The great green East: lands everyone wants.

Amazingly diverse and resilient but in the throes of monumental change, eastern forests are sorely in need of a new system of nurturing that respects both the land and the people who make demands on it.

The first Europeans to encounter the great forest of the East were astonished at its sheer scale and richness, unlike anything they had ever experienced before. For some the forest was a forbidding and impenetrable wilderness, hostile to progress. For others it meant the good life, enjoyed only by nobility back home. As one wrote to friends: "Here is good living for those that love good fires."

It didn't take long to discover the eastern forest's other commercial treasures, from sailing masts and naval stores, and from lumber, potash, and charcoal to a cornucopia of fish and wild game. And thus began a period of forest exploitation of monumental dimensions that changed the face of America forever.

Perhaps the best way to describe the forests of the East even today is to say that their diversity defies description - from the vast boreal forests of the north extending into Canada, to the white pine and northern hardwoods forests stretching from Maine to Minnesota, and south to the great swamps of the Everglades and the southern pine forests of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. In between lie the richness of the Smokies, the lure of the Shenandoah Valley, the hardwood and conifer-mantled Appalachians, bordered on the west by the tall-grass prairies now mostly in tall corn, wheat, and soybeans.

Yet, despite the richness so apparent as you fly across the eastern U.S., researchers tell us these forests are but a shadow of their former selves. Ecological historian Gordon Whitney (see Reviews, May/June 1995) says that while we still don't know exactly how these forests have been altered in the course of history, he believes they have experienced more change in the last 100 years than in any century since the immediate post-Pleistocene.

While he also writes' that our understanding of early wildlife history is equally incomplete, the tragic destruction of many species is all too painfully obvious. Millions of woodland bison ranged over much of the eastern forest, and some single flocks of passenger pigeons were reported to exceed two billion birds. They all disappeared as a result of massive changes in the eastern forest as timber was mined and the land cleared for farms. Nearly every species was impacted, from marine fisheries and migratory birds to large woodland predators and mammals. Millions of native peoples perished as the natural systems they depended upon for survival were changed forever.

And as we approach the next century, more change is on the way. A new resource science - ecosystem management - is the latest attempt to balance what is best for these forests with what is needed by urban areas so sprawling they seem to link arms up the eastern seaboard. Bugs, disease, development, and the loss of habitat and biodiversity - these battles and more are being waged throughout the eastern forest.

Eastern cities boast some of the nation's finest urban parks but have been less than kind to their rural neighbors. The view from Virginia's Skyline Drive is far less scenic and the Adirondacks disappear from view across Lake Champlain from Vermont, thanks to air pollution. Preservationists are battling urbanization - and the Episcopal church - over plans to develop a large tract of Belt Woods in suburban Maryland (see A Forest in Peril, page 14), one of the last remaining stands of extensive eastern hardwoods and a major roosting area for neotropical songbirds.

To understand the challenges facing our eastern forestland, take a look at the struggle to protect New York and New England's Northern Forest, owned by a broad mix of public and private concerns, from the huge Adirondack Park to the forest-industry empires in Maine. The Northern Forest Lands Council recently issued a report based on hundreds of Council meetings, public hearings, and studies, which uncovered an impressive "range of public policies and trends that now inhibit conservation of the region's forest resources."

The Council found increased polarization among forest user groups, excessive property taxes on forestland, heavy development pressures near shorelines and scenic areas, incomplete knowledge of land-management techniques to protect biodiversity, lack of funding and clear priority-setting for public land and easement acquisition, public fear of losing recreational opportunities and access to private lands, and "failure to consider forest land as a whole, as an integrated landscape."

It concluded that economic cycles may determine the degree of impact caused by these various threats, but over the long run the change that will result, "if left to proceed on its own, is likely to harm both the forest and the people who live here."

That diagnosis is generally accepted as sound - and probably holds true for all the eastern forests. At the heart of the debate, according to the Wilderness Society, is how to transform the "working forest into a sustaining forest" without "abandoning the central premise of the working forest - that economic use of forest resources is essential." The key, the argument goes, is not to think "merely of sawtimber and pulpwood," but to "move toward a more diversified forest economy.

The message that is emerging from this and other studies is that we can no longer resolve problems on a case-by-case basis and simply manage forests for paper and lumber. Instead, the cumulative impacts of biological, economic, and social change must be addressed comprehensively. That will require broad-based, strategic decisions, and recognition by foresters, public leaden, and citizens alike that forestry is as much a policy science as a biological one.

Jane Difley, former president of the Society of America Foresters, puts it this way: "The old image of foresters as managers of the forest, tough men among tall trees, is outdated. Unless we can reinvent ourselves to embrace a larger vision we will be irrelevant."

In Pennsylvania, where forest history includes years of intense harvesting, forests have returned and cover even more land as farms and mines convert to trees (see Penn's Sylva: Forest Regained, page 43). State forester Jim Grace says this trend plus quality sites provide both "challenge and opportunity" for his office. The land faces more pressures now than ever before, so foresters need to do a better job of managing to avoid damaging the land for future generations, he says.

How people use their forests is also on the mind of Dan Weller, chief forester for New York State's department of environmental conservation. Forest managers in the Northeast need to understand social trends as well as forest succession, he says. While the woods are resilient - he points out that the lower Hudson Valley's trees have returned after being stripped away 100 years ago to produce charcoal for iron furnaces - they would be better served by management plans that consider human impacts. You can't just manage the trees, Weller says. "The actions of people are the biggest factor affecting the future condition of our forests in New York."

No matter how optimistic we are about the potential of the East's great forests to recover from past degradation, understanding the historical impact of that exploitation is essential to understanding the present forest and its future potential. Research at the University of Georgia's Institute of Ecology suggests that severe disturbance - like early clearcut logging - may so alter a forest that it can never recover anything like its pre-cut ecological diversity. One writer sees it differently.

Bill McKibben, in the article, "An Explosion of Green," in the April issue of Atlantic Monthly, theorizes - incorrectly, I believe - that Eastern forests are about to regain their original stature. While admitting that it "will take centuries of care before they recover their full grandeur," he seems naively convinced that the job of renewal is all but complete.

"This unintentional and mostly unnoticed renewal of the rural and mountainous East . . . represents the greatest environmental story of the United States, and in some ways the whole world," he writes. "Nature's grace in the East offers the most important kind of hope, not only to a region that has been given a second chance to decide how to inhabit itself, but to a world in terrible need of models."

McKibben spends most of his article worrying about "renewed human assaults," especially "clear-cutting and other devastating 'management' techniques of industrial forestry," and developers. He argues that these "two armies of occupation" can be overcome by a combination of technological and economic tinkering to provide more "value-added" manufacturing jobs, and the establishment of huge wilderness reserves to ensure final restoration of the Great Eastern Forest.

"The East will not be fully renewed," he asserts, "until (wolf) packs wander its mountains again. That this is even a real possibility is a wonder, nearly a miracle." Such hope and optimism seem strangely misplaced. McKibben's article is provocative, important, and Well-written. His historical summary is excellent, and he identifies some of the problems plaguing these forests. But for me, it recalls H.L. Mencken's statement that "for every problem there is a solution - neat, simple and wrong." Not only are McKibben's solutions simplistic, but he fails to identify many serious problems facing the region.

Appropriate planning and regulation could stem inappropriate logging and urban sprawl. But some of the East's worst forest-health problems, for example, have no apparent solutions - certainly none that are neat or simple. And the changing patterns of ownership, taxation, global markets, and public perceptions of forests and their management are dauntingly complex. Nevertheless there is a growing determination among the public to face up to these tough issues.

Unlike the West, where battles rage over property rights and public lands, thousands of local organizations and individuals in the East are working together to reverse the trend toward community fragmentation, confrontation, and the posting of private lands as a protest against land-use planning and environmental regulation. A hand-painted sign on a farmer's pasture fence near my home in Vermont sums up the new view: "If your land is posted, stay the hell off mine."

In a region with precious little public land, people are coming to understand the need to accommodate recreation on private lands and to cooperate with neighbors to achieve land management and environmental-protection goals - regardless of whether that neighbor is a major forest-products company or the small forest landowner next door.

Fortunately, became efforts like the Northern Forest Lands project, people are exploring creative new ways to manage forest landscapes. Major forest-products corporations, for example, are working with environmental organizations toward third-party certification of the way they manage their forest lands and how they produce their products. This, it is hoped, will better achieve environmental standards and enhance marketing worldwide than continuing the old conflicts between industry and conservationists. (see "Certification: Pinpointing Good Wood," American Forests May/June 1995).

The USDA Forest Service has been thinking about the renaissance in Eastern forests for a long time, having inherited some of the region's most damaged lands to form the national forests of. the eastern United States - dubbed "the lands nobody wanted" by the late Bill Shands of the Conservation Foundation. Butch Marita, eastern regional forester, says forest conditions there have improved "dramatically" considering their history of abuse.

"The focus for the future," he adds, "will be protecting ecosystems and restoring deteriorated ecosystems" on the national forests, as well as ensuring that these forests provide multiple benefits. With the "dynamic change" in how the public views management of national forests, Marita explains, "we are dealing more often now with issues of biodiversity, forest fragmentation, neotropical migrant birds, development in and near national forests, old growth, and endangered species."

John Gray, one of the South's most outspoken foresters and former director of the Forest Service's Pinchot Institute (and a former AMERICAN FORESTS director) doubts that the Forest Service can convince the public of the need for a major expansion of harvesting on southern national forests, as is called for in the Forest Service's Fourth Forest report.

"Today's South is far different than it was in the 50s," he argues. "It is more urban, cosmopolitan, and diversified economically as a result of radical shifts from agriculture to manufacturing and services."

Gray wants the Forest Service to practice more "naturalistic forestry." This would put more emphasis on scenic enhancement, large-scale ecosystem research, and environmental education. He believes this effort would have broad-based support from professional societies, scientists, travel and tourism interests, and environmental organizations.

The Forest Service continues to grapple with the problem of forest health - a top concern of just about everyone, although there is major debate over the problem's severity. A Forest Service report earlier this year listed exotic insects and disease as the biggest threat found in a 20-state Northern Forest-Health Monitoring Program. The largest damage came from the gypsy moth, which defoliated over 1 million acres in 1993, mostly affecting oaks. But the report contained a dismal outlook for several other important species. American beech and white ash show severe dieback in the Northeast, the report shows, and butternut "may disappear from our forests due to the butternut canker disease."

Pine beetles affect forests throughout the East and spruce budworm hits balsam fir the hardest in parts of New England. Most other species are considered "healthy," with dieback in less than 10 percent of trees.

Not everyone agrees with the Forest Service's assessment of forest health. University of Vermont botanist Hub Vogelman, who has studied the forests of the Northeast for over 30 years, is convinced that air pollution-induced forest decline remains a significant problem for the East. While Forest Service studies suggest that sugar maple "stock volumes are increasing regionally," and that more than 90 percent "have healthy crowns," Vogelman believes that maple is in serious decline. His concern with long-term forest damage from air pollution is summed up in The Dying of the Trees, a recently released book by Charles Little, a veteran forest policy analyst and a contributor to AMERICAN Forests.

"My best guess is that the forests will not recover for a long time, no matter what we do." Little writes. "I suspect we may have permanently damaged the soil environment. . . permanently altered these soils, reduced the levels of productivity. Maybe for a thousand years."

The book presents a far more ominous outlook than does the Forest Service (see Reviews, page 40). After interviewing scientists, foresters, and land owners, Little uses one word to sum up his findings: despair. Most of the cases he cites are from the Eastern forests, where he describes forest health as "a pandemic, which means an epidemic is everywhere."

Traditional systems of managing forests in large blocks of public or corporate-owned land, supplemented by efforts to cajole millions of small landowners to manage their forest through Extension education, simply don't address these broad-scale problems. They are gradually being replaced by more comprehensive systems that encourage ecosystem management across ownership boundaries and with more shared public/private managerial responsibility.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for example, is experimenting with innovative approaches to landscape-scale management, like the newly established Conte National Wildlife Refuge. Unlike earlier refuges, based on federal ownership within a limited boundary, this one will be based on cooperative efforts involving federal, state, local, and private lands over the entire Connecticut River watershed.

The work of the Lake Champlain Management Conference is likewise coordinating the work of dozens of agencies in the Lake Champlain basin, on fisheries management, pollution control, heritage preservation, recreation, and overall lake restoration. Old ideas about bioregionalism are gaining new meaning as ecosystem management insists on crossing artificial boundaries and encompassing broad, natural regions.

Private land trusts and public agencies regionwide are exploring new modes of ownership and management, using easements and other less-than-fee arrangements for both natural area protection and forest management purposes. These innovative techniques are being used to protect the Appalachian Trail and to expand the Adirondack Park, as well as encouraging long-term "working forests" on private lands through the Forest Service's Forest Legacy program.

Perhaps some of the most exciting new efforts are occurring within the city limits of the East's metropolitan areas. Although the Forest Service is concerned about major insect and disease problems and "limited tree health care" in our urban forests, it may just be there that a new breed of forestry is being born and raised.

Some of the most diverse and continuous forests in the Midwest, for example, are located in urban areas, like those in and around Chicago. There, a new public/private venture called "Chicago Wilderness" involves many different jurisdictions, including the Cook County Forest Preserve system, working together to protect and expand the forest landscapes of the region.

Other innovative urban forest projects are underway in New York's Central Park and regional greenways system (see articles throughout this issue and the May/June and July/August issues of American Forests), as well as smaller cities throughout the East. Unlike Difley's "tough men, tall trees," urban foresters understand the human basis of forestry and its essential polical nature.

When Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, prior to being elected Vermont's lone Congressman, he launched a major tree-planting program with volunteers. A few years later he was asked by some visiting foresters how he persuaded volunteers to undertake such a huge technical task. "You must understand that planting a tree is a political act," he responded. "If people have the will, they can do anything! Politics is the science of the possible."

In the urban hinterland, which is most of the East, thousands of similar city and county governments, land trusts and other private conservation organizations are seeking innovative ways to encourage "working forests" while also enhancing urban forests and protecting special natural areas. But pressures from outside the Eastern forest, and the continuing high per capita use of wood by Americans, will likely make it difficult for those like McKibben who dream of vast new wilderness areas in the East.

Forest economist Perry Hagenstein believes the reduction in western federal timber harvests, due largely to endangered-species protection, is being offset by increased cutting of eastern forests, including those in Canada. Hagenstein, a former president of American FORESTS and chair of the Forest Policy Committee for the upcoming Seventh American Forest Congress (see sidebar) adds, "We can't save both old-growth and all young- growth forests - unless we are willing to make big changes in the way the economy and consumer sovereignty work."

Supporting this argument is a significant increase in foreign demand for eastern hardwoods from the Northern Forest region, according to Eric Palola, a resource economist with the Northeast Natural Resources Center. Exports and prices have increased as supplies dwindle elsewhere, pushing up the value of hardwood exports from the Northern Forest 400 percent in five years!

These new market trends, Palola suggests, could make it possible for landowners to properly manage their lands over the long-term. But it also could rush financially-stressed landowners into "high grading" their forests to sell off timber while the prices are high. He quotes a Maine logger who says that small landowners are "in a big rush to sell. They want to get rid of it while they've got a good price."

The Great Eastern Forest is a dynamic place in the throes of monumental change. Coping with that change will not be easy. We lack solid information about trends in forest health, land and wood markets, and global climate. Our knowledge of ecological processes and information about the likely outcomes of human actions are inadequate as bases for decisions in the fast-changing cultural contexts of the eastern United States and the world.

All that, I believe, suggests the need to manage the Eastern Forest with caution born of a certain humility and a major commitment to research in all aspects of ecosystem management, including the cultural as well as the ecological. Above all, we must reject neat, simple solutions to the complex problems besetting this forest. Any single strategy - be it based in economics, biology, or traditional forest management - is quite likely to be wrong. If any form of "management" is to be succeed, it must be adaptive to changing biological and economic conditions. And it must be political, as Congressman Sanders suggests, in the best sense of politics as "the will of the people."

Those of us who live and work in the Great Eastern Forest face an uncertain future. Ecological historian Gordon Whitney ends his book From Coastal Wilderness to Fruited Plains with this hopeful and pragmatic advice: "North America today is neither a lost paradise nor a land of endless resources. . . We cannot predict the outcome of every human action, but we can use our knowledge of environmental change in the past to create a better future - a future that respects the land and its ecological constraints."

RELATED ARTICLE: Is the Allegheny Forest Coming Apart?

A phenomenon perhaps unprecedented in the middle elevations of the Appalachian range is taking place in the half-million-acre Allegheny National Forest in northern Pennsylvania. Forest Service plant pathologist Phillip Wargo uses the term "full-force decline" to describe the combination of severe mortality in the mature hardwoods and failing regeneration. Forest Service scientists and other researchers gathered there in late spring to view and discuss the problems.

Eighty-percent mortality in some stands of sugar maple, and virtually no regeneration in a species fabled for fall splendor, is particularly troublesome, Allegheny Forest Superintendent John Palmer says. Sugar maple provides 25 percent of the forest cover Black cherry and red maple provide half the cover and also are declining.

"I came here in the winter of 1992 and was told there was a problem," Palmer said. "In spring I saw all the ferns and grass as the floor. The forest is not replenishing itself, and this is very serious. In large gaps there are no woody starts. We set up 6,000 monitoring plots over 300,000 acres and found that only 5 percent of the area has adequate regeneration. So we're not only faced with mortality in mature trees, but we have to figure out how to regenerate a forest."

Multiple factors are involved in the decline: old monoculture practices that radically altered the species composition (the forest was once largely beech/hemlock); two droughts in the 1980s; epidemics of insects and disease; and soaring numbers of deer browsing on seedlings.

"But what is highly unusual in this forest," said ecologist Orie Loucks of Miami University (Ohio), "is that the trees are not demonstrating tolerance to drought and insects, whereas historical evidence indicates that a healthy forest can tolerate consecutive droughts and insect attacks."

Forest hydrologist William Sharpe of Pennsylvania State University suggests the root of the mortality problem is in the soils, which he believes have been altered by acid precipitation, thereby lowering the trees' resistance to the natural stresses of drought, insects, and disease. Sharpe has discovered significantly less calcium, magnesium, and potassium in soils in the nearby Susquehannock state forest and in the foliage of high-mortality sugar-maple stands when compared to healthier stands.

"This leads me to believe there was an influence from soils on the foliage," Sharpe said. In other words, soil acidification is very likely a predisposing factor in the mature-tree decline.

Loucks supports Sharpe's analyses. "The key element is acidification," he said, a conclusion supported indirectly by Forest Service experimental soil liming in locations adjacent to the Allegheny. The liming, when combined with deer fencing, has increased calcium and magnesium in sugar-maple foliage, accelerated mature-tree growth, and improved regeneration. Sharpe concludes that liming, fertilizing, and fencing will be required to regenerate the Allegheny.

Meanwhile, the specter of acidification in the Allegheny - combined with increasingly mortality rates in the middle and lower Appalachian states as documented in the agency's Forest Inventory Analysis surveys, has led its northeastern-area health specialist Daniel Twardus to call for regional soil studies as rapidly as possible.

"This year we introduced the Forest Health Monitoring program into three mixed mesophytic states (Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio), but the program includes no soils work," Twardus said. "We know how to do that work, and we have deposition data that indicate there may be a problem. No we have the studies showing there have been soil changes. If we have to go back and say we made a mistake in the 1980s when we concluded that acid deposition was not a big problem, then, as they say in Los Angeles, 'If the globe fits'..." - JOHN FLYNN

RELATED ARTICLE: A Forest in Peril

If you happen to be near Bowie, Maryland, and drive past Belt Woods, you probably won't even notice it - it looks like just an ordinary patch of trees and grassland nestled in the usual maze of roads, developments, and disappearing farmland. But this small tract of earth has banded environmentalists, citizens, biologists, and even a musician together to try and save it from development. Containing some of the last stands of old-growth forest on the East Coast, Belt Woods is also the summer home for migratory birds - including one of the highest concentrations of neotropical songbirds in the United States.

Chandler Robbins is a biologist from Maryland's Patuxent Wildlife Reserve who has been studying the birds in Belt Woods since 1947 and probably knows more about them than anyone else. He is worried that the proposed development, which plans for 649 housing units to be built in the middle of the property, will fragment the area and cause a drop in bird populations.

"We are extremely apprehensive," says Robbins. "From the few studies that been done long-term [on fragmentation's effects in other forests], the forest interior species and very sensitive species [of birds] have disappeared."

Robbins believes that if the birds stopped visiting Belt Woods, the old-growth could suffer as well. Fewer birds would mean more insects; more insects could mean more free infestation, and the ancient tree's health could be threatened. But most of all, Robbins just doesn't want the birds to vanish from the landscape.

The Episcopal Church of Washington, which owns the Belt Woods property, believes that it has done all it could to compromise with environmentalists and biologists over the plan. The original development called for over 1,000 units and was scaled to the current 649 after buffer zones and other precautions were built into the plan to try and give the old-growth the best chances for survival. Church officials argue that Belt Woods is already fragmented - it is surrounded by housing developments, an amusement park, a religious center, two major roads, and a school - and that their planned development, unlike the surrounding developments, is taking the old-growth into account.

Pam Cooper wants to buy Belt Woods and preserve all 624 acres. Her organization, called the Western Shore Conservancy (WSC), has managed to raise over $3 million with donations from environmental groups, citizens, businesses and the government.

"I formed WSC two years ago because there wasn't any local entity to get involved in the Belt Woods project," says Cooper. "I felt that the property was too important for me to stand idly by."

One of the donors is Paul Winter, a musician who recently won a Grammy for playing his soprano saxophone with elk in the Rocky Mountains. National Public Radio went with him one morning and interviewed Winter while the incredible cacophony of what seemed like hundreds of birds warbled in the background. He played along with the frenetic chorus of birds, planning to make an album and use the money from sales to give to WSC. It wouldn't have required a scientist's presence, though, to discern that there were a lot of birds in a small area.

Whether Belt Woods and its birds can be saved is in question. Besieged by human impacts, and already suffering from cowbirds parasitism and invasive exotic plants such as mile-a-minute, this national treasure is a court hearing away from development. But it is not too late. If you want to help, call Pam Cooper's Western Shore Conservancy at 301/390-0797. - CHRIS HORNE

RELATED ARTICLE: Forest Fragmentation Continues

Nearly 10 million people own America's private forestlands, 85 percent of them with parcels of less than 50 acres. It's estimated that private ownership has increased by more than 2.1 million people since 1978; acreage in small-sized holdings (less than 50 acres) has about doubled, to around 77 million.

These findings are contained in the report "The Private Forest-Land Owners of the United States, 1994," which is in final editing at the Forest Service's Northeastern Forest Experiment Station at Radnor, Pennsylvania. It should be available late this year.

Other major trends shown in the survey include: a large increase in lands held by retirees (up 29 million acres since 1978), a large decrease in lands held by farmers (down almost 17 million acres), and an 18.5 million-acre increase in forestland held by "white collar" workers. Almost half of today's owners acquired their land in the past 15 years, suggesting a fairly rapid ownership turnover. The report also documents a major increase in large holdings (1,000+ acres) that seems to be due largely to the inclusion, for the first time, of Native Corporation and Tribal Forests in Alaska and other western states.

The continued trend toward more small ownerships and more individual owners - many for reasons that do not include the production of forest products - provides a continuing challenge to forest-policy makers and forestry program administrators. Most of these owners lack access to technical assistance when they have land-management questions, and many of the parcels are so small the management options are limited. When these forests can be held in a healthy, productive condition, the overall effect can be a significantly improved environment in terms of water and air quality, wildlife habitat, and scenic beauty. Maintaining these values - in the face of continuing forest fragmentation - is a growing challenge for forest conservationists in more urbanized regions. - NEIL SAMPSON

RELATED ARTICLE: FOREST CONGRESS TO SEEK "SHARED VISION"

The Seventh American Forest Congress will convene in Washington, DC, February 21-24, 1996, and will attract well over 2,000 people concerned with the future of America's forests. Tile Congress will be precede by a year of Intense planning by special committees and local roundtables all across the nation (see page 8). The objectives of the Congress are to develop "a shared vision, a set of principles, and recommendations that will ultimately result in policies for our nation's forests that reflect the American people's vision and are ecologically sound, economically viable, and social responsible."

The first American Forest Congress, convened in 1882, laid the foundation for the conservation movement In the United States. Subsequent Forest Congresses - in 1905, 1946, 1953, 1963, and 1975 - were organized and convened by the American Forestry Association (now American Forests). The sponsoring organizations for the 1996 Congress include American FORESTS and 10 other public and private organizations.

For additional information, and a copy of A Brief History of Die American Forest Congresses, write: American Forest Congress, P.O. Box 748, Granby, CT 06035.

CARL REIDEL - author of our Reviews column and an AMERICAN FORESTS past president, is professor of natural resource policy at the University of Vermont.