A new 20-year plan for how to manage a swath of public lands that includes one of Vermont’s highest, wildest stretches of undeveloped ridgeline was finalized Monday.
The state-owned Worcester Management Unit includes nearly 19,000 acres across five separate pieces of land across five towns in central Vermont — Elmore, Worcester, Middlesex, Waterbury and Stowe.
The plan, which was developed by Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources, lays out the overarching strategy for what sorts of things can happen on this swath of public land — from new trails, to timber harvests, to where backcountry ski glades can be cut and ecological restoration needs to happen.
The area includes 43 miles of trails in the Worcester Range, a beloved hiking destination, as well as the popular mountain biking trails at Perry Hill. It’s a key link in a wildlife migration corridor that runs from the Berkshires to the Gaspe Peninsula, and features forest that’s spread across low and high elevations — something that scientists say is essential to help plants and animals adapt to warming from human-caused climate change.
“The team tells me they’ve received nearly 1,400 comments as part of the review of the draft management plan,” said Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore. “And it, to me, is emblematic of how much Vermonters care about the management of our public lands.”
Many of those comments raised questions about the 12 commercial timber harvests the plan authorizes across 1,900 acres, about 10% of the total forested land in the unit, and the fact that it opens the door to additional commercial harvests on another 2,400 acres.
That includes 74 acres in a paper birch grove in the northern part of Elmore State Park, which is slated for harvest in 2033.
Scientists with ANR say these timber harvests will be designed to diversify stands of trees that are dangerously close to being a monoculture, in age and species and size.
That’s thanks to the fact that some 80% of Vermont’s forested landscape was clear-cut around the same time, during the 19th and 20th centuries.
And while the exact details of how those timber harvests will work have yet to be finalized, the plan does not propose any clear-cuts or smaller “patch cuts.”
What does it take to make a forest resilient?
As climate change brings more severe and frequent storms to Vermont, changes the growing season, and makes it easier for invasive pests and pathogens to survive through the winter, foresters at the state say it’s important for forests to be as diverse as possible — in species and age.
They and other scientists say a diverse forest is less vulnerable to the onslaught of a pest like emerald ash borer or a pathogen like beech bark disease. It’s less likely that all the seed-bearing trees in a stand will be taken out by a major windstorm if those trees are diverse.
Many of the proposed harvests are at lower elevations, in places that were more recently logged, and state regulators say working with commercial loggers makes this kind of work cost effective at scale.
But some members of the public — and state lawmakers — have asked whether this approach of using commercial timber harvests on state lands still makes sense in light of climate change, raising concerns about the potential trade-offs involved — for water quality and carbon storage, among other things.
Zack Porter, with the environmental nonprofit Standing Trees, which advocates for a halt to logging on state-managed lands in Vermont, had hoped ANR would scale back or eliminate those commercial harvests.
He says by his reading, very little changed between the draft plan and the final document — despite public comment calling for updates.
He applauded ANR setting aside more than half the land in the unit for no logging, but said that leaves the other half vulnerable.
“More often than not, the lands that we’ve protected in Vermont as across the entire U.S., are those lands that have lower timber value,” he said. “And so we have protected those areas with high ecological value at higher elevations, but we’ve sacrificed those lower elevation lands … and this is a golden opportunity with the Worcester Range to not do that. And the state has failed to do so.”
In response to public comments on the draft version of the plan, state regulators set aside just over 300 additional acres, including the Worcester Woods Wildlife Management Area, to be allowed to grow old with minimal intervention.
Additionally, they say the plan now formally requires addressing climate change — both the forest’s ability to adapt and to store carbon — be a central goal for any management in the area.
New commitments to protecting biodiversity
In 2023, Vermont passed the Community Resilience and Biodiversity Protection Act (Act 59) — a law that commits the state to conserving 30% of its land mass by 2030, and 50% by 2050, with requirements that some of that land be set aside as “ecological reserves,” with very little human disturbance.
What sorts of land will count as conserved under Act 59 is still being ironed out, but ANR Secretary Julie Moore says this plan for the Worcester Range aligns with those broader commitments.
“Over half the Worcester Range Management Unit falls into that ecological reserve category, and the remainder is designated as parts either of the natural resource management area — so those are really where the timber harvests would occur, but also where recreational activities take place — and then biodiversity conservation areas, where we know a little bit more is needed in terms of management intervention to achieve our forest health objectives, but we’re sort of managing towards, ultimately, in all likelihood, adding them to that ecological reserve category,” she said.
As Moore said, state regulators and land managers at ANR have set aside just over half of the state land in the Worcester Range for very little if any human intervention.
The goal here, Moore says, is to allow forests to grow old. And, she says, where timber harvests are proposed, state regulators hope doing this work will make those stands of trees healthier, setting them up to be managed for old forest characteristics in a future plan.
“We’re also really being intentional in working to manage our forests to be more resilient, looking for ways to ensure that forests are positioned as best as they can to adapt to invasive pests, pathogens, to erratic climate events like significant storms or straight-line wind events,” Moore said.
But Porter worries that the impermanent nature of this sort of designation could change in a future plan for the area, leaving all the carbon those trees pull out of the atmosphere vulnerable to disturbance.
A matter of timing
He — and others — have also raised concern about the timing of the plan’s release.
ANR is in the midst of rulemaking to overhaul and formalize its policy for writing plans like this one, and for incorporating public feedback about them.
Additionally, Vermont is just starting to refine its conservation commitments under the new Community Resilience and Biodiversity Protection Act.
“They’ve raced ahead with finalizing the Worcester Range plan for absolutely no reason, except that they wanted to get this done before there was any other public pressure for them to change course,” he said.
More from Vermont Public: Can we make Vermont's forests more like old forests, faster?
But Moore says the plan was underway before either of those processes started, and that bumping it back would delay other plans for state lands that have expired and need to be updated.
Additionally, she says a dramatic increase in the number of people recreating in the Worcester Range in recent years has created an urgent need for parking upgrades and new policy about how to manage increased pressure from backcountry skiing and mountain biking, among other uses.
The plan is effective immediately. Meanwhile, the deadline to provide public comment on ANR’s draft Lands Management Planning Rule is Nov. 1.
ANR has also started the process of developing a new Long Range Management Plan for northern Vermont’s 7,951-acre Jay State Forest, and there is a public hearing about that process Oct. 15 at the Montgomery Town Hall.
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