This decades-old dispute has taken on new urgency as the planet races to cut planet-warming emissions and the impacts of climate change become more pronounced.
In New Hampshire, environmental activists are now suing over a project to log within 3,000 acres of the White Mountain National Forest just northeast of Mt. Washington and south of Gorham. They argue that logging there would release too much carbon dioxide at a time when humanity ought to be doing the exact opposite.
The Forest Service argues that logging and letting the forest regrow in these areas will eventually absorb as much carbon dioxide as leaving the standing trees to their own devices.
An example of old growth habitat is seen near the Great Gulf Wilderness Trail in the White Mountain National Forest.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Earlier this year, the Forest Service approved 2,200 acres of logging in the “Peabody West” area of the White Mountains National Forest for “high quality” timber products, to create wildlife habitat, and to carve out areas for recreation such as mountain biking trails and roads. The project could technically start any time that the contracts are put out for bid. Unlike conserved US National Parks and wilderness areas, national forests are intended by the government for “multiple uses,” including recreation and logging timber.
The Peabody West area (so-called for the river that nourishes the area) is dense and mature. This time of year, the forest floor is blanketed with leaves accented by a smattering of maple red. The trees here neighbor the protected Great Gulf Wilderness.
Environmentalists said the region contains old trees that are in short supply in New England and that are most valuable left alone since the trees are storing a huge amount of carbon.
“We have so many easier to access, younger forests where we can source wood,” said Zack Porter, as he hiked through the area slated to be logged, pointing to old trees. “To target a place like this for timber harvest is just uncalled for.”
Porter runs a relatively new Vermont-based nonprofit called Standing Trees, the group that sued in May over the logging on behalf of its New Hampshire-based members. The plaintiffs, represented by Vermont Law and Graduate School’s environmental clinic, hope to convince a judge to issue an injunction to halt logging in both this area and another 880 acres near Lake Tarleton and east of Piermont.
Forests are widely recognized by international climate scientists as incredibly important for absorbing planet-warming emissions. During photosynthesis, trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which mitigates climate change.
The Forest Service wrote in a carbon assessment for the project that any emissions from logging would be “balanced and possibly eliminated as the stand recovers and regenerates.” The theory is that regrowing the forest will eventually allow the trees to hold more carbon than before the chop.
The agency also wrote that logging increases the health and age diversity of the area, which will help the forest withstand the impacts of climate change, including increased pests and disease.
The Forest Service would not comment specifically on the project since it is under active litigation. Scott Owen, a national press officer for the agency, wrote in a statement that in general: “We understand that ‘logging’ as a boogeyman is a common and historical theme. However, the more pressing threat in this century is [drought, wildfires, disease, and insect outbreaks].”
The plan for the Peabody West Project in the White Mountain National Forest.US Forest ServiceIn the short-term, logging will contribute greenhouse gas emissions, the Forest Service acknowledged in public documents. But the agency found in an environmental assessment that the overall effect would be “negligible” when compared with global emissions.
One forest expert, Jonathan Thompson at the Harvard Forest, called that conclusion “hollow” since pretty much any amount of carbon dioxide is small compared with the global total.
Jamie Sayen, a historian, author, and long-time environmentalist in New Hampshire’s North Country, said the argument that logged trees would eventually regrow to hold the same carbon as before is “utterly absurd.”
“The crisis is now,” Sayen said. “Releasing more carbon into the atmosphere now, because sometime in the next 100 years it’s going to be pulled back out, is not a good strategy.”
“Old growth” trees and habitat are a particularly hot area of dispute among foresters and environmentalists. Beginning with European colonization, New England’s forests have been aggressively cut, first for farming, then for the paper mill industry, later for cities and suburbs, and most recently for biomass energy. The forests were often, but not always, regrown over and over again.
That legacy has left the White Mountain and Green Mountain national forests with less than 1 percent of “old growth” trees compared with 10 percent, on average, in national forests across the United States. Definitions of old growth vary, but generally in the east, it means trees at least older than 101 years.
A handful of trees included in a survey of the Peabody West area were found to be close to 300 years old, and part of the area could be considered “old growth habitat,” according to a 2021 Forest Service field work report.
The Standing Trees lawsuit comes at a moment of inflection for the Service’s management of old growth. In 2022, President Biden directed the Forest Service to take inventory and conserve mature and old growth forests on federal land, an effort that was seen as a way to preserve the nation’s carbon sinks.
Statewide, the amount of carbon stored in New Hampshire is going in the wrong direction, mostly because of forest loss. Though about 80 percent of land in New Hampshire is forested, about 400,000 acres have been lost since 1970, the modern peak.
In northern New Hampshire, though, the allegiance to timber runs strong.
“We believe in forest management,” said Michael Waddell, who serves on the board of selectmen in Gorham, where the economy has long relied on tourism and timber. He said the national forest land needs to be used responsibly for multiple purposes, not just conservation.
“We’re not here to grow a million acres of wood into Sequoia National Park,” Waddell said, referring to the popular park in California known for its old trees.
Waddell, an outdoors enthusiast, dismissed the lawsuit trying to halt the Peabody West logging project. To him, it seems like just a new way of arguing that people shouldn’t use wood, adding that the climate change argument is “tiresome” and is now “thrown into anything and everything” people want to do in the forest.
A tree inside the parcel of land that would be logged near the Great Gulf Wilderness Trail.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe StaffForest management experts also argue the issue is complex. Alexandra Kosiba, a forest ecophysiologist and an extension assistant professor of forestry at the University of Vermont, said timber harvesting can improve the biodiversity of the area by creating space for new trees to grow.
Logging in New England, she said, is also done more responsibly today than it once was: Gone are the enormous clearcuts. Modern “treatments” — particularly on public land — are more targeted. Harvesting wood from land that’s regulated may also be better than purchasing it from places with few protections, she said.
“There’s a lot of oversight” in New England, Kosiba said. “That isn’t true in a lot of other parts of the country, and certainly other parts of the world.”
Still, Thompson, the research director at Harvard Forest, said when it comes to old trees, the math isn’t complicated: If it took 100 years to grow the tree, for example, then it’ll generally take another hundred to replace that stored carbon.
Thompson pointed out that over-consumption is a key point missing from most debates over carbon in forests. About 38 percent of wood harvested in the United States is used for short-lived paper products. Without reducing people’s consumption of wood, he said, halting logging in one place could just redirect logging somewhere else.
“And from the atmosphere’s perspective, nothing is different,” Thompson said.
Zack Porter, executive director of Standing Trees, hiked through the parcel of land that would be logged near the Great Gulf Wilderness Trail.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe StaffErin Douglas can be reached at erin.douglas@globe.com. Follow her @erinmdouglas23.