Well here was my response to this article to the MA "forestry Community:
The NY Times should have interviewed me. As the Petersham Tree Warden, I talked with the neighbor that didn't want Harvard Forest using the road in front of her house to access the 1 acre of red pine they wanted to harvest. I helped patch things up with the neighbor after having a public hearing on the trees that were going to be removed to help facilitate access. Wildlands & Woodlands is a good plan but its major failure is that it doesn't provide any incentives for landowners so the plan will fail. They think that landowners will jump at the chance to sell 75% of the value of their land while giving away 25% of the value? Give me a break. The 25% is the amount the "nonprofits" will skim off the top. Why is that a good deal for landowners even if they can deduct the gift? By the way the Times had an error in the article, 1 million acres of MA forest land is already protected; W & W wants to protect an additional 1.5 million acres. Audubon and others are always widely publicizing the fact that we're losing 20 acres/day in MA to development or whatever it is but they say nothing about rampant liquidation cutting which exceeds 20 acres/day. As Joe says, it's a myth and lie that there is much oversight of timber harvesting operations in MA. If there were, we'd be seeing no liquidation cutting. But I'm seeing it everywhere and even DCR's own numbers, which are very much understated because they only look at stem quality and ignore species composition, say they issue permits to operators to liquidate 17 acres/day. We should be giving landowners support for keeping their land in forest but Forest bureaucrat Bob O'Connor's pilot carbon trading scheme that will pay landowners a paltry $5-10/acre is a joke. The bills I have in the State Legislature WILL help landowners. One of them will reduce landowners' property taxes to zero if they enroll in the Chapter 61 Forest Land Tax Program while another one will provide 100% cost-sharing for any landowner who wants to hire a forester to enroll in that program or the Forest Stewardship Program. But we need to do more for landowners. An annual tax credit for landowners who agree to permanently protect their forest would be a good idea. Paying full market value to landowners who enter into a CR is another good idea. Without more incentives, the W & W vision will remain just a vision or maybe a hallucination. Today I have to run through an 80 acre woodlot in Templeton. The landowner wants no part of Chapter 61 because he wants to let his kids decide what happens to his land. But he is interested in an improvement cutting. So if I can help him improve his forest and his kids inherit a beautiful forest then there will be more of a chance that at least some of this property will be protected in the future. If this 80 acres was hammered by a highgrader then that would probably greatly reduce the future landowners' interest in forestry and protecting the land. So why is DCR still issuing permits for liquidation cuttings and allowing any moron to prepare Forest Cutting Plans while saying they want to save the forest? That's Orwellian doublespeak. And the New York Times missed the real story because these newspaper elites cannot stoop to talking to the "hoi polloi". Mike Leonard, Consulting Forester www.northquabbinforestry.com -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of neil Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 7:23 AM To: ENTSTrees Subject: [ENTS] The Working Forest - Harvard Forest Dear ENTS, Just wanted to give the group a big heads up on a long article on Harvard Forest and Dr. David Foster, among others, in last Sunday's NY Times. Doesn't seem forests get this kind of coverage often. First two paragraphs: "Over the winter, David Foster wanted to cut down some trees. His neighbor didn't want him to. Foster is the director of the Harvard Forest, a 3,500-acre experimental forest in the middle of Massachusetts. When you are the director of an experimental forest, people aren't sure you should be cutting down trees. "We're cutting an acre of forest, nonnative conifers," he told me calmly on a day in February, while grabbing some snowshoes. A forest ecologist will tell you that if you cut down some woods - not all the woods, but some of them - a new forest will quickly replace them. There's a joke in Massachusetts that if you forget to cut your lawn, you will have a forest. For an ecologist, tree-cutting can be a stimulus plan that actually works. This cycle of forest succession is an observation that Foster attributes to Henry David Thoreau; when Foster is walking in the forest, something he does a lot, he will spot some young white pine trees, for example, in a freshly cut field and say, "There's Henry Thoreau for you!"" The full article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19Forest-t.html?_r=2&ref=maga zine&pagewanted=all neil --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Eastern Native Tree Society http://www.nativetreesociety.org Send email to [email protected] Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees?hl=en To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
