Brave Little State is Vermont Public’s listener-powered journalism podcast. Every episode begins with a question submitted by our audience. Today, a question about a centuries-old industry in Vermont:
“Is logging really as bad for the climate as some people say it is?”
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
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Abagael Giles: I want to talk to you about carbon. Atomic number 6 and a big reason why our climate is changing so fast.
Scientists are clear that humans are behind this change by burning fossil fuels and, in the process, releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
Now, scientists say to slow down these big changes to our climate, we need to stop burning things, and in turn, stop releasing so much carbon.
And they also say we need to deal with the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere — by actually capturing it and taking it back out of the air.
The good news is that we already know the best way to do this. I bet you’ll see it if you look out your window. Or, if you’re listening to this outside, there’s a good chance the answer to taking carbon out of the atmosphere is all around you.
I’m talking about trees. More specifically, forests. They take carbon dioxide out of the air as they grow, and trap it in their wood, their bark, their branches, roots and leaves.
However, we humans also need trees for a lot of stuff that requires cutting them down: We sit on furniture made of wood inside of houses made of wood. We burn wood for heat. We use wood to make telephone poles and violins and baseball bats.
And there’s a catch: When we chop down trees for lumber, much of the carbon they’ve been storing — it gets released back into the atmosphere very quickly.
This raises some difficult questions. Like, how much should we harvest wood from our forests here in Vermont? And how much should we import from other places?
All this has been on the mind of today’s winning question-asker.
Their question?
Burgess Brown: Is logging really as bad for the climate as some people say it is?
Abagael Giles: That voice, by the way, does not belong to our question-asker. It’s Brave Little State producer Burgess Brown. You won’t hear from our question-asker directly in this piece. That’s because they work for the U.S. Forest Service, and they’re worried that attaching their name to this story would compromise their job security.
What we can say, though, is that their job is very relevant to their line of curiosity. They actually worked on a plan to manage a roughly 70,000-acre stretch of the Green Mountain National Forest in Rutland County called the Telephone Gap Integrated Resource Project.
The plan has been underway for several years, but recently, it has attracted a lot of controversy.
Protesters: Hey hey, ho ho, this logging plan has got to go!
Abagael Giles: One of the most controversial parts? It proposes logging.
Joe Gagnon: This forest we’re talking about really needs, it needs attention, it needs good attention, that’s my, my say.
Zack Porter: It's because of your advocacy a record number of public comments were submitted on the Telephone Gap project. (cheering)
Abagael Giles: The plan has already gone through multiple iterations in response to this controversy. The latest version proposes planting trees and restoring old growth forests and fighting invasive insects, too. But some environmental advocates say it still doesn’t go far enough to protect carbon-rich old forests.
As of the time we’re publishing this story, we’re waiting to find out whether this latest version — including that logging proposal — will finally be approved.
Telephone Gap is not the only forest management plan that’s generated passionate debate over climate in recent years. Recent plans for forests in the Camel’s Hump Area and Worcester Range have sparked similar conversations.
And the Trump administration recently issued an executive order that calls for a blanket 25% increase in timber harvests on federal lands. The order also tries to limit the public’s ability to weigh in on those decisions. It’s unlikely this will have a big impact on the Telephone Gap Project, but Trump’s order could have big ramifications for how the Green Mountain National Forest is managed in the future.
Amid all this, Our question-asker feels like those working in land management could do a better job of communicating to the public about where the science ends and where values come in.
Now, because our question-asker is actively involved in making some of these decisions, this is where we leave them behind.
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A sawmill through the years
Abagael Giles: If you were a farmer in Vermont in the mid-20th century, you’d probably spend a lot of your summers milking cows and growing grain. And during the rest of the year, you might shift focus to other endeavors — like sugaring in the spring. And logging in the winter.
Joe Gagnon: For a little extra money, pay their taxes.
Abagael Giles: It’s a way of life that’s faded, but one that Joe Gagnon remembers well.
Joe Gagnon: Between chores, they get out in the woods, cut a wood pile for them to keep warm, and cut a few logs to sell for extra money.
Abagael Giles: When he was younger, Joe milked cows in the summers, logged and sawed and trucked wood in the winters. And in the 1950s, he opened a sawmill: Gagnon Lumber in Pittsford.
At the time, there were at least six mills in the Rutland area and plenty of businesses working in wood — making furniture and toys, even crutches.
Joe Gagnon: Newton Thompson, they had a sawmill. They sawed white birch. Made paintbrush handles out of it years ago. That all disappeared.
Ken Gagnon: — Moved. It got to be more automated. And then the other one was Vermont Tubbs. That was another company, made snowshoes —
Abagael Giles: That’s Ken, Joe’s son, who took over the sawmill operation back in the 1980s and expanded the business from largely cutting wood by hand, to the more automated operation I’m here to see today.
There’s a big lumberyard with stacked logs and an open-air mill full of saws and conveyor belts.
Joe and Ken tell me that, over the years, they — and other sawmills — have had to scale up to survive, like dairy farms have.
Joe Gagnon: Because you got some farmers that are milking, you know, couple thousand cows. Never heard of that, years ago. (laughter)
Abagael Giles: And much like dairy farms, sawmills have had a hard time staying alive because of that.
And also because of climate change itself. Loggers work in the woods when the ground is frozen. And as winters warm, Vermont’s local industry frequently faces long periods where work is impossible.
These days, Gagnon’s is the last mill of its size in operation on the Route 7 corridor between Hinesburg and the Massachusetts border.
Gagnon Lumber has a tagline. It’s on their website, and also their business cards. It goes, “Come see what we saw!”
So, I’m not going to end my visit before asking them to show me around.
Ken Gagnon: We can, we can step up there —
Abagael Giles: They’re cutting eastern hemlock, which Ken tells me was harvested nearby:
Ken Gagnon: That noise you're hearing is our de-barker. And what that does —
Abagael Giles: After they strip the bark off, they pull the logs into the mill itself.
Ken Gagnon: His main job is to take the round log and turn it into a square timber.
Abagael Giles: Ken is pointing to a guy in a little box framed in safety glass who’s pulling levers and using a laser to find the right place to cut the circular log into a big, square timber, of the sort used for timber framing.
The process continues until the tree has been transformed into wooden planks.
Abagael Giles: (Yelling over machinery) It must be such an art to cut these!
Ken Gagnon: It’s a bit of a learning curve!
Abagael Giles: Yeah.
Ken Gagnon: Yeah yeah. You know. That's the chipper.
Abagael Giles: For each of the logs that enters the mill, Ken says 70% or more becomes lumber.
The remaining 30% goes into byproducts. At Gagnon’s, that’s either wood chips that get trucked to a paper mill in New York state, or chips for the wood boilers that Middlebury College and the Mount Anthony Union School District use for heat
The Gagnon mill is medium sized – they cut about 2 million feet of wood per year. By Ken’s estimate, that requires about 30,000 acres of forest — about half the area of the Telephone Gap Project.
Ken Gagnon: We buy most, all of our logs primarily from Rutland, Bennington counties and Addison, which is probably a circle of 40 miles.
So most all of my wood that I cut I deliver it within less than 100 — 100 mile radius, maybe a little less or a little more. So in the scheme of things, it's pretty close to home.
Abagael Giles: That means the carbon footprint of shipping that wood is relatively low. But when you look at the wood sold in Vermont overall, it’s not all so close to home.
Ken says a lot of the lumber that houses are made of these days comes from very large mills in Canada or Northern Maine. The same is true for the two-by-fours you see at Lowe’s or Home Depot or even at your local hardware store.
Some wood even gets shipped all the way to China to be made into goods like furniture and plywood or be pressure treated, before it’s sent back to New England.
Sam Lincoln: It is frequently processed in another state or country, versus Vermont. We just don't have the production capacity here. It's left.
Abagael Giles: Sam Lincoln is a logging contractor from Randolph. And he’s a former deputy commissioner of Forests, Parks and Recreation for Vermont.
Sam Lincoln: A lot of our lumber in Vermont — your two-by-four, two-by-six pine boards, the things you’re going to build with — that’s traded on a global market.
Abagael Giles: Why don’t we do more of the processing in Vermont?
Sam Lincoln: Generally, as the global economy has opened up to free trade, the lowest cost producer is rewarded, and Vermont, you know, very generally, Vermont has not been a low cost place to do business.
Abagael Giles: The globalization of the forest products and logging industry is part of why there isn't a straightforward answer to whether logging is always bad for climate change.
Because, yes, cutting down trees does release carbon into the atmosphere. Which, on one hand, is bad for the climate.
But even if we don't log in Vermont, we still use wood in Vermont. A lot of it.
And if that wood gets cut or processed out of state, getting it here is going to require burning more fossil fuels.
That makes it more complicated to measure the impact that logging here in Vermont has on the carbon going into or out of the atmosphere. Luckily, a lot of research has been done to crunch the numbers on this exact thing.
A survey of scientists
This question, about the impact of logging on the environment, and what to do about it, it’s the kind of thing where if you ask three different scientists, you’ll get three different answers. Which is exactly what happened while I was reporting this story.
Bill Keeton: Hi, I’m Bill Keeton. I am a professor of forest ecology and forestry at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at UVM.
Abagael Giles: Bill is THE forest carbon guy in this neck of the woods. And when it comes to carbon, there are two big ways forests fight climate change. That’s carbon sequestration and carbon storage.
Bill Keeton: Both are very important. So, sequestration refers to carbon uptake.
Abagael Giles: Basically, as a tree grows and photosynthesizes, it takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Then, it uses that carbon to make its wood and bark and leaves and roots and the soil around it.
Bill Keeton: Sequestration, the uptake, is really only one part of the equation, the other part is how much carbon is stored in vegetation, in the soils.
Abagael Giles: Scientists call this “carbon storage.” The carbon that a tree sequesters stays trapped inside for as long as it lives — and a portion of it can persist for decades in the forest long after it dies, in downed trees and soil. As forests age and become more complex, the amount of carbon they store grows.
Bill Keeton: We need to think of that storage as basically a reservoir of carbon that is kept in vegetation and is not in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. It's the benefit that a forest is providing to us by having already sequestered carbon for a couple of centuries, maybe.
Abagael Giles: Older forests store the most carbon. But Bill says research shows that younger forests actually take carbon out of the atmosphere the fastest.
Remember the controversy over the Telephone Gap proposal in Vermont? This is a big part of it. It’s not that people for or against the project don’t care about climate change — it’s that different groups of people have different ideas about the best way to address it.
For example:
Bill Keeton: There's, there’s a trade off between wanting some forests that are younger and growing rapidly and sequestering carbon at a high rate, and wanting also older forests that are storing a lot of carbon in their biomass.
Abagael Giles: Because of past logging, we have very few of these carbon-rich old forests in New England. And Bill says we would do well to protect every acre we have left.
More from Brave Little State: Does Vermont Have Any Patches Of Old Growth Forest?
But there are many different approaches to forest management: timber harvests, protecting places as forever wild, restoration work. Bill, who actually consulted on the revised version of the Telephone Gap Project, says we would be wise not to put all of our eggs in one basket — one approach — in the face of such an uncertain future due to climate change.
Bill Keeton: I'm not an advocate for any one approach. My view is that we need all of these, and we need what, what I would call a portfolio of forest carbon options, and each one offers different benefits, each one carries different risks.
Abagael Giles: But making the decision about how to manage a given patch of land, a given forest — this is where the science begins to end and our values do indeed start to show up.
Tony D’Amato: It's really hard to talk about it, you know, without the values piece on top of it.
Abagael Giles: That’s Tony D’Amato, also a forestry professor at UVM.
Tony D’Amato: Forests almost are inherently complicated because of all the values that we get from them, you know, and so much of it does intersect with us as who we are as humans.
Abagael Giles: Tony studies forests that face a lot of logging pressure, and he looks for ways to do that logging so that it will help forests adapt to climate change and absorb more carbon.
He believes we need to harvest wood — maybe even more of it than we do now — and do more of that harvesting here in Vermont, where we can regulate it well, and make sure it’s being done sustainably.
Tony D’Amato: If that wood is harvested in Vermont, and then processed in Vermont, and then, you know, ultimately sold to you in the store in Vermont, that wood from the stump to the mill, you know, to the, you know, the store, like, there's a lot less fuel being expended to, you know, get that to you as a consumer.
Abagael Giles: Tony points out that right now, about 70% of New England’s demand for wood is met by Northern Maine, from large swathes of land owned by big companies or investment firms that are beholden to a bottom line.
And this is true even though Vermont actually produces more wood than Vermonters consume — we just end up exporting a lot of it.
Tony D’Amato: We just don't own our consumerism. We don't own our impact.
Abagael Giles: Tony argues that from a carbon perspective, Vermont saving all the trees it can while consuming wood from elsewhere has limited benefit.
But that’s not the view of every scientist.
Richard Birdsey: It's a pretty complex issue. There's a lot of factors.
Abagael Giles: Richard Birdsey is an author of two reports by the International Panel on Climate Change. He’s also a PhD forester and former Forest Service employee.
He tends to feel that, unless we humans absolutely have to, we should walk away and let forests grow old on their own, without intervention.
And he sees public lands like Telephone Gap as the best places for us to do this.
Richard Birdsey: If society wants to address the climate crisis, then forests should be left to grow in areas where they're not excessively threatened by disturbances like wildfire or insect epidemics. You know, that's the best approach over the next two decades.
You know, all the data points back to your very original question: Is logging bad for climate? Well, it certainly doesn't help.
Abagael Giles: For the past two decades, Vermont has been losing forest, to the tune of 10,000 acres a year.
But here’s a key point: Logging is not the biggest reason for this loss. It’s actually suburban sprawl — basically, clearing forests for new construction outside of village centers.
Think: a single-family home on a few acres down a long driveway in the woods.
This is why the debate over how to manage Vermont forests is inherently tied to another issue facing the state: our major housing shortage.
Building more houses is going to take wood — so where should that wood come from? And how should those forests be managed? And where should those houses be built?
Here’s Richard Birdsey, again.
Richard Birdsey: And I think it's all those other values, is where a lot of these different perspectives come from. You know, people advocate for things that are important to them. I'm no exception. I like big old trees, and so, (laughter) you know, I like to see more of them. They're pretty scarce.
Something from scraps
Abagael Giles: The conversation about values doesn’t end with whether and how we cut down trees. It also involves what happens to the trees after we cut them.
Because, let’s face it: Vermonters do consume wood. And that doesn’t seem likely to change. In some cases, that’s because it’s not clear there’s a better material alternative for the planet (certainly not concrete or plastic or steel).
But, there are some things we can control — like what we make from the trees we cut down.
We’re going to throw one more statistic at you: When a tree is cut down in the forest, about half of the carbon stored inside is lost to the atmosphere fairly quickly.
And when that tree is cut at a mill, only about 70% of the log itself goes into long-lasting wood products like those used for timber framing. The rest gets turned into things like paper, wood chips and mulch, which break down and release carbon very quickly.
But what if there were a way to make sure the carbon in those wood scraps remained stored inside those wood scraps?
That was the goal of a recent construction project in St. Johnsbury.
Adam Kane: So this is the new addition, the Fairbanks Museum, the Tang Science Annex, and you can see the mass timber elements are kind of all around us here.
Abagael Giles: That’s Adam Kane. He leads the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury. I met him there during school spring break.
If you haven’t been to the museum, the main hall has these grand wood beams and eerie dark light.
Adam Kane: Um, so it has these big glue laminated beams that hold it up, that hold the structure up, and then the ceiling above us is what's called a cross-laminated timber panel, it’s a CLT panel —
Abagael Giles: Back in 2019, the museum decided to build an addition, to add new science exhibits. But instead of using the usual concrete and steel, the museum turned to another kind of material: called “mass timber.”
It’s a way of taking wood scraps, mixing them with very strong glue and creating panels that then get stacked to create very, very strong beams.
Adam Kane: We're looking at timber panels above us that are 25 feet long and 6 inches thick, you know, solid. And so that carbon in those panels is sequestered for the next century-plus.
Abagael Giles: Most of the wood scraps here came from Southern Vermont and New Hampshire. It’s a less carbon-intensive alternative to concrete and steel. It’s also fire-resistant and is much stronger than traditional wood.
The Fairbanks Museum addition was the first mass timber project in Vermont. And the museum was only able to do it — and use local wood — because it got money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pilot the technology.
Mass timber isn’t a perfect fit for Vermont’s primary construction needs. It’s really designed more for big industrial spaces or commercial buildings, like skyscrapers. It can be costly to use for housing. And because it’s so new, the supply chain is really complicated. The Fairbanks Museum had to ship the wood all the way to Alabama for it to be processed.
Lastly, the scientists we talked to for this episode say mass timber is only a good climate solution if we use it to harness the scraps from logging and milling. As soon as we start cutting down more forests for the express purpose of creating more mass timber, the carbon exchange doesn’t shake out in our favor.
At this stage, mass timber isn’t really a solution in New England at all. But maybe it’s the start of one. And as Bill Keeton described earlier, we need a “portfolio” of options when it comes to keeping carbon stored in wood — and removing more of it from the atmosphere. And we’re gonna need to get creative.
Abagael Giles: Alright, should we see what’s upstairs?
Catherine Morrissey: Let’s do it!
Abagael Giles: Back at the Fairbanks Museum, Brave Little State intern Catherine Morrissey and I take a walk around the new addition.
Abagael Giles: Um, Catherine, what are some of the things that you notice?
Catherine Morrissey: It's very light. The wood is all pine colored, very pretty.
Abagael Giles: I have to say, it looks really good. And I wouldn't even know immediately, looking at this wood, that it's made up of, like, many tiny little pieces.
Catherine Morrissey: Same. It just looks like normal slabs of wood. I thought it would be, kind of like, blended together. Like papier-mâché. But it's not. This just looks like timber.
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Credits
This episode was reported by Abagael Giles. It was edited and produced by Josh Crane, Sabine Poux and Burgess Brown. Our intern is Catherine Morrissey. Angela Evancie is our Executive Producer. Digital support from Zoe McDonald. Theme music by Ty Gibbons; other music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Special thanks to Katharine Servidio.
Brave Little State is a production of Vermont Public and a proud member of the NPR Network.
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