This commentary is by Rick Enser, who lives in Hartland.
As someone who recently retired from a career in natural resource management at a state agency, I can tell you that the new management plan for Camel’s Hump State Park and State Forest reflects a common and misguided approach that elevates money above public benefit.
In December 2021, the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources released the Camel’s Hump Management Unit Long Range Management Plan. One of the objectives of this plan is “to maintain and enhance the parcel’s ability to provide ecosystem services such as providing forest products, protecting soil and water resources, and providing recreational opportunities.”
This wording should concern Vermonters who thought the term “ecosystem services” meant something other than the provisioning of natural resources to satisfy human wants. Some might ask, “Aren’t ecosystem services things like nutrient cycling, waste assimilation, soil building, and carbon sequestration?”
So, what are ecosystem services? Let’s start with the basics.
An ecosystem is a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. Natural ecosystems make up the landscape of Vermont, the structure and species composition of each one determined by the physical characteristics of the environment, such as climate, topography, soil type and hydrology.
Ecosystems are typically identified by their dominant vegetation (e.g., grassland, shrub bog, deciduous forest) and further refined by regional subtypes. In Vermont, the Northern hardwood forest, comprised chiefly of sugar maple, yellow birch and American beech, is the widespread upland forest type.
The benefits of ecosystems are held in their inherent natural processes. All ecosystems function as complex webs of biodiversity, each organism contributing to the functioning of the system. Producers (plants) convert the sun’s energy to food that sustains consumers (animals), and decomposers return nutrients back to the soil to support more producers.
Remove too many pieces of the biotic puzzle and the system breaks down.
Ecosystem processes support all species on the planet, but it is the wants and desires of one species — ours — that have critically impacted the functioning of ecosystems by removing too many pieces. The results are the existential crises of climate change and biodiversity loss that we currently face.
Environmental economists explain the values of ecosystems in economic terms. Ecosystem processes become ecosystem services and are assigned monetary values, something everyone can understand. This process was initially accomplished in a 1997 paper titled “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital.”
The authors analyzed ecosystem services (nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, etc.) and goods (raw materials, food, medicine, etc.) and estimated their global value to be more than $18 trillion, at the time more than the value of global GNP.
Unfortunately, to simplify the analysis, goods and services were combined under the same heading (services) to get the total value; not factored in are the costs associated with the extraction of natural resources (goods). Logging, mining and drilling always result in the diminishment of an ecosystem’s capacity to conduct life-supporting natural processes. Cutting trees down reduces a forest’s capacity to sequester carbon, to support complex biotas, and to develop resiliency to disturbance.
Vermont’s forest once carpeted most of the state with trees aged several hundred years old and supporting complex biotic communities. Then, in the blink of an eye, nearly all of that forest was gone, and much of the biodiversity with it.
The European settlers who cut down those forests believed the New World was a gift from God, and with that belief they were justified in harvesting all the trees, slaughtering the wildlife, and committing genocide of the Indigenous peoples.
Today, we have curbed our assault on nature to varying degrees, but it will take several hundred more years to recover the full ecological potential of the former forest. Nevertheless, state and federal agencies continue to manage public lands for commodities, whether timber or game species.
Ecologist Aldo Leopold observed 70 years ago that “we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.” In the years since he wrote those words, we haven’t learned.
The Camel’s Hump long range management plan, like many plans concocted by government agencies to manage public land, is better described as a business plan in which ecosystems are treated as service and commodity factories and warehouses.
Commodity wildlife (game species) are more abundant in unnatural, young forests. Managers call it “early successional habitat,” a title around which a myth has been created about how the wildlife using this habitat is declining, and that we need to cut down trees in order to “create” more of this “young forest.” It’s a win-win for commodity producers posing as resource managers: Cut more trees, and produce more game for hunters.
Managers ignore the damage done when they do it. We can ignore the damage no longer.
For too long, the monetary value of forests in fulfilling the wants of a single species — humans — has taken precedence over the ecological value of forests in sustaining all species. It is time for governments to recognize their complicity in the abuse of nature and rethink the management of public land to most effectively address the climate and biodiversity crises.
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