Barren acres like this one, photographed in March in Crawford County, are being carved out of Hoosier National Forest in southern Indiana. The Forest Service says the logging is needed to make way for young oak trees. (Photo by Robbie Heinrich)

PAOLI, Indiana—When Jesse Laws rides her seven-year-old palomino, Roscoe, in Hoosier National Forest, she often steers him toward the tall pines. Needles carpet the trails, muting the clop of his shoes and shifting the feel of the air.

“The ground stays moist there, so it’s cooler and so quiet,” says Laws, whose great grandparents founded a saddle club in these woods about 30 miles north of the Kentucky border. “There is nothing more peaceful than listening to the breeze in a pine stand from the back of a good horse.”

But the tranquil evergreens Laws loves soon could disappear.

In two of the largest projects the U.S. Forest Service has ever undertaken in the historic Hoosier, the agency plans to log more than 9,000 acres, conduct prescribed burns on another 28,000 and build more than 27 miles of roads.?

The “Houston South” and “Buffalo Springs” proposals have engendered fierce local opposition, not only from horse riders and hikers but chambers of commerce, and elected officials, Republicans and Democrats alike.?

When added to the impact of two similar restoration projects already underway in adjacent counties, the “Oriole” and “German Ridge” projects, the Forest Service’s plans would transform about 18 percent of the Hoosier.

The contest taking shape in southern Indiana is part of a larger battle now being waged over the future of the national forests, the nation’s greatest reservoirs of forest carbon, in a changing climate. President Joe Biden has sought to protect mature and old-growth forests, but clearly his Forest Service is resisting the concept of preserving older forests as a strategic reserve of carbon, which some climate scientists have advocated.?

Last month, the Biden administration announced a plan for new regulations to enhance “climate resilience” in those forests. It was a follow-up to a first-of-its-kind inventory ordered by Biden that showed mature and old-growth forests make up 60 percent, or 112 million acres, of the forests managed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.?

But the Forest Service has more than 20 projects underway like the Hoosier plans that include logging or burning in 370,000 acres of those mature and old-growth forests, according to the Climate Forests Campaign, a coalition of environmental groups.?

The Forest Service, which is taking public comments through June 20 on what its new climate rules should look like, argues “restoration” and “vegetation management” activities, like the Buffalo Springs and Houston South projects proposed in Indiana, may be better in the long run from a climate change perspective.

“With predicted changes in climate, especially hotter, drier summers in the Midwest, Hoosier National Forest (is) more likely to experience wildfire and we must plan appropriately to have a fire-resilient forest in place,” the Forest Service said in written responses to Inside Climate News.

More than half of the stands in the Hoosier are 80 years old or older, and there has been a sharp decline in establishment of new ones, the Forest Service said in its assessment of the carbon impact of the Buffalo Springs portion of its Hoosier proposal.?

“If the Forest continues on this aging trajectory, more stands will reach a slower growth stage in coming years, potentially causing the rate (of) carbon accumulation to decline,” the assessment said.?

The plan is to make way for new oak habitat by clear-cutting 1,100 acres and otherwise culling mature trees the Forest Service says are less resilient and beneficial to the ecosystem, including maple, beech and pine.

But Richard Birdsey, who spent 40 years with the Forest Service before his retirement as a distinguished scientist in 2016, says, in effect, that the agency’s climate science in this instance is wrong. Such a fall-off in carbon absorption can take hundreds of years to unfold as trees die and decay. Middle-aged forests of the eastern United States would continue to absorb and store carbon over the next two crucial decades for staving off the climate crisis — if they are allowed to stand, he said.

“If you look back at what these forests were once like, presettlement, those areas had on the order of twice as much carbon stock as they do now,” said Birdsey, now a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. “It’s not like, all of a sudden these 100-year-old forests are going to start losing carbon. If left alone, they’ll grow in most cases to twice their age.”

Recent scientific papers Birdsey has co-authored show how protection of large-diameter older trees can help further biodiversity and other forest resilience goals, and how more robust forest conservation policy could help mitigate climate change. “If you harvest an older forest, it creates what’s called a carbon debt,” Birdsey said. “You’ve removed a lot of stored carbon, and in order to replenish that we’re looking at decades, if not centuries.”

Having worked in the eastern U.S. for the Forest Service, Birdsey is familiar with oak restoration like the agency proposes in the Hoosier. He said the agency may have reason to pursue such projects, but should not try to justify them on the basis of climate protection.

“There might be other reasons — let’s say for wildlife — for removing some of the trees and allowing some different species to grow,” Birdsey said. “But that has nothing to do with climate. And in a case like that, you just have to accept that it is not going to be good for climate.”

The case for cutting the Hoosier

The Forest Service’s Land and Resource Management Plan for the Hoosier, the guiding document for its current projects, was completed in 2006 — before the most recent science on older trees and carbon sequestration. It was also before rules changes under President Barack Obama that put more emphasis on community input and managing National Forests for recreation and other uses besides timber harvest.

Although the law governing the 154 national forests says management plans should be updated at least every 15 years, the average plan age is 22, with some dating back to 1983. (Congress now includes language in annual appropriations bills exempting the Forest Service from the 15-year requirement as long as it is acting in good faith.)?

The 2006 Hoosier plan stresses one tree above all others: the mighty oak, which dominates the landscape but is not regenerating young trees — a phenomenon recognized for decades in forests of the East. The hickory tree, oak’s partner in the deciduous ecosystem since the American chestnut was wiped out by blight in the 20th century, also is declining. The Forest Service says restoration of the oak-hickory ecosystem in the Hoosier is crucial to wildlife that rely on tree fruits, or mast, like acorns and nuts.?

Oak’s economic value clearly is a consideration for the Forest Service, which describes thinning and prescribed fire as methods of “timber stand improvement.” “The stumpage price for oak consistently ranks near or at the top among all commercial hardwood species,” said a 2014 Forest Service synthesis of studies on oak regeneration that also detailed its uses — for fine furniture, flooring, whiskey barrels, pallets and railroad ties.

The Forest Service, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, refers to the nation’s forests as “Lands of Many Uses,” but chief among them is harvesting timber. It sets targets each year for wood production and acreage cut, and employees are evaluated on meeting such goals. Although the amount of timber harvested from national forests has fallen from its peak in the late 1980s, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore has told Congress the agency is working toward increasing output by more than one third to 4 billion board feet per year — harvest levels last seen during President Bill Clinton’s administration.?

To meet those goals, Congress has given the agency authority to enter into “stewardship agreements” with outside groups that stand to earn revenue from timber sales and other management activities and are strong advocates for harvests. Regarding its plans for the Hoosier, the Forest Service said, “projects such as this are strongly supported by many conservation-focused groups and communities.”?

One of those supporters is the hunting group, the Ruffed Grouse Society, which entered into a 10-year contract with the Forest Service in 2019 to provide timber sale and forest management services throughout the eastern United States. It is one of many such wildlife groups pushing to increase habitat for game birds and other species through “young forest creation,” primarily by cutting older forest.

Due to the forest age and overcrowding in the Hoosier, the Forest Service says trees will have a harder time weathering climate change. Oak wilt, a fungal disease that is deadly to the trees, has been identified in small portions of the forest over the past six years, and an unprecedented insect outbreak occurred in 2020 — signs that the Hoosier is under stress, the agency says.

“The consequences of inaction will be ecologically dire,” the Forest Service said in written responses to questions from Inside Climate News.

And a key action that the agency is planning — covering more acres than logging — is prescribed fire.

“I could give you probably a six-foot high pile of scientific papers showing the strong relationship between fire and oak,” said Michael Saunders, professor in Purdue University’s School of Forestry and Natural Resources, author of some of the studies.

The Forest Service has partnered with academics, held symposia and compiled meta-reports on the fire prescription for oaks.?

“Oak needs canopy openings and needs fire and needs other things to be able to regenerate successfully and replace itself,” Saunders said.

Both Native Americans and early white settlers provided plenty of disturbance. They burned the forest repeatedly, usually to clear the land for agriculture. The territory that became Indiana, which was 90 percent forest-covered prior to the start of the 19th century, had only 4% forest cover left by 1900, according to a 2018 report by the Purdue-led Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment. Thick-barked oaks survived the fires, and thrived in the open spaces — even on north-facing slopes with less direct sunlight.

“We got a lot more oak back than probably we would have naturally gotten without that cut-over,? just because oak was the only thing that could handle all the disturbance we threw at it,” Saunders said.

Indiana’s forests now cover about 20 percent of the state, but most of that woodland remains in private hands. The Forest Service began buying abandoned land here and in other Eastern states during the Great Depression. Only after the lifting of a restriction requiring tracts purchased by the Forest Service to be 20 percent contiguous could the 200,000-acre Hoosier National Forest be established.

The Hoosier is now filled with stands of non-native pines planted 50 to 90 years ago through federally funded efforts like the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps to stop rampant erosion on bare, abandoned farmland. But the Forest Service says the pine plantations are less suitable habitat for wildlife and biodiversity than oak, and should be removed.

Also targeted are shade-tolerant species like American beech and sugar maple that have been regenerating instead of oaks and hickories.

Prescribed fire — in most cases, preceded by logging mature trees — reduces forest density and removes the competition. The projects will “improve the sustainability of the oak-hickory ecosystem” and “move the landscape toward historic conditions,” the Forest Service said in its statement of need for the Buffalo Springs project.

The Forest Service said it is looking to mimic Native American settlements in Indiana that date back to 12,000 BC. “Evidence suggests extensive use of fire by Native peoples for centuries and people have been on this landscape since nearly the last ice age, therefore our native plant and animal life evolved with fire and are adapted or tolerant of it at low intensities, which is what our prescribed fires are,” the Forest Service said. “Recent projects propose actions to improve the health and diversity of the forest to increase its adaptability and resilience to the predicted changes to climate, among other ecological objectives. We take a long-term view and plan for 100 years or more ahead.”

The Indiana Society of American Foresters, representing professional forest managers,? supports the Forest Service’s plan for the Hoosier. “Timber harvesting needs to be implemented at a scale large enough to address the myriad of current threats facing overstocking public forests,” said Edward Oehlman, the group’s vice chair, at a public meeting in April. It’s an “appropriate implementation” of the Forest Service’s 2006 Land Management Plan, which calls for increasing the amount of young forest to as much as 12 percent of the Hoosier. In the areas the Forest Service wants to log, less than 1 percent of the forest is less than 20 years old.?

The case against cutting the Hoosier

The power of Indiana’s only National Forest to bring the state’s residents together from across the political spectrum is demonstrated by this unlikely pair of opponents of the current plans for the Hoosier: J.C. Tucker, a member of one of Indiana’s most prominent Republican families, and Andy Mahler, longtime forest advocate, songwriter and food co-op operator.?

“People who live here love the county, and Andy and I both think it’s the most beautiful place in the world,” said Tucker, brother of former second lady Marilyn Quayle and father-in-law of one of Indiana’s two Republican U.S. Senators, Todd Young. “We want to make sure it sustains for generations.”

Tucker, longtime county attorney for Orange County, where most of the Buffalo Springs project would take place, says the plan should be “re-evaluated.”

“They need to reduce the emphasis on clear-cutting and logging, and have more emphasis on preserving the natural state of it,” he said. “If burning has to happen, it should be limited. What they’re planning is extreme.”

Mahler is more blunt in criticism of the Forest Service. “They are trying to convert the forest into a tree plantation essentially to promote the most commercially valuable species,” said Mahler, who, with his wife and songwriting partner, Linda Lee, lives in a cabin surrounded on all sides by the Hoosier. “Of course, they won’t talk about the commercial value. They talk about the wildlife and the mast and the birds and everything, but it’s really, really all about the money.”

Established in 1951, the Hoosier is among the smallest, youngest and most fragmented of the national forests. And yet the trees on this well-used land inspire passionate defenders who have shaped the course of U.S. forest policy.

In 1940, when a lumber company purchased a long-untouched family tract of hardwood trees in southern Indiana, local civic groups raised money to buy the land in one of the first community-led campaigns in the nation to preserve old-growth forest. Those 88 acres, called Pioneer Mothers Memorial Forest, are now part of the Hoosier and a National Natural Landmark, with trees nearly 300 years old and five feet in diameter — one of the few sites of its kind in the eastern United States.

In the 1970s, when unregulated off-road motorcycles were tearing up hiking trails and the fragile forest floor in the Hoosier, a career Forest Service employee, A. Claude Ferguson, turned against his own agency and joined environmentalists in a lawsuit to halt the damage. The case exposed agency officials’ diversion of Forest Service funds and efforts to silence Ferguson, and was an impetus for what became the federal Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. In 2005, after years of debate, the Forest Service adopted rules to manage off-road vehicle use throughout the national forest system.

Now, with impacts of climate change already evident, critics say the Forest Service is seeking to recreate an era that was anything but a healthy one for Indiana’s forests. “They’re trying to restore the forest back to the most degraded baseline that ever existed there,” said Jeff Stant, executive director of the Indiana Forest Alliance. “They always use the word ‘historic,’ so that the public will think they’re trying to go back to the way nature really was. But much of the dominance of oak-hickory forest in southern Indiana is an artifact of heavy rural settlement in the 1800s.”

The Native Americans whom the Forest Service says it seeks to emulate didn’t use herbicides like glyphosate — better known as Roundup — which the agency plans to apply on 2,700 acres in the two Hoosier project areas. And project opponents ask why the Forest Service isn’t protecting the mature trees of all species, since many will be lost to severe weather and other climate impacts in the years ahead.

“The tornadoes in December 2021 that flew in all the way from Arkansas created more (forest openings)] than the most ambitious silviculturist could imagine,” Mahler said. “We do not need to create more disturbance. We need to hope that our forests will be free from disturbance,? because I guarantee you in a time of radically altering weather patterns and extremes, Mother Nature will create plenty of disturbances across the landscape, including in our forests. We need to make sure we have as much standing as possible for future generations.”

A forest protecting troubled waters

At an April public meeting in Orange County, where dozens of residents spoke up in opposition to the logging and burning, a local tree farmer voiced support for the Forest Service’s plan.

“We have a golden goose in Indiana that’s putting out $10 billion dollars a year in economic activity, and a lot of that is because of oak,” he said. “We have a lot of oaks that are big and not many that are smaller. … Our oak trees are going to be gone in our lifetime.”

“We’ve got to feed the goose and we need to get more oaks on the ground,” he said, “and fire and management is a tool to do that.”

But today in Indiana, tourism generates more revenue than timber — about $13 billion a year, according to state officials — and local leaders see the Hoosier as integral to that business, and the reason has a lot to do with water.

The Forest Service touts its role as a national water protector and agency officials quote its first chief, Gifford Pinchot, as saying the connection between forests and rivers is “like father and son.” Since his time in the early 1900s, science has learned even more about how forests help regulate the water cycle and reduce the impacts of intensive storms — a particularly important function in an era of climate change.

Last fall, Forest Service scientists calculated 125.5 million people in the continental United States, close to 40 percent of the population, derive part of their drinking water from National Forest lands. Communities around the Hoosier are among the most dependent, on par with many areas of the West.?

That’s due to two water impoundments dug out by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — Lake Monroe, in 1965, and Patoka Lake, in 1978 — mainly to control flooding in the Wabash River basin. They are Indiana’s two largest reservoirs, together providing drinking water to 200,000 people and pumping tens of millions of recreation dollars annually into local economies.

The Houston South (pronounced “How-ston”) and Buffalo Springs projects would take place in the watersheds of the two lakes, which clearly are under stress from both pollution and climate change. At Lake Monroe, officials have issued recreational advisories every year since 2011 because of blue-green algae blooms. Caused by agricultural and other runoff and worsened by warming, the blooms can sicken people and animals. The Hoosier, which covers the steep eastern side of Lake Monroe, has been a critical buffer and filter of pollution.

“The trees themselves are holding moisture in the forest and creating an environment in which water is released slowly, rather than letting it run off quickly,” says Sherry Mitchell-Bruker, a retired Forest Service hydrologist who now is pitted against her former agency over its plan for logging and prescribed burning in the watershed.

Mitchell-Bruker, who worked in the Everglades and in the Sierra Nevada mountains before returning to her native Indiana to retire, started kayaking in Lake Monroe and quickly learned of its problems. She founded the nonprofit, Friends of Lake Monroe, seven years ago, and worked with local communities on a watershed protection plan finalized last year. But some of the partners in the project feared their work would be for naught if the Hoosier became a new source of runoff.?

Monroe County led a lawsuit against the Houston South project, and on March 29 won a federal court injunction blocking the Forest Service from the prescribed burning set to begin days later.

A year earlier, U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt, chief judge for the southern district of Indiana, ruled mainly in favor of allowing the Houston South project to go forward, with one exception: she said the Forest Service had failed to fully analyze the potential impact on Lake Monroe as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

In response, the Forest Service put out a 40-page “supplemental information report” in December to “clarify relevant portions of the existing project record.” But such brief reports, only acceptable for addressing new information or changed circumstances, couldn’t be used to avoid doing the kind of detailed analysis and consideration of alternatives that NEPA required, Pratt ruled.

The Forest Service has since withdrawn the report and is evaluating the decision. The agency would not comment on a possible timeline for Houston South while the matter is in litigation.

But the Forest Service has maintained that its low-intensity prescribed burns would be a “significant distance” from Lake Monroe and would not harm the reservoir. Silt fences, log landings and other best management practices would be in place to prevent erosion. Overall, the Houston South project “will restore a mosaic of healthy forest that will support diverse populations of wildlife and provide resilience to climate change,” the agency had said in its report. The Forest Service said it had more controls in place to protect the lake than Monroe County, which exempts agriculture from zoning ordinances meant to combat sedimentation.

Mitchell-Bruker — who provided expert testimony in the case — does not dispute that farm pollution contributes to Lake Monroe’s problems, or that local governments need to do more.? But she argues that the Forest Service has a major role to play.

“If you talk to a farmer, they’ll say, it’s the boats in the lake, and the people in the forest will say, it’s the farmers,” Mitchell-Bruker said. “The message we have been working very hard to convey is that it’s everyone, everyone in the watershed. All the small contributions along the way add up to a big contribution. And the Forest Service, with a huge amount of land, can have the most impact — the most potential for harm and the most potential for good.”

Monroe County, the home of Indiana University, is led by Democratic elected officials. But sentiment about Forest Service logging and burning is much the same in Republican-led Orange County, where the Buffalo Springs project would reach close to the banks of Patoka Lake, not only a drinking water source but a recreational center.?

“We have concerns about water quality, we have concerns about the fact that so many people use our forests and trail riding and hiking and all those different things that lend to commerce in Orange County,” said Richard Dixon, president of the county board of commissioners.

“We need every resource we can to draw people in and keep our county solvent,” Dixon said. “It’s just something that’s very, very important to our county to have those drawing cards, and we’re going to lose one if we just go in and, in my words, ravage that forest.”

With a draft decision on the Buffalo Springs project expected by this fall, the Orange and Crawford boards of commissioners, along with local chambers of commerce? and economic development partnerships and the local Farm Bureau joined in a March letter outlining their concerns to the Forest Service, raising questions about the legality of the plan under NEPA.

Republican U.S. Sen. Michael Braun, who knows the region well as a native of nearby Jasper, Indiana, has sought to play a mediating role between his constituents and the Forest Service. Braun, who announced in December he is running for governor in 2024, organized an unusual meeting in April in Paoli, Indiana, for local residents to air their concerns directly with Homer Wilkes, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who oversees the Forest Service.?

“Treating forest in a respectful way, it gives back in so many different ways,” Braun said at the start of the meeting. With a nod to the Great Smoky Mountains, 300 miles to the south, he said the hardwood forest of Indiana also was a unique ecosystem with much opportunity for recreation, education and conservation.

“I think you’ve got to look at the total value of a unique property like this, and listen carefully to the people that live around it and use it most,” Braun said.

Shade above, history below

Nearly 300 residents crowded the Orange County Community Center for the April meeting, many of them clad in bright orange t-shirts that read “Save Hoosier Forest,” and “Stop the BS Project.” Among them was Jesse Laws, whose great grandparents started the Orange County Saddle Club.

Laws can cover a lot of ground in the Hoosier on a horse, including in the neighboring counties of Crawford and Perry, where the Forest Service has been executing logging and burning projects similar to the plan for the Buffalo Springs area. Trails have been converted to gravel logging roads, and the clear-cuts are barren and hot.

“It’s really disheartening because you go from this beautiful, shady woods, and then you come out to a clearing and there’s nothing but stumps, or the tops of trees, left behind on the ground because they aren’t worth anything,” she said. “They leave a big mess.”

The Forest Service says that such sites eventually will be restored. “Regenerating the upland oak-hickory community is a multi-decade long, multi-step process,” the Forest Service said in written answers to InsideClimate News. “We have several sites that we believe with high confidence are developing as expected for the stage of treatment they are in.” The agency pointed to a recent study by a Purdue University graduate student that showed a 94 percent survival rate for oak seedlings at one research site in Perry County after a “shelterwood harvest” — the logging of most mature trees — followed by a prescribed burn. The site showed the planned shift away from moisture-loving species like the maple to the oak, and increased richness, diversity and cover of understory plants than it had before the treatments.

But it will be decades until such sites return to mature forest. To Laws, the Hoosier forest is already full of new growth and life.

“I’ve been riding on those trails my entire life and without fail, almost every time you ride through the big mature pines, you scare up deer or wild turkey,” she said. “As pines age and die, when they fall it creates a sunlight opening. Hardwood trees are growing up in these openings. There are many hardwood species growing in the pine stands.”

Robbie Heinrich has seen the same happening — native species replacing the non-native pines — in the portion of the Hoosier forest that borders his family’s 92-acre property in Orange County.?

“Those pine trees, they did their job,” Heinrich said. “Now they are at the end of their life and are not regenerating, and there’s about as many hardwoods as pines. Where pines have fallen, it is naturally being replaced with hardwood forest. It is returning to the condition it was in before there were white people here.”

Heinrich’s ancestors were among the settlers who first altered the Indiana Territory’s forests. The family property was purchased by his 10th great grandfather, Joseph Farlow, in 1811 — five years before Indiana’s statehood. The family still has Farlow’s sheepskin deed signed by President James Madison and received a Hoosier Homestead Award in 2016 for holding one of the longest continuously owned properties in Indiana.?

Heinrich, an engineer who works on electric vehicle projects in the auto industry, used a drone to photograph the agency’s oak restoration projects in neighboring Crawford and Perry counties.?

“It is horrific, what we’re doing today in Hoosier National Forest,” Heinrich said.? “When I drive through the clear-cuts and think, ‘Oh my God, this is what will happen to the public property next to my property that I love and where my wife and I want to retire,’ it makes me want to vomit.

“I hope it doesn’t come to this, but I will chain my happy ass to the top of a tree to stop this if I have to,” Heinrich said, noting that he finds common ground with the activists who stopped the logging of spotted owl habitat during the timber wars of the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. “I’ve been a self-proclaimed redneck all my life, and now have turned into a grassroots preservationist, because I am so upset that they won’t listen to us.”

Heinrich’s ancestors were among a group of Quakers who traveled and settled in the Indiana Territory alongside 11 Black families who were free citizens, but faced increasingly harsh treatment in the 1800s in the South.

A cemetery and a few stone remnants in the Hoosier forest mark the Lick Creek Settlement, which thrived for 50 years before Black families abruptly abandoned it after the start of the Civil War.

When 78-year-old Diana Daniels, a descendent of the Lick Creek settlers, first visited the site in the Hoosier forest with her family in May 2022, she cried.?

A teacher and education activist in Indianapolis, Daniels has researched the struggles of her ancestors — who had come to America as indentured servants, not slaves.

When Daniels recounted the story behind each of the stone tablets standing in the underbrush to younger members of her family — ”That’s your sixth great grandfather, that’s your fourth great grandfather” — she recalled the African American ceremony of “libations,” pouring liquid onto the ground while calling out the names of the dead.?

“I began to feel ??that spiritual connection, and it was like the graves were saying to me, ‘Thank you! Welcome back! Glad to see you!’” Daniels recalls. “I just broke down and started crying. It was just so much.”

The Lick Creek area is marked for prescribed burning in the Buffalo Springs restoration plan. The agency says it will establish at least a 30-meter (about 100-foot) buffer zone around cemeteries and burial grounds and take other precautions. Crews will cease work and call in a heritage resource specialist if they discover cultural materials or human remains, the Forest Service says in its plans. In addition to the 2,500 discovered sites like Lick Creek containing evidence of prior human occupation that have been recorded in the Hoosier, the Forest Service estimated there are probably 2,500 more sites that have yet to be identified. Most of the Buffalo Springs area has not been surveyed for historical sites.

After learning of the Buffalo Springs project and the surrounding controversy, Daniels called the Forest Service, which forwarded her the plan and more than 700 pages of analysis.

She said she understands the need to cut and replace dying trees — she’s done that on her own property — but her brothers were alarmed after reading the materials from the Forest Service.

“They said, ‘This is terrible. We shouldn’t go along with this,’” Daniels said. “But I said wait until we get down there and see what they’re talking about before we hop on any bandwagons.”

The family plans to visit the gravesites again this summer, and she hopes to learn more. She would like to see a true memorial established in the Hoosier that tells the stories of the settlers and the struggles they faced, where children can learn a nearly lost but important part of history.

“The people that can help us do that are Orange County, and the Forest Service,” Daniels said. “If we all could come to the same table over that same vision, boy, it would be a powerful team.”

In the footsteps of the buffalo

But at the moment, there’s mostly strife and division over the future of Hoosier National Forest.

At the public meeting in April, Heartwood founder Andy Mahler crumpled a poster-sized copy of the Buffalo Springs plan in front of Senator Braun and USDA Undersecretary Wilkes. “If I could burn this, I would, but burning pollutes the air and warms the planet,” Mahler said. “You are not going to destroy the forest of Orange County, the last best forest in the Midwest … the best forest remaining in the state of Indiana.

“We need this forest for recreation, for water quality and for historic and cultural preservation,” Mahler said. “We need it for biodiversity and we need it for carbon sequestration. The Hoosier National Forest is going to be protected. It’s either going to be protected by the Forest Service, or it is going to be protected from the Forest Service.”

The Forest Service, which sent no representative to the April meeting, maintains that the projects it is planning are the best hope of maintaining a healthy, resilient Hoosier Forest for the long term.

“We understand that some feel that no forest management is the best path forward,” the Forest Service said in written responses to Inside Climate News. “However, the science tells us that on the fragmented forested landscape of the Hoosier National Forest, this strategy is counter-productive to the broader goals of building and maintaining healthy forests that we all share.”

But at its core, the dispute over the future of the Hoosier isn’t over that science, but over whether there is time to execute such an extensive overhaul of the forest. “The problem is the idea that you can sacrifice the short-term for the long-term in this day and age, with climate change and all the ecological crises we’re seeing right now,” said Mitchell-Bruker, the former Forest Service hydrologist who has studied the climate impacts on Lake Monroe. “We have to ask, ‘What is the impact going to be in ten years?’”

At the end of the April meeting, opponents of the Forest Service project sang an original ode to forest preservation. “The Song of the Buffalo Springs” lamented the “long-gone” chestnut tree and the buffalo that once roamed here by the thousands.?

It was the trampling of these American bison as they migrated for thousands of years that created one of the area’s beloved historical features: the Buffalo Trace, a trail as wide as 20 feet that was followed by early pioneers. Hundreds of loaded wagons could pass through what is now Orange County in a single day. The route brought Daniels’ ancestors to the area along with other Black settlers of Lick Creek and the Quaker ancestors of Heinrich.

But now, homes, farms and other development covers most of Buffalo Trace. Indiana State Highway 56 was built over part of the route. “Today, the Buffalo Trace is fading into obscurity,” says the Forest Service website, and a sign at a Hoosier trailhead calls it “Indiana’s Forgotten Highway.” Indeed, the only remaining portions that can be seen are within the Hoosier National Forest, in an area now marked for prescribed burning and logging.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Timm Martin points out areas that are part of the Jellico Vegetation Management proposal to clear cut and log on 10.000 acres inside the Daniel Boone National Forest. (Photo by Jared Hamilton)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. ?The story is part of Deforestation Inc., a global investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

WILLIAMSBURG — Brandon Bowlin learned of the U.S. government’s plan for clear-cutting in the southernmost mountains of Daniel Boone National Forest only a few weeks after the hard summer rains of 2022, when the earth slid off a mountain beneath a slope he had once logged.

Since age 14 — when Bowlin first held a chainsaw — he has harvested timber in these woods. But they’ve also been his hunting grounds and refuge. It’s a place where he has come across oaks so wide that three men couldn’t join hands around the trunk, trees that witnessed history before the United States existed and could live well into the future.

Bowlin, 37, and his wife, Charity, bought a home nestled beside this forest last year, hoping the land and lush mountains would be a legacy for their teenage children. Now, they could inherit a front row seat to one of the largest and longest-term logging projects ever proposed in the Daniel Boone.

The U.S. Forest Service’s plan, unveiled in October, is for logging, much of it clear-cutting, and the use of herbicides in nearly 10,000 acres over the next 40 years — a project that would spread over roughly half of Jellico Mountain and surrounding peaks on the Tennessee border.

Bowlin is now one of hundreds of residents of Kentucky’s Whitley and McCreary counties begging the Forest Service to abandon the idea. Their pleas bring up the tragedy that looms over the Jellico logging conflict — last summer’s floods and mudslides that killed 44 people in neighboring counties of the Appalachian Mountain range — a disaster residents view as inextricably linked to wanton extraction of both coal and timber.

“The slides all have one thing in common and that’s at some point in the past 10 years and even less in some cases, the mountains above them [have] been clear-cut!” Bowlin wrote to the Forest Service of last year’s deadly landslides and other earthen collapses he has witnessed in woods near the proposed Jellico logging site.

The Forest Service says it will study landslide risk along with other impacts in the environmental assessment of its so-called “Jellico Vegetation Management” proposal that’s due in June. But if officials follow past practice, that analysis will not make more than a passing reference to the most profound environmental issue raised by the Jellico project — the loss of forest protection from the ravages of climate change.

A growing body of scientific evidence makes clear that forests have been a critical buffer against global warming, with mature and old-growth forests storing an outsized amount of carbon dioxide. President Joe Biden acknowledged the “irreplaceable role” of forests in reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in an April 2022 executive order. He directed the Forest Service to conduct its first ever inventory of mature and old-growth stands in National Forests, with an eye to creating new policy protecting them.

“If you compare the map of North America in 1620…with America today, you’ll see how much we’ve devastated our forests,” Biden said at the time.??“From the Atlantic Coast almost to the Mississippi River was heavy forests, and we took it all down over those years.”

And yet, even while the Forest Service proceeds with its mature and old-growth census — due in April — the agency has more than 20 logging projects planned or underway on 370,000 acres of older forest around the country, according to a tally by the Climate Forests Project, a large coalition of environmental groups. In a slew of those projects—particularly in the eastern United States—the Forest Service is seeking explicitly to reduce the amount of mature forest on its lands—including in Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky.

Finding meaning in a forest

Bowlin admits that his longing to protect the Jellicos may seem, in his words, “bipolar,” since he has worked in the private land surrounding the forest all his life to cut trees down. “I love logging,” he said. “It’s in my blood, but I have a lot of conservationist in me.”

When Bowlin was growing up, he always thought he’d be a coal miner like his father and grandfather. But his grandfather introduced him to a neighbor who was cutting trees near the mines.

Trees could cause problems, especially at the mouth of the mines. Bowlin’s first job was to preemptively cut the trees around a mine so that endangered bats that migrated to the area in spring would not nest where they’d put themselves in jeopardy and get the mining operations in trouble with regulators.

Working in the woods suited Bowlin. “When you’re a kid, as a deer hunter, the first time your dad or your pap turns you loose and says, ‘Okay, you can go on your own today,’ it’s like a rite of passage…,” he said.

These days, his wife teases him because he comes home from hunts with photos and video more often than with deer. For example, there’s “Patches,” a doe he has named because of the scars on her right shoulder and hip, where she must have been once grazed by a crossbow. He has seen her come back year after year with new fawns. He talks to her, feeds her corn and swears that she recognizes the sound of his truck.

“A real true hunter has also got to be a conservationist because if you go out and kill everything, you have nothing for the next year and the year after that,” Bowlin said.

Although the Forest Service never built trails in the Jellico mountains, Bowlin often hikes, hunts and fishes in the woods beside the national forest. The landowner, Timm Martin, has built 17 miles of trails over the past 25 years and Bowlin helps Martin steward his acreage. Timm’s wife, Theresa, calls him “part of our family on the land.”

The Martins came to love the Jellico mountains from a completely different perspective than Bowlin. Timm was a tech entrepreneur and Theresa was an investment banker living in northern Kentucky near the Ohio border when they decided to seek out a more peaceful life. They crossed the country in an RV, looking at sites out West that were expensive, hot and dry, but Theresa saw a plot for sale back East in a landscape they knew and loved—the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky.

It’s plenty moist. Timm marvels at the moss that seems to grow on every stone of their farm on Little Wolf Creek—part of more than 2,700 acres of riparian corridor the Forest Service estimated to cross the Jellico mountains. Two rare freshwater ray-finned fish, the Cumberland Darterand the Blackside Dace, found nowhere outside these streams in the Cumberland River system, are on the federal endangered species list. More than 55 inches of precipitation has fallen in six of the past 12 yearsat the closest station in the Mesonet, Kentucky’s extensive local weather monitoring system. By one criterion, that would be enough water to make the Martin’s woods a temperate rainforest if the summers weren’t so hot.

Meeting with the Forest Service

The November consultation with the Forest Service started with a prayer, which isn’t common for public meetings run by federal agencies. But this session was organized by community members.

The Martins had met with the local Daniel Boone National Forest officials as soon as they learned about the plan to log the Jellico area, and asked them to explain the project at a public session.

One of the Martins’ neighbors on Little Wolf Creek offered the blessing: “…Have everyone listen and gather all the knowledge that is needed, Lord,” she said. And Theresa, who ran the meeting, offered her own plea: “I want you to join with me in the faith that this democratic process that we are all a part of is going to matter.”

Tim Reed, the district ranger, explained that the “treatment” plan came from an evaluation of the forest’s current condition compared to the desired condition set out in the Forest Plan for the Daniel Boone, which was last updated in 2004. That plan does set goals for developing a network of old-growth areas in the forest, but stresses achieving a balance of age classes.

“We don’t want it all mature. We don’t want it all young,” Reed said. “We want to balance so you have some diversity out there.”

Jim Scheff, staff ecologist for Kentucky Heartwood, argues that the plan will fail to achieve the Forest Service’s stated goal of diversity, in part because it treats all trees it considers mature—trees that are more than 80 years old—as the same. Scherr’s own graduate research, carried out in Kentucky national forests, showed profound differences between stands of 80-year-old trees and those that are 140-years-old or older, which truly begin to show old-growth characteristics—the structural diversity that is key to old growth forests’ biological diversity.

The Jellico plan calls for logging in stands where Kentucky Heartwood’s expert has identified trees more than 250 years old.

On a recent walk through the area proposed for logging, Scheff pointed out forest management work that should be done there. Some stands are overrun with a rapidly growing invasive species, Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), which secretes chemicals toxic to surrounding plants and can quickly dominate native species.

Kentucky Heartwood said the invasive species apparently became established in Daniel Boone National Forest after past logging, and managers of the Jellico plan clearly are concerned the problem could worsen. The Forest Service’s own research indicates that logging is a major driver of Tree of Heaven spread, with one study suggesting managers should wait six years before logging after efforts to eradicate the persistent weed tree.

At the November meeting, some residents said they would not oppose selective logging at some Jellico sites. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it,” said Johnnie Baird, whose late father was a forester. “He select-cut 300 acres over a 20-year period and you couldn’t tell the difference at the end from when he started.” He pointed to the wall map with the Forest Service’s “proposed treatments” for the Jellicos. Yellow splotches meant clear-cutting; pink indicated harvesting that would leave as little as 10 percent of the forest behind to be cut later; and orange marked areas where 20 percent would be left for later logging.

“You will never see a mature tree back in here again,” Baird said. “I guarantee it.”

Despite the different colors, Bowlin said 70 percent of the project was technically clear-cutting, with small temporary reserves of trees left behind.

Pat White, who has been judge executive of Whitley County, its highest elected office, since 2008, comes from a logging family, and said he knows residents are concerned. He learned forest management from his father, who learned it from his own father’s management of the woodlands surrounding his farm.? “He cut timber from it three times in his lifetime, because he select-cut every 20 or 25 years, taking prime trees and making room for others to grow,” White said. “If you clear-cut, then it’s 80 or 100 years or longer before you can get anything else from the property. I don’t think there’s any wisdom in that. My dad would describe that as robbing the next generation.”

But the decision appears to be an economic one for the Forest Service. “They get the biggest bang for the buck,” said Furnish, the retired Forest Service deputy chief.? “It requires the least amount of investment for them to prepare the sales, and it’s the easiest thing for the logger.”

Forest Service research conducted in the 1980s in the Appalachian Mountains showed that because of the higher costs to extract timber, “treatments” that left 75 percent of trees standing did not provide sufficient revenue to be commercially viable. The volatile timber market has had many ups and downs since then, but the Forest Service still calculates that clear-cutting generates more timber with less labor.

At the public meeting, John Hull, a forest management specialist at Daniel Boone, explained that the agency also planned “intermediate treatments,” such as non-commercial thinning, removal of dead trees and other clean-up in the Jellico mountains. But he said, “The harvest is the main thing. It helps pay for all these other treatments.”

Loss of trees leaves slopes vulnerable to extreme weather

People who live in the valleys below the steep Jellico mountains are worried about different climate impacts than the ones that are the focus of many scientists. Their concerns are not about how many metric tons of carbon storage could be removed, but the loss of shelter from storms.

“It looked like a war zone,” said Jonah Neal, 21,? who with his church, Christ the King, in McCreary County, organized a haul of donations to last summer’s flood victims. Even though theirs is one of the state’s poorest counties, they ended up with four truckloads of contributions to fellow Kentuckians who had borne the brunt of the flooding, landslides and mudslides last July and August. The National Weather Service said 14 to 16 inches of rain had fallen in a four-day period, an amount “historically unheard of.”

Everything looked normal during the hour and a half drive to the flood zone, until they exited the Interstate, said Neal, a student of ministry and political science at nearby University of the Cumberlands.

“As you went into the valley, you could literally smell it,” he said. “You couldn’t see it, but you could smell it. And as you came on into town, then you saw the massive piles of people’s stuff, dead fish, ruined everything.”

The area around the Jellico mountains was spared the worst of the storms, but a microburst pummeled a corner of Whitley County near the Martins’ farm. Theresa was stranded away from home for three days. Six inches of rain fell in two hours before their rain gauges overflowed. The creeks raged and soil slid down the mountainside. “The rain washed so much sediment into Jackson Creek that places that used to be waist deep are now ankle deep,” Bowlin said. Water rushed with enough force to push over a nearby mobile home and dislodge a culvert from beneath a main county roadway, which collapsed.

White, the county judge executive, said the total storm damages amounted to about $1 million, and Whitley County has been working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to make the roads more resilient.

But Bowlin and other opponents of the logging project believe such efforts will be for naught if the trees are clear-cut from the surrounding mountains. The landslide that caused the most damage was directly across a valley from the Jellico project site. Although he cannot prove it, Bowlin said he believes the landslide resulted from the clear-cutting he and other loggers did in private forests higher up the slope eight years earlier.

They had followed the same Best Management Practices that the Forest Service now says it will use, and they received state officials’ approval for the silt fences they erected and trenches they dug to divert water and prevent erosion.

“But any time you disturb ground, you’re taking a chance for water to create a slide,” he said. “There’s adverse effects to logging, no matter how good you do it.”

Residents, steeped in the region’s history of logging and mining, raised technical questions for the Forest Service.

At the public meeting in November, the Forest Service soil scientist and hydrologist said they had not set a “threshold,” a limit on how much erosion would be deemed acceptable, since they had not yet determined how much erosion the project could cause.

“The top of my head just about came off,” said Debbie Moses, 64, a neighbor of the Martins who owns forest surrounded on three sides by the Daniel Boone, who had asked the scientists how they would determine an acceptable load of sediment from the logging. “That’s not the right answer. You can’t run the models and then decide what the threshold is going to be. That’s like the tail wagging the dog.”

Moses knows something about such calculations. She was among the first women to graduate from the University of Kentucky with a degree in mining engineering and received the school’s distinguished alumni award in 2017.

She often did environmental analyses both before and after mining operations in and around her native Whitley County, and she had a beef with the logging operations often operating nearby. A Congressionalexemption granted in 1977 let them discharge dredged or fill material into waterways without obtaining the permit under federal Clean Water Act that coal mining operations were required to have.

Moses said there already is a landslide on her woods—possibly from the rains last summer—and she fears the impact of the extensive logging the Forest Service has planned. “All that sediment, the tree branches, whatever—they’re going to end up in the creek, which is going to stop up with extra sediment load,” she said. ”My property will be a floodplain.”

Moses and her husband, Archie, used to walk in their forest, which had originally been his family’s land, almost every day.? “He used to say that it was his Prozac,” Moses recalled.

They had apple, walnut and cherry trees, and one year they picked 22 gallons of blackberries. “You could actually live off of that land if you had to,” Moses said. The couple considered raising freshwater shrimp or rice in the old mining ponds on the land but never got around to it. “We had big plans for up there,” she said. “The only thing we didn’t really plan on was him dying.”

Archie died 20 years ago at the age of 56, from a skin cancer that had been diagnosed too late.

Since then, she has refused numerous offers from timber companies that would like to log her land, she said, and her son feels the same way. “That property will be preserved,” she said.

The biggest threat to that vision is Daniel Boone National Forest’s plan for logging Jellico Mountain, right up to the boundary of her land.

Claudia Cotton, soil scientist for the Daniel Boone, told residents at last fall’s meeting that officials took the erosion concerns seriously. “We go to every single one of these units, looking for sensitive areas, areas that have slid, as well as all kinds of areas to protect,” she said. “We’re not taking this lightly at all because we understand how important these resources are to all of us.”

Yet Forest Service officials are moving forward with another large logging project where concerns had been raised about the landslide risk on steep slopes in the Daniel Boone about 50 miles northeast of the Jellicos. Documents obtained by Kentucky Heartwood through a Freedom of Information Act request showed that the Daniel Boone’s retired soil scientist, George Chalfant, detailed the risks of landslides in the area for Cotton and other current Forest Service officials.

In a November 12, 2020 email with the subject line “Coal Seams and Tree Roots,” he said he had inventoried more than 20 landslides in areas that had occurred in clear-cut stands of the Red Bird district of the Daniel Boone, where new logging was planned. All but three of them were associated with a coal seam. Such seams, which also run through the Jellico project area, create inherent weaknesses, which worsen when trees are removed.

“A live root network of a healthy timber stand increases soil strength substantially,” Chalfant wrote. “Slope stability problems often develop after timber harvest on steeper slopes where much of the soil strength is provided by tree roots. As roots decay after harvest, in particular clear-cutting, their value diminishes rapidly.” He said half the tensile strength of roots is lost two years after harvest, with 90 percent lost within five to 9 years.

But Cotton and her colleagues, after inspecting one of the landslides themselves, concluded it was an anomaly, caused in part by an unusual amount of rain. “Precipitation was higher in 2018 and 2019 in this area compared to the preceding eight years,” they wrote in the project’s soil analysis.

Annual precipitation at the weather station that report cited has been above average in each of the three years since then. Since 2011, total annual precipitation in Kentucky has averaged 7.4 inches above the average from 1895 to 2020, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s environmental information center.

But the Forest Service never asked whether the abnormal weather pattern could be part of a trend. Climate change was “not carried forward for detailed analysis,” the Forest Service said in its environmental assessment paving the way for more than 3,800 acres of logging, including removal of up to 90 percent of trees in some plots, in the south Red Bird district of the Daniel Boone. That project was approved on January 19, 2021, President Trump’s last day in office.

The Forest Service told Inside Climate News that in the upcoming Jellico project environmental assessment, climate change and carbon storage impacts will be analyzed in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. In January, the Biden administration reinstated guidance for agencies to incorporate greenhouse gas emissions into such reviews—a directive that had been suspended under Trump.

But the Red Bird project is moving forward, at least for now. Kentucky Heartwood and other environmental groups have filed suit to block the logging, and proceedings are pending in federal court.

Wildlife groups join with industry to push for “young forests”

An audience member who remained silent at the community meeting over the Jellico logging plan later filed one of the only letters in supportof the Forest Service’s proposal out of more than 300 public comments submitted to the agency at the end of last year. His organization is also managing the timber sale in the Red Bird district for the Forest Service, and he applauded the plan for a similar project in the Jellicos.

Nick Biemiller, forest conservation director in the Southern Appalachians for the Ruffed Grouse Society, wrote that his organization “commends the Forest Service on their efforts to restore young forest habitat at biologically significant scales.” Biemiller even suggested additions to the project, including clear-cutting stands of eastern white pine and tulip poplar.

The Ruffed Grouse Society is more than a hunters’ organization dedicated to the small crested North American game bird with intricate, brown and white plumage. It has been a leader in an interconnected network of nonprofit groups and public agencies that have been advancing logging projects on public and private lands in the eastern United States in the name of creating “young forest.” The timber industry is seldom at the forefront of these efforts, but is helping to fund the drive, and reaping the benefits.

Advocates of the Ruffed Grouse—not endangered, but less common than it once was—are pushing to cut some mature forests down. The effort is buttressed by a large body of science showing that the grouse, the American woodcock and a number of other birds require forest less than 20 years old.

“Overall, what we’re lacking is forest diversity,” said Benjamin Jones, Ruffed Grouse Society president, in an interview. “Just like if you have a community of people that’s all one age, all one generation, that’s not a healthy population. And that’s the case with a lot of our forests, especially east of the Mississippi River.”

In the Jellico mountains of the Daniel Boone National Forest, only 3 percent of the forest is less than 20 years old, which is typical of many eastern forests, Jones said. He argues that not only does this make the forest more vulnerable to disease and pests that attack older trees, but it is the main reason for a recent rapid decline in ruffed grouse numbers.

The bird is listed as a “species of concern” by wildlife agencies in 19 states and is considered an endangered species in Indiana. A 2020 report by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies said the bird’s population has declined 71 percent since 1989 in the southern Appalachians. (It is notable that state wildlife agencies are funded by hunting and fishing license fees, and from a federal excise tax on guns and ammunition, with extra federal funding available for their efforts on behalf of “species of concern.”)

The big picture regarding the ruffed grouse is complex. It has an enormous range—from the Appalachian Mountains through most northern U.S. states and all of Canada. The International Union for Conservation of Nature reports that there were 18 million ruffed grouse in 2021, making it a species of “least concern.” The National Audubon Society, however, says the ruffed grouse is at risk of becoming threatened “without substantial intervention,” wrote Marshall Johnson, chief conservation officer at the nonprofit, in an email to Inside Climate News.

“Homogeneity of forest age and structure across the landscape threatens certain species that need a mosaic of habitats to thrive,” Johnson wrote.

But climate change is also a major threat to the ruffed grouse, Jones, at the Ruffed Grouse Society, agreed, and there is a need for more old-growth forest to draw down the greenhouse gases driving it. But he argues that at the same time, global warming makes creating young forest habitat just as important, to help species that rely on open woodland be more resilient to disease and adapt to change.

“The humbling thing of being in forest wildlife management is you need to think hundreds of? years ahead for things that clearly you’ll never see,” Jones said. “Yes, today’s 80-year-old forests, 300 years from now, will be 380 years old. We need to make sure that’s provided for on the landscape. At the same time, we need to make sure that same landscape has some young forest and some middle-age forest. This really is the art and science of forest management.”

The Ruffed Grouse Society is part of a larger coalition called the Young Forest Project, launched by the nonprofit Wildlife Management Institute (WMI) in 2012. WMI is funded in part by the nonprofit National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which counts among its many corporate partnersInternational Paper and Sierra Pacific Industries, another forest products company.

The academic researchers led by Kellett, of RESTORE, traced the history of the Young Forest Project and found a key development was when WMI got help with young forest messaging from the Indiana-based public relations and marketing firm, DJ Case & Associates, which focuses on natural resource issues.

The firm’s survey analysis showed that significant segments of landowners and the general public wanted to ban clear-cutting and valued beauty, benefits to water, air and biodiversity. So the PR professionals suggested two messages seemingly in concert with those values: A diversity of wildlife requires a diversity of habitats. And decreasing young forests have brought about declines in dozens of wildlife species that depend on it.

Those are now the key messages of the “Young Forest Project,” which includes the Forest Service and state agencies as well as timber companies like Weyerhaeuser, MeadWestvaco Corporation, Lyme Timber and J.D. Irving, along with wildlife groups like the Ruffed Grouse Society and Wild Turkey Federation. The Ruffed Grouse Society also has a young forest-focused partnership with Domtar, in which it reaches out to private forest owners on the benefits of habitat creation on their land. The Ruffed Grouse Society then helps connect those who are interested with forestry consultants and ultimately, with Domtar.

Domtar said it began entering into such partnerships because so many private forests were left in poor condition by previous harvests, and had become ineffective at either growing timber or storing carbon. “Our goal with RGS, Audubon [Mid-Atlantic] and other conservation groups is to provide landowners, whose stands that have been compromised, a market and incentive to be able to go back into those properties and conduct remediation work,” wrote Lucas Dillinger, Domtar’s certification manager, in an email to Inside Climate News. “For Domtar, it opens an opportunity to gain access to fiber on lands closer to our mills that might otherwise not be harvested again.”

The Ruffed Grouse Society also has benefited financially from its young forest partnerships.

According to its tax returns, the organization’s revenue nearly doubled in five years, reaching $6.6 million in 2021. It ended that year with a $2.6 million surplus, a turnaround from the $500,000 deficit it posted in 2016. Jones said that the growth in the organization’s budget allows it to pursue even more of the habitat creation that is its mission.

“Anything we ‘make’—quote, unquote—we’re just turning back into more conservation work,” Jones said.

Some of that work has advanced logging projects in national forests throughout the East.

In Vermont, the Ruffed Grouse Society raised $80,000 for a consultant to conduct the environmental assessment that paved the way for a 15,000-acre logging project in Green Mountain National Forest in March 2022. In Indiana, the Ruffed Grouse Society joined in a friend of the court brief in support of the Forest Service, which was being sued by local county officials who fear the area’s drinking water supply will be threatened by a 4,400-acre logging project in Hoosier National Forest; the brief was signed by a lawyer for the American Forest Resources Council, a timber industry group. And in Kentucky, the Forest Service signed a stewardship contract with the Ruffed Grouse Society to manage the 3,825-acre Red Bird timber sale in Daniel Boone National Forest.

There’s an incentive for Forest Service district rangers to enter into such stewardship arrangements with outside groups. Under the 2003 Healthy Forests Restoration law—an initiative of President George W. Bush—all money raised from such timber sales stays local to be used for other stewardship projects, instead of going off to Washington. Timber sales are not a big money-maker for the Forest Service overall—in the 2022 fiscal year they brought in $186 million—less than 2 percent of the agency’s $10.9 billion budget. But they can provide important local support at a time when the Forest Service has had to divert more of its budget to fighting wildfire in the West— 53 percent in 2021, compared to just 16 percent in 1995.

The Forest Service said it has made no decision on whether the Jellico project in Kentucky will be managed through a stewardship partnership, but the Ruffed Grouse Society is pursuing more collaboration with the Forest Service in the region. In his 2021 report on the society’s work in southern Appalachia, Biemiller said his team “has robustly engaged all eight? national forests” in the South and “is currently drafting several agreements with the [Forest Service] to increase the pace and scale of forest restoration and wildlife habitat improvement.”

Environmental advocates and scientists who oppose the logging projects in eastern national forests do not dispute the benefits of young forests for ruffed grouse and some other species. But some, including Kellett in his group’s research paper, argue that the population of the birds was unnaturally inflated 50 years ago, ballooning with deforestation of the eastern United States. Forest preservationists also argue that the young forest advocates, including the Forest Service, are missing the larger picture—the eastern United States already is a highly developed mosaic of landscapes: urban, suburban, rural, roadway and farmland.

Although trees and wildlife habitat have been lost in much of that landscape, 81 percent of the remaining forest in the East—341 million acres—is on private land and has no logging restrictions. The Jellico mountains abruptly become private land in Tennessee, with large areas owned by timber and mining interests.

“If you want to see young forest, just go down the interstate,” said Bowlin, who has been logging the area recently.

Currently, only 4 percent of U.S. timber is harvested from national forests, despite the pressure to cut more. Climate advocates argue that logging could be restricted in mature and old-growth areas of national forests without damage to the timber industry, since there is so much wood available on private land.

“What is largely lacking and truly rare is the more mature and particularly old-growth component of the forest,” Furnish said. “And this, I would argue, is the great crying need of the eastern national forest—to just restore the mature old-growth character of much of that Appalachian and New England hardwood landscape that disappeared with the onslaught of logging and other land use.”

But the large expanses of mature trees that make eastern national forests potential reserves of old-growth carbon also make it a prime target of the timber industry. Jeffrey Stringer, chairman of the University of Kentucky’s Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, says that in some locales national forests contain significant forest resources that local markets need. For example, national forests hold only 10 to 15 percent of the supply of white oak, a species in demand for bourbon whiskey barrels, but it is better quality and provides more volume per acre than what can be found on private land.

Stringer said the national forests also have a role in setting a high standard for environmental practices, which tend to transfer to private forest timber operations nearby, his department’s studies have shown.

“On federal lands,” Stringer said, “you have the opportunity of certainly protecting and preserving areas that need to be untouched, and you can define those. But you also have the opportunity to have areas where you can truly be managing for multiple uses, and you have the ability to showcase what good management is.”

An alternative to turning a forest into a crop

Timm Martin said he asked a former Forest Service official how the agency could undertake such a large logging project on the Jellico mountains and still live up to its “multiple use” mandate of balancing recreation and preservation with the use of the forest for timber.

The forester replied that the Red River Gorge, a popular rock climbing area in the national forest about 90 miles north, was the area for recreation. The Jellico area was managed for timber.

And suddenly, it became clear why there were no hiking trails, camp areas or any other amenities on the map of the Jellico mountains.

“They think of it as a crop,” Theresa Martin said. “A long-lived crop.”

Her husband? began to work on an alternative. “Jellico mountains deserve something better,” he said. He mapped out the area, including the private forest land like his and Theresa’s adjacent to the Daniel Boone. He talked to neighbors, gathered photos and wrote up a set of principles. He created a website around the idea showing Jellico’s greenery with the words “What if…?”

The “Jellico Mountains National Recreation Area,” he envisioned would preserve the forest but provide opportunities for hiking, hunting, rock climbing, horse-riding and foraging of mushrooms, berries and herbs. The forest would still be open and free to enter. But it would be managed for jobs and tourism “to transform Whitley and McCreary counties into an outdoor recreation destination that will be the envy of rural America.”

Currently, there are 40 National Recreation Areas across the United States managed either by the Forest Service or Department of Interior agencies. Typically, the areas allow more activities than National Parks do, but there is less extraction of resources than on National Forests.

“This idea may be a bipartisan political unicorn,” Martin said, because of its appeal to hunters, fishers, economic development advocates as well as environmentalists.

The Martins, the Bowlins, Neal and others working to promote the National Recreation Area idea hope to establish a basis for the community and the Forest Service to work together toward a better future for the Jellicos.

“We believe they genuinely care about the forests they manage,” Martin said of the Forest Service. “We’d like to come to some sort of collaborative, middle ground.”

Bowlin understands the need for compromises.

Once on a job, he was given the order to cut down a red oak that was more than four feet wide. He didn’t want to do it, but he did.

“We cut a slab off the butt of it, and sanded it and polished it, so that we could count all the rings,” Bowlin said. It was 340 years old.

“That thing has seen the Civil War, the Trail of Tears,” he said. “It could probably have lived another 300 years.”

Bowlin knows that he has changed the landscape around him, while other changes—like increasing severe weather in Kentucky—are beyond anyone’s control. But preserving the forest around Jellico Mountain could be a buffer against the changes, like climate change, that are transforming their world.

“There needs to be an area…that is protected and undisturbed,” Bowlin said. “If they start this logging project, my grandkids will never see what I’ve seen, and their grandkids will never see what I’ve seen.”

This article is part of “Deforestation Inc.,” a global investigation organized and led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in collaboration with 39 media partners. At climate talks in 2021, world leaders pledged to halt forest loss and degradation by 2030. During a nine-month investigation, 140 journalists from 27 countries delved into why and how nations are falling short of meeting that goal.