 Science and Technology Library here in the library, and so one of the co-providers for this program. I'm really excited to see you all here today. This kicks off our fourth season of the Sustainability Series, and I just want to inform you that we have these beautiful posters, and next month, Star Kelly from the Abbey Museum will be here on October 23rd. Discomfort and renewal, decolonizing the Abbey Museum, is a presentation she'll give. And then due to the holiday schedule this year, the November Series will actually be held December 4th. It's a Wednesday as well at 5.30, and that's going to be one climate future, and it's going to be the Sustainability Officers for both Portland and South Portland talking about their joint projects. Hope to see you then. In addition, there's a library and I love data, and so you'll see that there's this little form on some of your chairs, and if you'd be so inclined to fill it out and then you can just leave it in the back of the room and I'll collect them. I appreciate it. This is Jessica Burton, my partner in the series. Hi. Hi, it's Meg. I'm Jessica Burton with the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. We're an organization based here in Portland that seeks to facilitate joint projects and collaboration with land and water conservation organizations in this region, and we seek also to broaden the conversation about conservation. So this series is a really wonderful opportunity to do that. Working with the National Library is really fantastic, and we're thrilled to be here tonight, especially. Today we're going to hear from John Leibowitz, the Executive Director of the North East Wilderness Trust. I have a special place with this organization in my heart because I'm a very good friend of mine from college. Many, many years ago I was one of the, which is the first executive director, so I've been following it for a long time and it's really exciting to be here tonight. So John is the Executive Director, as I said, and this land trust, this Wilderness Trust, is focused exclusively on forever wild conservation. He has a master's in environmental law and policy and a JD from Vermont Law School. Prior to his current role, he and his family lived in Southwest Colorado, where he served as the Executive Director of the Montezuma Land Conservancy. John is an avid hiker and gardener, and he serves on the board of Vermont Parks Forever, and we're really happy to have John here with us tonight. So thank you all for coming in. Let's welcome John. Well, hello. Good evening, everybody. Thank you for coming out. Again, my name is John Leibowitz. I'm with the Northeast Wilderness Trust. We are based in Montpelier, so just a relatively short drive away from here. I want to start with a very brief background in history of the Northeast Wilderness Trust. We are the only land trust of its kind in the Northeast. We were founded in 2002, and in our short history of 17 years, we now conserve 35,000 acres of wilderness across the region. I say we're the only one of our kind because we are the only regional land trust that's focused on forever wild conservation exclusively. Every single landscape that we protect is a future old growth forest, which is a really neat way to think about our work. Wilderness has been in the news a lot lately as a natural climate solution, as an answer to the biodiversity crisis, collapse happening around us. In recent headlines that you may have seen would include, wilderness areas have the risk of extinction for plants and animals. That was from Science Mag just a few days ago. In the New Yorker from written by Northeast Wilderness Trust advisor Bill McKibbin, there was an article a couple weeks ago called Don't Burn Trees to Fight Climate Change, Let Them Grow. And perhaps as a little plug for ourselves, you might have seen our op-ed in the Portland Press Herald called Main Wilderness can help save us from climate and extinction crises. It is not a coincidence that wilderness has been in the news a lot recently. We find ourselves in ecologically troubling times. However, I think I believe that wilderness represents hope. And that's what today's presentation is just about. It's about hope, hope for our future, hope for wildlife, hope for our planet, and hope that it is really in our power to create the world that we desire. So I found wilderness myself working at a state park in Vermont called Elmore State Park. It was after college and I did not know what I was going to do with my life. And while at Elmore, I was very lucky and I happened upon a copy of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. I grew up in Miami, Florida, very far away from here. And while I spent a lot of time in the outdoors, primarily fishing and canoeing and the Everglades, the idea of wilderness, which is both a philosophical and kind of legal construct in many ways, and the need to conserve it was very foreign to me. On practically the very first page, it might actually be the first line of a Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote that there are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of those who cannot. From that day forward, almost quite literally, I became one of those people who can't live without wild things. And I suspect you chose to come here tonight, perhaps many of you in the audience tonight are of the same ilk. We are of course not reading essays tonight as Aldo Leopold did, but this presentation will celebrate some of the delights and dilemmas of those who too cannot live without wildness. Like many young people from the East Coast in search of big wild places and big mountains, I headed West and I found wilderness literally in that case. After Elmore and after graduating from Vermont Law School, I headed to Southwest Colorado. And I lived there for six years where I hiked thousands of miles in designated wilderness areas. This is the West Elk wilderness. Those rocks are called the castles. This is in Central Colorado, just north of Crested Butte. I floated a lot of wild rivers and really generally immersed myself in wilderness. But this presentation is not about the West. We are here to celebrate wilderness in New England and the Northeast. So by a show of hands, how many people in this room have ever had the thought or heard someone say, we don't have real wilderness in the East or that our landscapes are not as beautiful as those in the West? Anyone? Just a few. All right. Well, I hear that a lot in this line of work and people scratch their heads while they're asking, how are you a wilderness trust conserving wilderness in New England? So I want to make sure that we get rid of preconceived notions of what quote, unquote, wilderness looks like and what constitutes beauty. I don't know about you, but I am convinced and I live it every day that our wild places are every bit as unique, beautiful and important as those in any other corner of the world. Whether it's the Western United States, Patagonia, Asia, wherever, there are plant and animal species that live here and nowhere else. In our northeastern forests, the great northern forest may be one of the greatest assets in the fight against climate change. The wild corners of our home in New England deserve to be protected as wilderness just as much as any place in Colorado. This is a map of every road in the United States of America. Darker areas show higher concentrations of roads and blank spaces, and there are some, are places where there are no roads, roadless areas. So let's focus first on those big blank spaces on the West. In the West, you've got the Crown of the Continent ecosystem in northern Montana and central Idaho and the Greater Yellowstone. The central Sierra in California, the Cascades. And if you shift your eyes to the east, believe it or not, the largest wilderness, roadless area, east of the Mississippi is my hometown. Just west of Miami is the Marjory-Stoneman-Douglas wilderness area in the Everglades. And if you follow the east coast, one could imagine the Appalachian Trail corridor through the darkest part of that. It gets pretty bleak until you're pretty much within a day's drive of right here in Portland. Many don't realize that we have a lot of beautiful, wild, roadless areas in the northeast. We of course have the Adirondack Park in upstate New York, the spine of the Green Mountains heading east. We've got the White Mountains in northern New Hampshire. You can see Baxter right in the middle of your beautiful state standing out very clearly. And as you know, much of northern Maine is quite remote. At the Wilderness Trust, we are in the business of keeping the wilderness we have intact and also expanding those blank spaces in an effort that we call rewilding. So how did all those roads get there? Many know the history. In New England, we cleared upwards of three-quarters of the landscape, the forested landscape by the late 1800s in a race to produce lumber and clear land for agriculture. In Vermont, my home state, there were very few forests at all by the late 1800s below 2,000 feet. It was largely denuded of forests. These pictures are from the White Mountains of an era of logging and wide-scale timber use. And during that time, which really is not that long ago, the many wild residents of our home region were either eliminated from their ranges or found themselves on the brink. Who here has seen a moose in the northeast? All right, black bear in person? All right, getting a little more rare. Fisher? Anyone seen a fisher? Okay, good, great. How about a lynx? Okay, all right. So the recovery of northeastern forests as I started this speech in my mind is a story of hope, healing and rewilding. A hundred years ago, those species that many of you have seen, which is incredible and we should all be grateful for that, were rather uncommon and in many cases extirpated from this region. Even extremely common species like deer was largely absent from a lot of the landscape just a hundred years ago. Bill McKibbin, when speaking about the Adirondacks, says, and I quote, Perhaps the world's greatest experiment in ecological recovery, a place hard used a century ago and now slowly recovering, slowly proving that we're humanity backs off nature rebounds. And, end quote, the same can be said for Maine, Vermont, and much of New England, where people take the intentional step of backing off nature rebounds. And maybe someday, with patience and deliberate action to preserve wild spaces in roadless areas, cougars or catamounts, as many call them, panthers as I call them in Miami, South Florida, could return to the region. This is a diagram from Harvard Forest's wonderful report called Wildlands and Woodlands. The future, though we've seen nearly a hundred years of recovering forests, is uncertain again. For the first time in a century, our forests are shrinking and you can follow the time span from 1600s, heavily forested, 90% to the bottom when we log the most of our forests. Everything re-grew in those hundred years and you can see lots of little dips, but the overall trend is for the first time in a hundred years forests are disappearing again from New England. We lose almost 24,000 acres of a year, 24,000 acres a year in New England since 1990. And at this rate in the next 50 years, if things don't change, 1.2 million acres of forest today will be gone. The development that we have today focuses most in the suburban and ex-urban context. This is a photo from Martha's Vineyard, just to use one example of fragmentation in forests. In rural New England, while the pressure from home development may be less intense, there are other looming threats. This is an industrial wind farm in my neck of the woods in Lowell, Vermont. That's cutting a wild place in half for a good use, but nonetheless from a land use perspective, fragmenting the area. And of course that energy needs to get to market. This, where the arrow is pointing out, is a major transmission line that slices two of Vermont's largest roadless areas in half. And even the places that we know and love as protected wildlands are often surrounded by lands that are intensely managed. This is an aerial view of Baxter State Park on the right, and you can clearly see where the boundary is from a satellite. Likewise, the Allagash, a beautiful canoe trip, which I've done myself. It's a wild and scenic river, but heavy logging and industrial uses on both sides. That was the negative part of the presentation. Without proactive efforts to preserve existing wildlands and to re-wild impacted areas, we will again see our forests go out of balance and wildlife could disappear. This is a photo of one of our preserves in New Hampshire called the Binney Hill Preserve. I'll pepper these in throughout the slides just to show you what kind of work we do. This is along the Wapak Trail in southern New Hampshire. So let's take a stake of where we are today. Here is a map showing all conserved lands in the northeast. Everything that's light green is conserved, and this includes both public and private as of 2015. So this is about four years out of date, but relatively accurate. It's pretty incredible. That's about 25% of our region has been conserved. The trade-off or the flip side of that is that a vast majority of those forests are not wild. They're open to multitudes of uses. In many cases, motorized vehicles, logging, energy development, etc. Only a very small fraction of those are preserved as forever wild, so take a very good look and get that in your mind how much green, light green there is. The next slide is the exact same data showing areas protected as wilderness. So you can see there's quite a stark difference. This map shows forever wild preservation around the region, and this is mapped in a way that's called Gap 1. So in the way that some of these properties are mapped, you use Gap 1 for wilderness, Gap 2 is a step below, Gap 3, etc. So these are Gap 1 lands that is determined by some partners. And that equates to about 3% of our region is currently protected as wilderness. It's important to be very clear as I talk about wilderness and logging properties or the working forest. Many strategies are needed to fulfill a hopeful vision for a resilient future, and that includes well-managed forests, properly designed roads, good energy siding, improved agricultural practices, greener cities. But most of all, we really do need more wild places. This is not a black-and-white all-or-nothing approach. It's necessary to add more wild lands to the patch quilt of our New England landscape. And right now, as you can see from that map, wilderness is woefully underrepresented from a conservation perspective. So what is wilderness? Let's just get the definition out of the way. In a nutshell, it is land that is left to its own will. The etymological root of the word wilderness means will of the land. In a wilderness area, also sometimes referred to as forever wild or a wildland, trees grow old and die on their own time frames. Species can form multiple generations. Complexity increases year after year. And it's a place where nature, not humans, direct the ebb and flow of life. So that is how we define wilderness at the Northeast Wilderness Trust. And just a beautiful quote from Terry Tempest-Williams. Wilderness is not an extravagance or a luxury. It's a place of original memory where we can witness and reflect on how the world is held together by natural laws. We know what wilderness is, generally speaking. Why does Northeast Wilderness Trust exist? Why should we be protecting more of it? The forests of the Northeast, our northern forest, the northern forest, they are arguably among the most important lungs on our planet. And the next few slides are going to discuss a few of the reasons of why conserving wilderness is critical. So, first, is carbon storage. For many years, the thinking has been that younger trees absorb more carbon than older ones because their tree rings are wider in the early years. But the catch is that even as the width of a tree gets narrower, a tree ring gets narrower, its circumference grows, and this volume is newly stored carbon. And this is just to speak of the main trunk. When you calculate all of the large limbs and branches that come along with an older tree, it becomes clear how much more carbon is stored by old forests. And that's from Joan Malou from Nature's Temples. And of course, trees are just one part of the forest. There's also coarse woody debris in deadwood on the forest floor, standing dead timber. The soil itself adds significantly to carbon storage. And those things, standing dead timber, coarse woody debris, intact complex soil are some of the things often missing from managed forests. These are two graphs from recent peer-reviewed studies demonstrating the rate of tree carbon accumulation that increases with trees, the tree size. And then on the right-hand side, a chart that shows that old growth forests are carbon sinks, which is something that to a lot of people is new and exciting news now that it's been unleashed. We recently released a study, a synthesis of studies really, which was authored by Mark Anderson of The Nature Conservancy, who is on our board of directors. There's copies of it in the back for those that are interested in the carbon perspective of old and complex forests. When it comes to carbon storage, we now know unequivocally that the concept of over-mature forests is misplaced when it comes to carbon storage. We also know that old forests are wildly effective at capturing vast amounts of carbon. These and other considerations are in this document, and I highly encourage you to pick it up if you like it. If you're interested in the carbon component of old forests, we know that they're unrivaled in their ability to store carbon. They continue storing carbon as they age, and they accumulate more carbon in their complex and undisturbed soils. And in conclusion, peer-reviewed science is now telling us that old forests are carbon sinks, and this is really important as we figure out natural climate solutions that are scalable, effective, and cost-efficient for combating climate change. So the second why, if you will, is resilience. This is Mount St. Helens in 1980. It offers one of the clearest examples of why old, unmanaged forests are incredibly resilient. In 1980, when Mount St. Helens erupted, it wiped out most of the surrounding forest, and the general consensus was that the landscape would remain effectively dead for years. However, just three years later, a majority of the species, and by this study over 90% of plant species were already found growing again. How can that be after such an event? Well, the answer is the difference between an unmanaged, wild, and complex forest and forests that are not. So this is actually a picture of an eastern forest, but the lesson essentially is the same. So because the old forests surrounding Mount St. Helens were old, wild, and complex, it rebounded quickly. So-called old-growth forests, and I say that in quotes, are actually not forests that are filled with just old trees. Signs of an old-growth forest include trees of a variety of ages, a mix of closed and open canopies, standing dead wood, snags, as well as woody debris on the forest floor. All of this habitat diversity is what fosters biodiversity and resiliency. So the forests around Mount St. Helens were resilient because of their complexity. Their complexity literally protected life in the forest surrounding Mount St. Helens. And that complex forest structure, insulated seeds, wildlife, et cetera, and it rebounded quicker than anyone could have imagined. And in our age of climate change and uncertainty, this sort of resiliency is what we need. We need more of it, not less of it. And resilience, of course, is not only what is above ground, but also what is below ground. Fungal networks of old and wild forests, this is from a study showing fungal networks between cleared, mid-managed, and old forests or mid-aged forests, they increase. And with an increased below ground network, you see more resiliency. From this study, which is highlighted here, over time the connectance of species in the soil community increases. Carbon and nutrient uptake becomes more efficient the older a forest gets. The third of the five whys is biodiversity. Biodiversity is, of course, another and somewhat evident reason for setting wilderness aside. There are many examples of species that thrive in older and unmanaged forests, much as those that rely on specific habitats found more commonly in older forests. The photo on the top right is a old shagbark hickory, which provides fine habitat for Indiana bats. On the bottom right is a tip-up, which is just one great home for nesting winter wrens. These are two examples of what happens when time is allowed to pass in a forest. These things are often absent from younger forests. So what is equally interesting than these specific examples of species that thrive in certain habitats in less disgust is the idea of wilderness having an oversized impact for the actual size of the area. And that is for its role as a source. The concept was first discovered by a pair of birders in Illinois. They were documenting birds in a wood lot and noted that a number of species were present, but they weren't successfully breeding on their wood lot that they were studying. They couldn't figure out how are all these birds present here if few of them are successfully breeding. Where are they coming from? And as it turns out, there is a natural area nearby that many of the birds were nesting in, reproducing successfully, and that natural area functioned as the source area for the majority of birds that were being documented in the wood lot by the birders. So this chart just shows a few examples of specific species that have more breeding bird densities in old growth forests versus managed forests. So the fourth Y is spiritual renewal. This is right here in your beautiful home state. Northeast Wilderness Trust owns about 7,000 acres, which we call the Alder Stream Wilderness Preserve in Atkinson. Like all of our preserves, or I would say most of them. It's open to the public. This is one of our, it's an old picture as it's clear, one of our board members from many years ago canoeing on the Alder Stream. And since the earliest stirrings of an organized movement for conservation, advocates for wild nature have been talking about another experiential value in wilderness, and that is spiritual renewal. That feeling of quiet from the clamor that continues to grow around us year by year, this idea that immersion in wild nature brings spiritual and physical benefits is a constant in conservation literature. Think of Terry Tempest-Williams writing, Wilderness is a place of humility. Humility is a place of wilderness. Rachel Carson writing about how crucial it is to develop a sense of wonder. Or Wallace Stegner, who beautifully articulated that wilderness is good for our spirit, just knowing that it's out there, and you don't even have to go visit it. There are countless writings of John Muir and before him Thoreau and before him the poets of the English Lake District. And of course let's acknowledge that these early wilderness thinkers, both historic and contemporary, collectively help us remember a deeper and older way of thinking and being in a world that predates our notion and legal construct of wilderness. So carbon storage, resilience, spiritual renewal, these are a few of the reasons for why Northeast Wilderness Trust and others protect wilderness. And there are countless others. But there is the reason that I think is most important, and that these places like Eagle Mountain Wilderness Preserve in New York simply have a right to exist. It has intrinsic value and we don't need to place any additional value on it. And when we think of wilderness conservation through that lens, what we are speaking about, as Terry Tempest Williams states, is an act of humility. No matter the size, whether it's 7,000 acres in Alderstream, 700 acres in Vermont, 7 million acres in Patagonia, the intentional act of setting aside an area as wilderness is quite a radical one in which we as humans step aside and let nature and not us direct the ebb and flow of life. We allow it to be self-willed in every sense of the term. And to me, that is what wilderness is all about. It's about self-will. Personally, it's accepting that humility and recognizing the intrinsic value of these wild places, that's why I do what I do. So we've seen the reasons for why wilderness and what wilderness is. What does wilderness really look like on the ground in action at Northeast Wilderness Trust? How do we make it happen? Our standard prohibitions are actually quite expansive. They largely mimic the prohibition set forth in the Wilderness Act of 1964, though as private landowners we go a bit further. On our preserves there are no horses, no vehicles, no bicycles, no tree cutting, no agriculture mining or extractive uses of any kind. We also don't allow grazing or trapping. And these uses, so these are what happens in the surrounding landscape. This is an actual map of one of our preserves here in Maine called the Holland Research Forest. On the right is our preserve, and on the left is the surrounding forest. Obviously not all of those uses are going on there, but for illustrative purposes. So what's left in places like Holland? Quiet muscle-powered recreation, hunting of abundant prey species, and scientific research. A common piece of criticism that we get is how unmanaged forests will form gaps without cutting. Gaps in the canopy are really important for some species of wildlife and for a diversity of age classes. This is an example of that same forest in 2016. So this is Holland again, a little animation of a tornado going through there. A small tornado really blew through those woods, leaving behind a large natural opening. It took no management to do that. This is a small-scale demonstration and microcosm, if you will, of what our region could look like where enough unmanaged forests were preserved at a landscape level. Natural gaps will form and would complement gaps that are created by best management practices within managed forests. So now you know all the things that you can do in a wilderness preserve, at least when it comes to Northeast Wilderness Trust. I imagine most of us in this room tonight are conservation-minded people, and we all believe wholeheartedly that getting more people out into the outdoors is really important. Sylvia Earle, who's a National Geographic Explorer paraphrasing, but she has a beautiful quote that says, you have to learn to love something before you're moved to save it. And that has a lot to do with what land trusts do all over the region. It's our responsibility to connect more people with the outdoors, so they fall in love with them and they want to protect them. However, it is easy to overlook the amount of recreational pressure on our forests. And that's something that we think a lot about at Northeast Wilderness Trust. So that map on the bottom corner is actually not a map of city lights. That is a map of Strava heat maps from people mountain biking, hiking, cross-country skiing, whatever it may be, in our woods primarily, obviously in cities as well. There is a lot of people outdoors, which is a good thing, but we need to recognize that some places need to be set aside. And what this means on the ground is that areas that seem like they are intact and beautiful forests are actually functionally fragmented by trails. That's all of the hiking, biking, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera that's going on in this forest. The darker, excuse me, the thicker and the lighter the trail, the more people you can see even in between where there's no trails. There's little tiny threads of blue and those are what are often called social trails. Those are just people bushwhacking or whatever it may be. So again, what looks like an intact forest on the ground is actually rather fragmented. And that's something that we keep in mind at Northeast Wilderness Trust. And we try to keep recreational pressures low on our properties by having them open to the public but not always having designated trails. So our vision for the organization and for our region builds on Harvard Forest's groundbreaking report called Wildlands and Woodlands, which calls for, if you look at that graph, 70% of New England's forests to be protected by 2060, legally conserved, including 90% as actively managed forests and 10% as wilderness. So that's 10% of that 70%. So as a land mass, it's 7% of New England is called for being protected as wilderness areas. Is 10% enough? That's a very important question. And again, this is where we are today showing that same GAP1 data and where Northeast Wilderness Trust works. This is a map that could help us envision where we could go from here. The long-term vision for New England. What does that look like? Is it 10%, 20%, 30% as wilderness? As a point of comparison, the dark green on this map represents, again, that GAP1 or what is currently protected as wilderness. 15% of California, our nation's most populated and largest economy, has been conserved as wilderness. So here in New England, we're at 3%, California, upwards of 15%. Is that the right fit for New England? The light green on this are what the Nature Conservancy identifies as Tier 1 forest blocks. So these are the most intact forests in our region. And let me explain kind of the weird map here. This is based on our service area. We don't work in Rhode Island. No offense to Rhode Island, but that's why that's not there. And we also work in the Champlain Valley of New York. So that's why that's sticking there. Not really part of New England, but that's where we work. So the most intact forests of New England are considered what we call Tier 1 forest blocks. And we envision a region-wide landscape of interconnected wilderness areas of 5,000 acres or more of core habitat in all of these forest blocks. That's one way to look at what a functional interconnected wilderness landscape could look like in New England. Why 5,000 acres? That's the number that a lot of ecologists and scientists use as a baseline for a functional core habitat. Such a size stands a better chance of surviving climate change as well as natural events such as ice storms, microbursts, hurricanes, etc. Going a bit bolder, this includes Gap 1 and Gap 2 forests. So still incredibly important habitat, just not as intact, if you will, as Tier 1. And what if there was a 5,000 acre core area in all of these forest blocks? What if a majority of New England had wilderness in your backyard? That would be a very different place than what we're currently living in. So envisioning a wild future for the Northeast is not new. This is a long-standing tradition. The modern American concept of wilderness originated right here in New England, in places like the Adirondacks and Walden Pond. And it does not rest on finding places that were somehow spared the axe in the last 400 years of European settlement. We know that that largely doesn't exist in New England. Howard Zahnheiser, the author of the Wilderness Act, the law that created our federal preservation system in 1964, was a Pennsylvania native and part-time resident of the Adirondacks. And he knew that wilderness could grow as well as shrink, and he consciously used the obscure word untrammeled in the law's definition of wilderness. He did not use pristine, not virgin, not untouched, but untrammeled. And something that is trampled is bound or cut. Conversely, untrammeled is free or unimpeded. The Wilderness Act does not contain the words pristine or untouched. The primary characteristic of wilderness is freedom. Freedom for the land to follow its own evolutionary path and to be self-willed. And likewise, at Northeast Wilderness Trust, we like to say that wilderness is not simply a special kind of place, but rather a special commitment we make to a place, and that commitment is freedom to animals, natural processes, and diversity. The instant that Northeast Wilderness Trust or any of the great land trusts in New England that work on this sort of conservation place a legal conservation easement, whatever deed restriction there is on a piece of land, whether it's been cut over or it's pristine, it's wilderness in the way that it's being managed. From that point on, the land is self-willed. So how do we get to where we want to go? There's a public side of this and a private side of this. State lawmakers, of course, have a role in most of our public lands. Let me re-save that. More of our public lands can be set aside as wilderness. Our state forests, national forests, state parks, they all could protect more legally conserved wilderness, but parallel to that public land effort that is starting to percolate a little bit more, are efforts on the private side, which, of course, is what most of New England is, private land. Forever wild conservation on private land can be done through purchasing blocks of wilderness, through placing conservation easements, buying it outright, and this is where Northeast Wilderness Trust and our partners come into the picture. So this is a photo of a preserve in your home state of Maine called the Lone Mountain Wilderness Preserve. We took ownership of this a year ago. It's 1200 acres of essentially new wilderness. It is not pristine. It's been cut over, pretty hard hammered, but the instant that we took ownership of it, the slow re-wilding process has begun and the property will never get cut again. In one day, it will be an old growth forest again. That's how wilderness can be created. It's home to Bicknell's thrush, perhaps one day Atlantic salmon at the headwaters there. In Massachusetts, we recently took ownership of the 350 acre muddy pond preserve. It is a beautiful example of a coastal plain pond. It's just an hour from Fenway Park and that wilderness preserve is the proud neighbor of a Walmart. This is vest pocket wilderness, if you will. It's in an urban context, but the management style nonetheless is still self-willed. We are not doing anything on this property. It's going to grow older and older and more complex over time. It is untrammeled if we were to use that word again. On that property are 24 vernal pools, home to countless actually endangered species of plants and animals, tons of amphibians, beautiful turtles. It's a really special property. Another recent example is Burnt Mountain. This is another way that wilderness happens. This property is northern Vermont's 5,500 acres. It's owned by the Nature Conservancy. We hold a forever wild conservation easement on it. And another recent example is the Eagle Mountain Wilderness Preserve. This is 2,400 acres in the Champlain Valley of New York. Again, not pristine, although it does look so in that photo. Home to rare eastern pearl shell mussels, peregrine falcons, black bear, moose, coyotes. I was following otter tracks just a few days ago on that property. It's a wild place that from this day forward is just going to grow older and wilder. So there are some of the projects that we've worked on recently and ongoing projects like this one in Bridgewater, Vermont. It's called the Bridgewater Hollow Preserve. Home to a very healthy population of brook trout and cute little guys or girls like that, Pine Martin, likely live on this property, which is full of tons of standing dead timber. Of course, woody debris, it hasn't been cut in any large scale in 70 or 80 plus years. It's what's called a mature forest on its way to being designated as an old growth forest. Right here in western Maine, we're working on a 3,000 acre preserve. Home to spruce grouse, an incredible amount of moose. Those are examples of what Northeast Wilderness Trust does, and we're just one of many organizations that are focusing on forever wild conservation, but we focus only on that. We don't do anything else. So what landscapes will be next and will you help us rewild the Northeast? As a land trust, we have the unique opportunity to move the ball forward on wilderness preservation, no matter political winds. And as the only land trust focused exclusively on wilderness conservation, all it takes are folks like you joining our community of wilderness supporters and advocates to add more wilderness. It's really as easy as that. So I am asking all of you to consider joining us in that effort, whether it's with Northeast Wilderness Trust or your local land trust or regional land trusts to do more forever wild conservation. So to close, I just want to share this beautiful quote from Mary Bird Davis. You know, we often think of just the timeline that we're living in and we're surrounding. We are surrounded by forests that don't look like the forests that were here 100 years ago and they surely don't look like the forests that were here 200 years ago. They're different. Those were older and more diverse, and those forests are gone, but they can return. And Mary Bird does a beautiful job of talking about that. We are between two forested worlds, the natural forest of pre-settlement North America and the recovered forest of the future. The earlier forested world is not dead. We are studying and struggling to preserve its living remnants and we do not believe that the future forest is powerless to be born. These remnants with our help will become the seeds from which a renewed forest spreads. Thanks. So I am more than happy to answer questions. And in the back we've got our brochure, that wild carbon document for those interested in the carbon component of wilderness and our annual report and a sign-up sheet if you want to learn more about what we're doing. So are there any questions? Yes. I was just curious that in the definition size is not a factor and I was just sort of sitting there listening and thinking you know we have two acre property and you make a commitment just to let one of the acres you know maybe a acre or anything if you let one acre just be unmanaged or would that be circled in? By the definition of the management scheme is what matters. I would say it's wilderness. There's wilderness everywhere that humans step aside. At Northeast Wilderness Trust our conservation projects range from I think maybe the smallest is 17 acres around there to 10,000 acres. And the management style on that 17 acre parcel in Vermont and that 10,000 acre parcel in New Hampshire is exactly the same. If you step aside, let trees grow old, die, fall over, don't take them out of the forest you are going to create unique habitat and unique attributes on that one acre out of your two. And I think in open to debate and many might disagree that that is wilderness. That's a wild place. Yeah. Thank you for the talk and for your work. I'm curious about the self-willed part and about whether or not there are self-wills that you're not willing to accept. So if you have a child, you say you're on your own but you can't be a drug addict, you can't do it. And in particular fire and invasive species. Sure. So if it never burns you're going to end up in greater places than if fire was there. Sure. Or if it's taken over by some particularly problematic invasive species its self-will is to become a lot of specific standard whatever the invasive species is. Is that okay with you? That is a tough question. So this is something we think a lot about and we do talk a lot about at the organization. There is a lot of evidence to say that actually demonstrates older, more complex forests going back to resiliency and less noxious invasive species than heavily managed ones. And that's something that we have seen. We monitor invasives on all of our properties and none of them have gotten out of control. That property in Massachusetts that I pointed out Muddy Pond Preserve is a coastal pine barren ecosystem. It's supposed to burn. Eagle Mountain in New York has a red pine stand probably was created 100 years ago the last time that area burned. Fire is a natural part of our forests although less than out west. And we would theoretically be okay with fire occurring on our preserves but we also recognize that we live in a world where there's private properties, homes, etc. And we when it comes to both invasives and fire, respect surrounding neighbors and private property rights and we work with local communities, fire departments especially in the case of the place in Massachusetts we reached out to the local fire department and we're just aware of these things. So we would be okay with fire occurring on any of our preserves but of course we would want to make sure that it doesn't impact neighbors. There's no good answer for that. It's something we think a lot about. Yes? How long does it take for a forest in New England to become mature? So... And the same question about old growth. How old was that definitely? So I should first state that I am not an expert in the definition of... Well, I'm not an ecologist. I'm a lawyer. So I'll give you the best answer I can. Old growth forests have no exact age but there's characteristics in an old growth forest that are apparent and there are people that are well trained and recognizing that the amount of downed trees, the amount of coarse woody debris, etc. Numbers that I have heard are of the 200 year range something like that and it also depends on the species. The forests of Maine grow different trees than the property of Massachusetts. Different rates of growth, life, decomposition, etc. So, you know, hundreds of years is a safe bet. We at Northeast Wilderness Trust have a few places that we think are old growth. There are parts of the alder stream preserved in Maine that we don't think have ever been cut and you can tell when you go there even to an untrained eye like myself they look different. They feel different. There's something else going on in there. So that is a very non-scientific answer. Thank you. Great. I'm visiting from another state and can you tell us something you have a lot of engagement with competing competitors I guess or neighbors or stakeholders? Can you share a story of either a challenge or a success around neighbors or people buying or competing uses? Yeah, I have to think about that. One of the things that I try to emphasize and I hope I did a okay job of it during the presentation, I don't look at wilderness as in competition with a managed forest. In New England, I think that wild lands need woodlands and woodlands need wild lands. The core of our organization is collaborative work. We have conservation easements with New England Forestry Foundation. Forest Society of Maine has easements on our properties. We really work in a collaborative fashion. So I don't think that there are... I can't come up with an example exactly like you asked, but what I would say, my push and what I try to do is when there are large-scale conservation efforts occurring, most of the time wild lands or forever wild is not part of the picture. And I think it's our role at Northeast Wilderness Trust and those that care about this sort of conservation to ensure that when a 10,000-acre, 20,000-acre transaction is occurring with land trusts, make it known that the public wants to see more forever wild conservation. And that could be the land trust itself setting aside some land as forever wild, partnering with an organization like us to designate a core area. The Vicki-Bunnell Preserve in northern New Hampshire is a great example of a very, very large property that the Nature Conservancy owns, and we hold a conservation easement on 10,000 acres of it, which is large in itself, but smaller than the overall working forest. So there's an example of a large-scale conservation project that they intentionally set aside some land as wilderness. And that's what I think our role at Northeast Wilderness Trust, more than anything, is injecting forever wild into the conservation conversation wherever it's at. Yes? So Maine recently found the Emerald Ash border and we're the last state, you know, like the last hole out for this insect. And so there's a really big effort to track and manage its spread, because it really endangers the ash. So is that something that maybe could be managed for in the forest or is it just absolutely nothing? I mean, it would be watching and monitoring. Yeah, so we do watch and monitor where EAB is turning up and it's all over Vermont as well. Again, there is not a good answer for this. The general approach that we take is to monitor and see. We would have no plans to cut ash trees on our properties. However, if one of our properties was determined to be a source area for an infestation that's impacting local landowners, we would have to take action. And all of our management plans and conservation easements allow for exceptions in the case of public health or situations like that. Our idea, our hope is to let nature do its thing, but we are also pragmatic about it and recognize that sometimes you got to take some steps that we otherwise wouldn't.