that we could not have, given our region’s constant demand for wood.
This is the full extent of the geography of consequences and forgetting that everything come from the land for which we must care. When I think of my own love of woodworking, or even my love of logs on the fire, the same care must be the foundation. Good stewardship is what makes Great Mountain Forest so special. Today, however, this demands wider knowledge and broader action – not only in James Bay, but in all the places we touch with our demands.
In putting forth his land ethic, Leopold asked, “what more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and, by cautious experimentation, to prove how it works? What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one’s own land?” That substantial service has not changed nor has it diminished. We all need to be more involved in understanding how ecology works in the world today, and practice meeting our needs in sustainable ways.
That is not enough though. We must also ask a more difficult question. We must ask: what more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and know how it fits in the global political ecology – the biosphere of use that is our modern culture and economy – the history of colonization and demand? Only then can we really practice conservation at home in both ecologically sound and environmentally just ways.
