Vermont
Green Mountain National Forest
The photos shown here are a celebration of autumn in southern Vermont.  At this time, health issues for nationally-owned forests in the Green Mountains are tied more to air quality, invasive and exotic plants, suburban  sprawl, and the encroaching hemlock woolly adelgid than to roadbuilding and chain saws.

Maple Circle, by Carol Harley In Vermont, according to the USDA Forest Service, the National Forest System  Lands consist of 376,000 acres. Inventoried Roadless Areas consist of just  25,000 acres. According to Forest Watch, "The volume of wood logged annually  from the GMNF amounts to about 1 percent of the total volume of wood logged in Vermont....In 1999, the logging-generated revenues provided by the US Forest Service to Vermont towns with national forest land amounted to only 2 tenths of 1 percent of the townsí total municipal and school budgets."

In the northeast part of the state, land has recently been set aside for  conservation. In March, 2000, The Conservation Fund and The Vermont Land Trust bought 133,000 acres from Champion International: 26,000 acres added to Silvio O. Conte National Wildlife Refuge; 16,500 acres as a gift to the Vermont Agency for Natural Resources; 5,600 acres held by The Conservation Fund and intended for transfer to the state depending of the availability of funding; the remaining 84,000 acres as working forests with easements to insure public access.

Fungi Circle, by Mieke Kohl. According to The Vermont Land Trust, "The sale of this property represents the last major holding of a paper company in Vermont, reflecting an industry trend to divest in the Northeast and invest in the southern United States and South America." Together with parcels in New York and New Hampshire it was the largest multi-state conservation project in U.S. history. This all sounds good for Vermont, but what does it mean for our southern  forests?

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