Harvard Forest Study Calls For Protecting 70% Of New England As Forest

A study released by a team of New England scientists is calling for protecting 70% of the region in forest. WNPR’s Nancy Cohen reports the researchers from the Harvard Forest say this would still allow for a significant increase in development.

In New England, the landscape can be read like a history book. Early settlers cleared the forests for farmland in the 1600 and 1700s. But by the mid 1800s, the farms began to be abandoned for industry and the forests grew back. Today in Connecticut, about  55% of the land is forested. In Maine it’s 85%. But ecologist David Foster, the director of the Harvard Forest, says in the past decade or two that reforestation is starting to be reversed.

“We now are converting forests to developed uses. And so that’s actually eating the amount of forest, reducing the amount of forest and its fragmenting and perforating, if you will, the forest by putting developed spaces, roads, houses and other kinds of buildings in the middle of our forest landscape.”

The Harvard Forest study calls for protecting 70% of the landscape in forest across New England while still allowing for a doubling of the amount of development that we currently have. The study calls for most of the forested land to be managed for things like recreation and timber harvesting, but a small amount would be kept wild and protected from human impact.

For WNPR I’m Nancy Cohen.