Our federal government, in the name of efficiency and cost-cutting, is completely reorganizing the U.S. Forest Service. With over 80% of our state covered in forest, New Hampshire needs to take this threat very seriously. The administration’s plans are ignoring the uniqueness and irreplaceable value of forests across the country, but here in our state the impacts of their budget slashes are enormous. The northern hardwood forests of the White Mountains are among New Hampshire’s great treasures. They cannot be administered by a bare-bones staff from two-thirds of the way across the country.
Perhaps even worse than the reorganization, our government is taking its chainsaw to experimental forests, institutions all over the country that study forests long term, and aim to optimize both a forest’s health and its productivity. Until now, we have had a network of approximately 80 experimental forests in the U.S. Now most are either in jeopardy or slated for closure.
These research centers have compiled decades of information, which in turn have led to invaluable insights. Now more than ever we need to understand the how ecosystems respond over the long haul to disturbances of many kinds.
Experimental forests have complete day-to-day, season-to-season records on everything from precipitation and temperature to the health of tree species when subjected to various forms of timber harvest, air pollution or introduced species not native to the area. New Hampshire is fortunate to have had two of these special places up until now, Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the heart of the White Mountains in Woodstock and Bartlett Experimental Forest near Conway.
With these forest research facilities under threat, I am grateful to senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan for a step they took recently to fight the administration’s ruthless and dangerous efforts. They have successfully averted the closure of Hubbard Brook. At present, the facility in Bartlett remains on the chopping block, which would be a loss of staggering proportions.
So, what is so special about these places? I understand now better than I did before. I just returned from a three-day visit to Hubbard Brook with a group of like-minded women from a national grassroots organization, the Great Old Broads for Wilderness. We call ourselves Broads, and we visit, learn about and advocate for protecting and preserving wild public lands throughout the country.
We learned that Hubbard Brook was established in 1955, and has made invaluable contributions to our understanding of how air, water, plants, animals and soil interact, in ways which were purely speculative until the data were collected and analyzed. Thanks to careful measurements here in the 1950s and 60s, the link between emissions from coal-fired industrial plants in the Midwest and the scourge of acid rain in our forests and lakes in the Northeast was proven once and for all.
Today, Hubbard Brook is a bustling hub for foresters, scientists, educators and students all trying to wrap their arms around the complex web of life and earth in this small corner of the world. Few if any other places house an entire library of water samples collected continuously for the past 70 years. Few if any have vast reams of data on insect, bat, bird and other animal populations, what time of year they arrive and leave, what they eat and how they are responding to climate change. Few if any have studied so carefully the cycling of nitrogen, carbon, calcium and other nutrients in the water and soil, and have the unique characteristics of these 7,800 acres which allow controlled experimentation on forest tracts within this watershed.
We Great Old Broads got to interact with scientists, staff members and students during our visit. We saw firsthand the vital importance of the work being conducted there. We were drawn under the spell of flowing streams, woodland blooms and the insects that seek them out, birds we heard more than we saw, and evidence of five of eight species of bats that have made their appearance there so far this spring. For me, it was especially magical to learn about and see the many varieties of moths and caterpillars — yes, those homely, overlooked creatures I’ve always batted away as nuisances at best — in their natural habitat. All of these creatures are important in the web of life, and seeing them there in their endless variety drove that importance home for me.
Seeing is believing. Knowledge is power. In the case of Hubbard Brook, acid rain studies of decades ago brought new understanding that led ultimately to revisions in the Clean Air Act. For now, those regulations have mostly reversed the deleterious effects of this toxic rain in New England.
The scientists at Hubbard Brook understand what our current administration is trying to forget. Pretending a problem doesn’t exist only guarantees that it will get worse. If you don’t ask the questions and measure what you are seeing, you will not be able to correct course. We all need to shout loud and clear that ignorance is not bliss, and that “efficiency” and “cost-cutting” are not the solutions to the challenges we face.
Millie LaFontaine is a retired neurologist who lives in Concord.