Clearing the Forest: a Commentary
It is a place most of us take for granted every day on the Vineyard, a vast, heavily treed place embracing 5,200 acres in the ecological heart of the Island. It is the last unbroken piece of rare sandplain habitat left in the world and the single largest tract of conservation land on the Vineyard. It provides critical protection for the Island aquifer which is its water supply. And yet for a long time, the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest has been the forgotten stepchild of the environmental movement.
Today, after years of neglect, funding shortages and quiet infighting among the state environmental agencies that are responsible for its stewardship, the forest has been tagged for a new and exhilarating project. The newly organized Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation has confirmed that it will solicit bids from logging companies to clear some 500 acres of red and white pine plantations from the old forest.
The project still must go through a public bidding process, and the commonwealth's conservation and recreation department has trained its sights on logging companies that specialize in forest clearing operations on Islands. Who even knew that such a specialty existed - but of course it makes sense - the sheer logistics of clearing wood from 500 acres on an Island will require special expertise, not to mention an array of equipment not normally associated with logging, such as barges and tugboats.
In 1908 the forest was established as a reservation for the heath hen, a subspecies of grouse that had become extinct everywhere except on the Vineyard. The heath hen faded from existence on the Vineyard in 1932, and that was when state officials began to plant tracts of red and white pine in the sandy scrub oak barrens that formed the heartland of the Island. There was some wisdom to the planting at the time; the pines were intended to create a lumber industry, but the market never materialized, and more to the point neither did the forest. Planted well south of their range, the red pines fell victim to a fungus that left them dead or dying. The white pines became infested with a weevil that stunted their growth, drastically reducing their market value for board lumber.
Today the red pines are a blighted ruin, good only for pulp. The white pines may have some minor market value that could induce a logging company to come to the Vineyard to do the work.
In the venerable old forest, vestiges of the Great Plain still remain, and along with them an array of rare plants and animals that are considered key elements in the Island's ecology, among them bushy rock rose, sandplain gerardia and the purple tiger beetle.
The tangled mess in the state forest today threatens these rare species, and there is another threat that is just as dire and certainly more immediate: the prospect of uncontrolled outbreaks of fire. Respected leaders in the Vineyard's volunteer firefighting community have been sounding the alarm about this for some time.
Five years ago Harvard University published a report with a plan to save the forest; the vision would return the forest to its natural state through a massive clearing project coupled with other measures like controlled burns.
Now it appears that the state is ready to carry out the vision articulated in the Harvard study, and if it all comes together the project will be fascinating to chronicle, a story for Islanders to tell for generations to come. It could well become the environmental story of the decade as the old forest takes center stage, no longer a forgotten stepchild in the conservation movement.
There is much still to learn and absorb in the weeks and months ahead - 500 acres is a tenth of the forest and that's a mind-boggling number of trees - but at the outset one word comes to mind at the news of this new plan:
Finally.