Ecological Forestry and Slow Wood
Perspectives from Around the Region
Editor’s Note: The topic of ecological forestry is deeply embedded in the vision of Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities. The time has come to really delve into the topic, and that is what we aim to do in this issue. Brian Donahue joins Tony D’Amato and David Foster in introducing us to ecological forestry and its myriad interpretations. Brian’s new book, Slow Wood, explores many of the implications of ecological forestry and asks, in particular, how we can thoughtfully procure the wood we need while caring for our forests. - Liz Thompson
Ecological Forestry. We’ve been hearing about it in the news, from our partners, and in these pages. I wrote about it in our first issue, as an essential part of our integrated approach to conservation. In 2024, Beyond the ‘Illusion of Preservation’ was published (and reported on here), bringing light to the importance of ecological forestry, along with protecting both Wildlands and Woodlands, and reducing wood consumption. New England Forestry Foundation, through a USDA grant, has implemented a large “climate-smart forestry” initiative. We’ve heard about the related Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Mitch Lansky has written about low-impact forestry. We’ve reported on Massachusetts’ 2023 Forests as Climate Solutions Initiative. Bob Perschel offered a poem about the humility that underlies ecological forestry, while learning about Europe’s Closer-to-Nature Forestry. And I’ve written about it in my new book, Slow Wood.
But what IS “Ecological Forestry”?
To explore that question, From the Ground Up asked Dr. Tony D’Amato—Director of the Forestry Program at the University of Vermont, an author of Beyond the ‘Illusion of Preservation’, and an author of the book Ecological Silviculture—to help assemble a group of practitioners to explain how they practice ecological forestry. Tony and David Foster offer framing essays to that collection, along with this one.
There is striking congruence among our contributors about what it means to practice ecological forestry, especially at the stand level.
Manage for diversity. Practice “worst first” thinning. Employ long rotations to grow high-quality timber and store carbon. Support regeneration through the creation of small gaps. Retain legacy trees, snags, and deadwood.
Many also comment on the need to extend the management for diversity to the landscape scale, creating a connected forest of different cover types and developmental stages, including both young regenerating patches and old growth.
Photo © Brian Donahue
Striving for an “integrated approach to conservation and community” is a central principle of Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities and From the Ground Up.
It is worth thinking about what that integrated approach might look like, if achieved. Ecological forestry would be the core element of such an integrated landscape, because it would cover the largest acreage. In our vision, the productive ecological forestry described in this forum would prevail over at least half of New England, maintaining a wide range of species. The trees in that forest would be mostly middle-aged or approaching maturity (as is true in much of central and southern New England today), but with younger trees filling gaps of various sizes, depending on the forest type.
Such a forest would provide baseline habitat for biodiversity without much need for careful planning or special efforts, but rather in the routine course of producing the wood we need. These practices could be tweaked by programs such as Foresters for the Birds, and targeted for particular species of concern on wildlife refuges. Alongside these productive Woodlands, 10–20 percent of the landscape would be occupied by Wildlands, protecting old-growth forests—or those moving toward old growth—and the special habitats they provide. A similar portion of the landscape would be devoted to sustainable farming, ideally relying mostly on perennial grasses (often mixed with trees)—which, with a little attention, would provide habitat for another important suite of open land species. A full range of biodiversity would emerge from ordinary management of forests and farms, with only a small part requiring extraordinary manipulation. Ecological benefits would mostly be embedded in productive use of the land—what many of us unblushingly call “good stewardship.”
Photo © Brian Donahue
This connects to the community benefits of the integrated approach, which are also frequently mentioned in these essays. The forest supplies the building material we need, obviously, but the authors also point to the importance of recreation, logging, and wood processing in sustaining rural economies. And that is perhaps the greatest challenge in practicing ecological forestry, as things now stand: It is not often profitable for forest owners.
That is hardly surprising; you cannot expect to take the extra care to internalize ecological and social benefits and compete straight up with more “efficient” resource extraction that doesn’t take that care. We began to address this conundrum in a previous issue, and some of our authors take up the question here—but at the moment, there is no good answer. In the long run, society as a whole will need to insist on and support these efforts, because they will not be adopted on a sufficiently wide scale otherwise.
“A full range of biodiversity would emerge from ordinary management of forests and farms, with only a small part requiring extraordinary manipulation. Ecological benefits would mostly be embedded in productive use of the land—what many of us unblushingly call ‘good stewardship.’”
In the meantime, given the world as it is, these authors tell us that the burden (and the satisfaction) of practicing ecological forestry comes down primarily to landowners—whether they be government agencies and nonprofit organizations dedicated to this mission, or community and family forest owners devoted to their land. Many of us know examples and cherish them—not (in these cases) for their wild beauty, but for the unmistakable signs of loving human connection with nature.
A Lesson from Pennsylvania
A few years ago I visited the Foundation for Sustainable Forests (see Annie Maloney and Guy Dunkle in this issue) in northwestern Pennsylvania, and Troy Firth took me to see one of his woodlots. It was a mixed hardwood stand on a lower slope, about 100 years since it had been heavily cut over. Troy acquired it half a century ago, and had been managing it by light-entry horse logging ever since, always cutting the worst trees first. The lot was filled with magnificent red and white oaks, sugar and red maples, black cherries, tulip poplars and a smattering of other species—all 100 feet tall, straight and broad all the way up. I grew up in western Pennsylvania and have spent the last 50 years walking and working in New England forests, but I never saw anything quite like that.
The lofty canopy was closed, but there was nothing “low grade” left to thin. I asked Troy what his plan was for harvest and regeneration. He shook his head and said he didn’t know—he didn’t have any plan. Just keep watching, and see what the forest told him to do next. He sure wasn’t planning to cut anything that still looked to be healthy and growing strong.
I don’t know if all ecological forestry can be quite as deferential as that. Many of us would be itching to cut some timber, make some small gaps, get some young growth going, create more deadwood. Maybe—but man, you should have seen those trees!
Personal Reflections: Slow Wood
Photo © Faith Rand
This issue of From the Ground Up is in line with my new book, Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests.
Slow Wood is about building a house from our farm woodlot. We cut “low-grade” trees—knotty hemlock for the frame, ceilings, and doors; over-topped black birch for finish flooring, trim, and cabinets; crooked cherry for curved braces, windowsills, risers and stringers; suppressed sugar maple for loft ladders and treads. The wood came from a larger thinning, part of ecological forestry as practiced by our forester, Lincoln Fish.
Slow Wood was written for tree lovers, like you and me. When we come home from a walk in the forest, it asks us to take a good look at our house. If the house is built of wood that comes from sustainably-managed forests (preferably not far away), then sitting by the fire is another kind of forest bathing, a way of being back among the trees. If the house is built of materials extracted at great environmental cost, no amount of forest bathing is going to get us clean.
Photo © Michael Lovett, courtesy of Brandeis University
The book goes on to argue that we can supply most of the wood we use from sustainably-managed local and regional forests, drawing from analysis in Beyond the ‘Illusion of Preservation’. There, we calculated that all of New England’s wood needs could be met by about half of our landscape (or 60 percent of our forests), with enormous social and environmental co-benefits, through the practice of ecological forestry. That is probably more acreage than is actively managed today, but also assumes more restrained cutting than what is now commonly practiced.
Ecological Forestry alone won’t save the world, but perhaps it can slow the damage, one woodlot and one wood-framed house at a time.
Brian Donahue is Professor Emeritus of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University, and a farm and forest policy consultant. He co-founded and for 12 years directed Land’s Sake, a nonprofit community farm in Weston, Massachusetts, and now co-owns and manages a farm in western Massachusetts. He sits on the boards of the Massachusetts Woodland Institute, the Friends of Spannocchia, and Franklin Land Trust. Brian is author of Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town (1999); The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (2004) and Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (2024). He is co-author of Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities (2017) and A New England Food Vision (2014).