 fantastic turnout and fantastic crew of people. I'm guessing you're all pretty darn knowledgeable about the Worcester Range. So some of what I'm sharing with you may not surprise you very much at all. We do presentations, we've done presentations three winters now on a whole range of topics related to forest and public land management here. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the science tonight of forest management, some. But I invite you, we have a YouTube channel, Standing Trees and also Save Public Forests, which is the coalition that we've created. YouTube channels that have some fantastic presentations by regional and global experts on forest management, on forest carbon. And so if we don't get to everything that you're interested in tonight, check those out. And there's some great resources there. But also during Q&A, if I don't get to something that you have a burning question about, please ask. And maybe we can dig into that here tonight too. So let's dig in. So Standing Trees is the new kid on the block in the New England environmental community. And for those, some of you, many of you maybe even, are familiar with the organization. But for those of you who are not, we've been around as an idea for about three years now. We've had a budget for two years and a staff person about that same amount of time. And I feel very, very fortunate to be working for Standing Trees. I helped to found it with a collection of people just like you who are passionate about public land protection. And we got started because we were looking around for help from Vermont's existing environmental nonprofit community. And we were not finding it. We were not finding that help. And I was working for that nonprofit community and I could not find the help. Before coming to Standing Trees, I was at Conservation Law Foundation and before that at Northeast Wilderness Trust. Prior to that, working for Montana Wilderness Association for the better part of 10 years and while out in Montana, I got a really good glimpse of how a high functioning public land advocacy community works. You can shake a stick in any direction in that part of the country and you will find a group that is active, passionate, organized either at the landscape scale or at the, you know, state level, regional level, working to protect public lands. And I grew up here in New England and I always thought that there was an organization or maybe several organizations doing that kind of public land work here. I took that for granted. I just assumed that was the way it was. I left New England when I was 18, 21 years ago to go work in the Cascades for the Forest Service and, you know, kind of came of age in that landscape, working for, you know, a variety of nonprofits at that way. I'm doing public land work and when I came back to New England five years ago with my family, I was stunned that New England didn't have those resources, that infrastructure. If you just look across Lake Champlain at the Adirondacks, it's a whole different story with the degree of knowledge of public lands and their importance and the existing organizations, you know, really incredible diversity of organizations working on public land issues. So we're trying to create something new here in New England, which seems like we shouldn't have had to do, but we're doing it and it's been an amazing ride so far and invite you to be a part of it. You're part of it being here tonight. So this is a quote from a great book by Mary Bird Davis. The book is Eastern Old Growth Forest Prospects for Recovery and Rediscovery. Wonderful book. I think it is out of print, but you can find a copy without too much trouble. And I would say this is our guiding quote as an organization. We're between two forested worlds, the natural forest of pre-European settlement in 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 the future forest is powerless to be born. These remnants with our help will become the seeds from which a renewed forest spreads. That is what we do as standing trees, focusing on public land protection. And maybe some of you recognize this view. Any guesses where this is from? An unusual vantage point, but it's in your neighborhood, in our neighborhood. This is the view from Eagle Edge, looking down the North Branch Valley. In now this is inside of the Northeast Wilderness Trust Woodbury Mountain Preserve. This is our valley, the North Branch, and this is our mountain range, the Worcester Range. I feel like it's the center of gravity for me living here in Montpelier. I go on walks up North Street all the time and I think for many people who live here in town it is just kind of where you go to free your mind and the Worcester Range is always out there for me. It's kind of an anchor for me and so this is it's deeply personal and I know it means only more to many of you in the room who have grown up with the Worcester Range or lived in its shadow for far longer than I have. At Standing Trees I wanted to also begin by saying we are approaching this work looking far into the future and far behind and I wanted to read our land acknowledgement if you let me for a second because working with Vermont's Abenaki community has been really important to again who we are as an organization from the get-go. So this will take a second but Standing Trees wishes to begin this gathering acknowledging and affirming the ancestral and ongoing presence of the Abenaki and the Abenaki peoples in the land we now commonly refer to as Vermont. The word indigenous literally means originating or occurring naturally in a particular place. The rich cultures of the Abenaki and the Abenaki peoples are of this place. They grew and they continue to grow from this ground. Over millennia their cultures were and continue to be shaped by the particularities of the soil, the rocks, trees, air, water, creatures large and small that share this green mountain home. Equally important these indigenous cultures shaped, storied and animated this landscape. This reciprocal relationship goes back countless generations but because of injustices perpetrated over the last 400 years to the present day the relationship is strained, tattered and hanging on by threads. But it's not broken. What does it mean for indigenous cultures and their home landscapes when the two are disconnected from one another? How can these cultures in the land and water from which they arose overcome centuries of violence? What does it mean when we erase a deeply storied landscape where teachings on conduct, morality, ethics and respect were literally woven into the geography, right? I was just talking to some indigenous partners today at the Winter Center for Indigenous Traditions and just beginning to kind of learn some of the names for landscape features around here that I should really know and I wish we all knew and could kind of do a do us all, which would do us all a service to reanimate, re-story this landscape. In braiding sweetgrass, Robin Wall Cameron writes, just as old growth forests are richly complex, so too were the old growth cultures that arose at their feet. How much richer would our modern day culture become if we had the wisdom and humility to allow our forests to grow old once more? How much richer would we become if we didn't just restore this landscape but we restored this landscape? So I think that's what we're all doing here and in our advocacy we are restoring these places. We're adding meaning to places where I think literally the meaning was stripped in the post-colonial era. And so that's our job here is bringing that significance, that meaning back to this place. So at Standing Trees, our work falls into three big buckets, education and organizing. That's kind of what we're doing here tonight. We do a lot of policy advocacy. We were deeply involved in the drafting and the passage of Act 59, the Community Resilience and Biodiversity Protection Act. We were also very closely involved in adding that new reserve forest land category and use value appraisal a couple of years ago. And then when necessary, we use the law. And we were in court with the state of Vermont just this last year over the Camel's Hunt Management Plan but actually really management of all state lands. And we'll get into why we were in court with the state because that issue has not gone away. And it's at the root of the problem with the Worcester Range Management Plan too. Welcome, welcome. So I think most of you know the environmental crises that we're living through. Again, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the science here, but some. I would say extinction, our water quality crisis and the climate crisis, of course, are all intertwined and are three of the kind of major issues that we're dealing with right now. I think it's like traumatic, unnecessarily traumatic to put pictures like that up on the screen. That too, and for critters like the Pine Martin. But where all of these come together, where I should say solutions come together for water quality, for the climate, for biodiversity is in this central space of natural solutions. And I just put up a smattering of things here that you know Vermont has this amazing document, this blueprint for biodiversity protection and restoration Vermont conservation design. We passed this law last year that tries to put Vermont conservation design into action on the ground. Act 59. We have the Vermont climate action plan, which takes a good look at all of these things and actually was what spurred Act 59 was was, you know, the recommendations in the in the cap. We have our Lake Champlain restoration plan. And we have our state hazard mitigation plan, which grew out of Hurricane Irene. And, you know, we're still figuring out how to put into action on the ground. But I would like to hear yeah, how the state plan for the Worcester range agrees or doesn't meet the criteria in these five documents. I would like to thank you for your nice introduction tonight. But I think we're going to have less than two weeks before the deadline. That's right. I think that we're not here to pick the plan apart. Because if we look at tiny parts, we're going to miss the whole document. We need to stop this. We don't need to say your science or your plan is wrong here. We need to stop it. And I want to hear from you how we're going to do that. Bravo, excellent questions. And I promise you that's exactly where I'm going. Is how we're going to stop this. Yeah, we have a little more than that. And I what I'm doing here is I'm trying to share with you some of the things that have kind of made it into the plan and those things that have been completely left out of the plan. So I'll show you kind of I'll get you some good answers to those questions in just a second. What I want to just I had not bed out and digger earlier this or last year, right after the flood in July. And the focus of it was, let's stop blaming climate change for all the problems that we are up against right now, because the land the land management decisions that we're making each and every day that we've been making for the last four centuries in New England, have all shaped how our communities either are you know, adapted to or not adapted to the climate. Let's look at Montpelier, right? Montpelier is in the worst possible location for climate change adaptation and resilience. We're going to flood again and in this setting that we live in here. And so when we look at, you know, the Worcester Range Management Plan, you know, what could let's think critically about what we could be doing differently to make sure that our downstream communities fare differently than than they did in this last flooding event. So I'll breeze through these things. You all know what the Worcester Range looked like. These are photos from the White Mountains. But you know, it was a very similar story here in the Greens. We were down to, you know, very little forest cover in Vermont at the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s. That's the legacy we're living with today. So in 150 years, since kind of peak deforestation in New England, we have trees back in, you know, 80% of the Vermont landscape, more or less. But I would not argue that we have forests back in our landscape. And I think this is a critical distinction that most people just aren't thinking about. Most, you know, of our forest in New England is younger than 150 years of age. Does that qualify as a forest yet? You know, I think the more you learn about an old growth forest, the more skeptical you would look at the trees and the forest that we have today and think of them as healthy functioning landscapes. So trees might be renewable, but forests are not. And, you know, we all use wood products, not arguing against that in the slightest, but we've got to be thinking about how we're creating forests. And that takes time. That's the chief component of making forests, time and space. So this is this next slide. Oh, no, here we go. So when I say old growth forest, what makes an old growth forest different or unique, you know, when you're in a mature forest or a rapidly maturing forest like we have in the Worcester Range, you might see some of these things, you might see a canopy gap of a quarter acre in size or less, which is the typical size of an opening in our forests here in Northern New England, where a few trees have blown over creating these micro habitats that are essential for, you know, all of the biodiversity that thrive in our forests here. You've got standing dead trees, decaying logs on ground. You know, this is a healthy forest ecosystem. And what was so interesting, maybe some of you saw this at the public meetings that I'm sure many of you went to, but they had a map up at one of those stations saying forest damage and it was a map showing insects, wind damage, all these things. And I went up to the person and I said, is that really damage? Or are these kind of natural processes that are critical to shaping a healthy forest? And the forester kind of paused and looked at me and didn't really know how to answer that question. And we had a good chat about, you know, why the state was presenting all of the ice storm, you know, disturbance or wind disturbance as damage. And, you know, maybe someday they'll take a kind of more holistic look at how they present that information. So I know this is a little bit hard to see, but I want to just give a sense of the public land situation in Vermont. About 20% of Vermont is public land, roughly split equally between federal and state lands. There's a little bit of municipal land mixed in as well. And if we zero in on just this, and here I wanted to share a little bit more from a report that just came out this year called Wildlands in New England by David Foster. And we contributed to this report as well. It's a continuation of the Wildlands and Woodlands program. So about 25% of the New England landscape is protected from development, but only 3% of Vermont and New England is in wildland management, meaning off limits to timber harvest. So the Wildlands and Woodlands vision has been 10% in Wildlands. And that goes back to 2006, when that report first came out. And we've made almost no progress really towards that 10% goal in that time. A little bit, a little bit here and there, like with places like the Woodbury Mountain Preserve, but there is so much more to be done. And let's start in the Worcester Range. The Worcester Range is the largest wildland functional wildland north of I-89 in the state of Vermont. That doesn't include the right side of that green thing. But on the right side of the recall, it's very undisturbed also. Yes, this is just showing public land in the highlighted areas. But there's a 15,600 acre block of contiguous land and the C.C. Putnam State Forest primarily that is the single largest wildland, small W wildland, meaning it's not protected as such, but it functions as a wildland. Largest anywhere, the closest that there is to it is the, excuse me, the West Mountain Wildlife Management Area, a core area, which is a 12,000 acre reserve that the state of Vermont manages. So this is the single largest, I mean, I would say this is the, you know, gem of Central slash Northern Vermont. And the Worcester Range is, as many of you know, at this critical location for wildlife moving, you know, East West and North South. It's really this pivot point. It's kind of, you know, just essential for and if we had those other private land protected areas shown here on the map like Woodbury Mountain, you would see how there's starting to be a stair step of wildlands moving across into the Northeast Kingdom and beyond. But the Worcester Range should be that that next pivotal piece that's permanently protected. Okay, I think I just said as much. I forgot I had this map in here too. So here's the Woodbury Mountain Preserve. This is showing the natural area. That's just the natural area boundary. And almost just the tiny spruce trees, right? It's yeah, just 4,000 acres, mostly around the 2,500. Yep. That's right. It's 25. It's about 2,500 feet and up in the Worcesters. And something to note, we argued very hard when this wildlands report was being made this last year. We requested that all of these state lands be kept out of the report. And the reason for that is that there is almost no protection for these lands. These are what are called highly sensitive management areas. And the state of Vermont designates these every time it does a management plan. But the state can do management plans kind of however it wants to whenever it wants to. There's no formal process. There are no rules in place for developing those management plans. And they only last 20 years. The idea of wildlands is that it's permanent. And the wildlands report defines wildlands as an intent to permanently protect these lands. So the good thing about this is that the state of Vermont has committed to wildlands management of these state land parcels. But the bad thing is that they're not really that well protected. And the state needs something equivalent to, for example, you know, Adirondack, you know, constitutional protection, or we need something more like there are various, there's about a dozen states with state wilderness acts, like a federal wilderness act in miniature. These are all options potentially to codify protection for these areas. Yeah, go ahead. Act 250 defines that 2500 foot file. Right. Yeah. Yeah, but that protection has been in place for 50 years. Great. I one of the points I make is that most of that area is by default, it's shallow soiled, it's wet soiled, it's the ridge line. There's no protection in the lower elevation. So I'm I'll get more into that just a second. That blue, what's called in the plan, the natural area? Yes. Okay. And that's not expanding. The natural area is not proposed for expansion. They could have done that too. In this look in this plan. But the the highly sensitive management area designation would expand the functional natural area by another 4000 acres or so, 4500 acres in the in the proposed plan. That's good. Except for the fact that the whole 15,000, 15,600 acre contiguous block is a wildland right now. And half of it is being proposed for timber management. That's right. They they they won't do anything. But which does mean they're fully protected, except that do you all remember when stow and smugs were in conversation about that lift, which is still not really dead, but it's on on on it's it's it's gone only while they do their next economic study that they want to present to the state to bring it back. So I don't think it's actually dead. Yeah, the resort. But the the the reason I mentioned it is that to the district stewardship teams credit, the same team that is doing the Worcester range plan. Brad Reno, who is the the lead of the team wrote a very powerful and compelling statement about why they were not going to allow that ski lift to be built. Because the current Mount Mansfield management plan says you cannot do that here. So the advantage of having a plan there was I think you might have asked the question at the meeting in Worcester about why do we need this plan? It's a great question. Why do we need this plan? The Worcester range is doing great right now. I think it's doing better than almost any public land in New England. In a lot of ways, I think it's better off without change any changes that would come from this plan. But the time that a plan works well is when it sets us up for a good decision like the one that Brad was able to make in that case where Stowe and Smuggs wanted to build that lift without that plan in place. I think that lift would have gotten the green light right away. So you know good planning, that's that's a good thing. Bad planning is another story. But the natural area designation is really flimsy. It's the best we have in Vermont. It still can be changed by the governor. Just really by the flick of the wrist. You can draw away the boundaries of a natural area. It doesn't take any act of the legislature here to change a natural area boundary. They have to hold one hearing and then they can get rid of the natural area or adjust the boundaries. It's never happened as far as I know, but there's no reason it couldn't happen. It's also places that they can hardly reach. That's true. Except for building things like ski lifts. There's going to be some text in the next few slides, but I wanted to point a few kind of key things out about state land management in Vermont. Vermont state lands are managed in a multiple use framework. You've maybe heard about this in relation to the way the US Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management manages our public lands. There is no timber harvest mandate so something that somebody said to me after the Worcester public meeting was that the state staff were saying we have to cut trees. It's something that we have to do. The state can, but it is not a shall. There is no you shall cut trees on state lands. There's nothing saying that the state has to cut trees in any particular location. The Worcester range could be decided right now by Commissioner Fittsgo, by Commissioner Herrick of Fish and Wildlife that we're going to manage the Worcester range differently from other management units as a whole unit. Multiple use can mean any number of different kinds of uses. Timber is just one of those uses. I think it's really important to dispel that myth that we have to be sourcing wood products from all state lands. The multiple use idea has created this kind of lowest common denominator forest management where state and federal agencies argue that we have to do everything everywhere. What multiple use I think should be about is doing the best thing in the right, in the best place. I'd argue that we shouldn't be cutting at all on public lands and we can talk more about that, but I don't think there's any reason that we need to be doing any logging in the Worcester range on the public lands. Why does the Worcester range need a plan? I had your great question in mind when I wrote this. Why does it need a plan? The commissioner shall manage and plan for the use of publicly owned forests and park lands. That is something that FPR must do. They have to plan. And what's crazy is that they have never made a management plan for the Worcester range. They are management plans for even the most tiny obscure blocks of state land in Vermont, but somehow this 19,000 acre management unit has never gotten a management plan. Decades after these lands were acquired by the state. Decades. So it has not been decades. Oh it's been since the, at least the the 90s, 80s, since a lot of that upper land was. That's the hunger-mounted headwaters project. Yeah. That's why the plan came about. Because when they got the Patterson Brook track and Brownsville, especially Patterson Brook, which is Worcester Middlesex, all of a sudden they had this beautiful access road. Right. And I think we have these access roads and I, you know, 13 timber harvests are going to be in the Worcester area going off a West Hill road. The access there, so all of a sudden. So are there accesses besides that one that they just developed over Patterson Brook? Well there's, they redid the road going into the hunger trail. Right. This fall. But there's also a road from the last harvesting that was done with this private land. But I really didn't get that acquisition and all of a sudden being having access said, well, we should have a plan. So you're right that there was that big, almost 2000 acre acquisition in the last, it was 2000, I think it was 2020 when that was, when that was completed. But what you're saying is that they're planning on accessing timber that was on the existing C.C. Putnam State Forest that has been. I believe it'll be both, yeah. Newly acquired and much older, you know, acquisitions. So they could be justified maybe for not having a plan for the chunk that has recently gone into acquisition, but. Oh, sure. Yes. The lands that just came on board, it would usually take some time, obviously, for those to have a, you know, a zoning process done and all that. But right, it doesn't make any sense why these other lands haven't had that planning done before. Although I think it has worked in our favor up until now. So here's the thing though. The secretary, excuse me, the commissioner is also supposed to shell adopt and publish rules for state land management. And this was the essence of the litigation that we filed against the state of Vermont last year, because those rules have never been promulgated. So right now, the only rules that there are in place for forestry in Vermont are the acceptable management practices, which are, you know, kind of bare minimum guardrails for, you know, water quality. And then fees that are charged for uses of campgrounds and timber that's removed from land. There are no rules for developing management plans. There's no rules for deciding where you're going to harvest timber. There's no rules for, so what does that mean? What is a rule compared to the policies that FPR has right now or the draft documents they have right now? Rules are binding. So if FPR violates a rule, they're breaking the law and you can hold them accountable for that. There's a reason why these rules haven't been adopted, right? It's a lot easier. It's a lot more flexible without rules. But that is really, I think, a disservice to the public. These are public lands and the public deserves transparency and accountability and decision making. And so to the Forest Services Credit, U.S. Forest Service, there are very strict rules for, you know, developing management plans. They don't always do what, you know, standing trees would like them to do, but they're following a process that's at least set out for them. The State of Vermont has no such process. It's a choose your own adventure every single time a management plan is written, you know, and it changes. So that's where, you know, our argument is that with the Worcester Range plan, the core issue here is that there aren't rules. And that should happen before, you know, this plan moves forward. Yes, Commissioner Danielle Fitsko is the current Commissioner for Forest Parks and Recreation. And she is under, FPR is under Agency of Natural Resources and Secretary Julie Moore. Is her, her direct supervisor. So the other people who presented right are like foresters, the Commissioner and then foresters. Who presented, you said, at the public meeting? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is the Commissioner elected? And what's their turn? The Commissioner is appointed by the Governor. Um, so it's, it's not something that we get to have a say in. Um, but and that, and that is usually delegated. It's not the Governor typically who's making these appointments. It's the Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources who would make that appointment or the, or Deputy Secretary or whatnot. Yeah. Um, so the state, this is the interesting thing though, the plot thickens. The state is planning to issue a draft rule this winter. And this is a result of the petition and the litigation that we've been involved in over the last two years. So, you know, that could be good news that we're going to get, um, a chance to weigh in on these kind of binding, uh, you know, uh, rules. But that should again really be done before we got this far in the, in the Worcester Range planning process. Okay. I'm going to zoom through this part because you all know how unique the Worcester Range is, but I, I want to put up here, the state knows how unique it is too. And this is what makes it so galling to me that the proposal is what it is for the Worcester Range because the Worcester Range is unique in central Vermont because it remains almost completely wild and undeveloped, says the Department of Fish and Wildlife. This is a document, the, an enduring place, a really beautiful pamphlet that Fish and Wildlife co-published several years ago. You can find it online if you just search for an enduring place, Worcester Range, it'll pop right up. Um, and, uh, you know, the only place left in central Vermont that's large in scale and completely unfragmented. So again, the state knows how valuable this place is. Um, just to read a few more quotes from the draft plan, you've probably all seen this. It's of exceptional ecological importance. The dominant forest cover is relatively old and large trees of 90 to 120 years. Given the expansiveness of the major forest types comprising the Worcester Range Management Unit, the property supports the range of bird and mammal species that depend and even thrive on the interior forest that can't easily be found elsewhere in the state. So despite that, this is the plan that they're proposing. And I think, again, a lot of you have probably seen this already, but I want to make sure for maybe people who haven't dug into it that you get a sense of what's being proposed. So, um, there are four, uh, management categories that are the big, the big buckets that the land has been put into. And really a management plan like this is a zoning document. Think about it that way. It's, it's permissive. It doesn't, management plan like this does not prescribe any specific action, typically in a, in a given location, except I shouldn't say that because this, that's more of the case with the Forest Service. This plan does prescribe or pretty close to prescribing tim, actual timber harvest. And we'll get to that in a second. But what it does is it kind of opens up areas to various types of uses mostly. That's what's going on here. So the highly sensitive management that we talked about is the, the blue, the, That's not the natural area. It includes the natural area. But, And it also expands out from the natural area. It expands out from, but I thought I saw it called general management. I thought I saw it called red. I thought I saw the natural area and then everything else would be red. No, it's, it's, it's, so what they're, what they're essentially doing is you know, the, the natural area, like I said, it's about four, four thousand acres. Four trees and apples. Maybe, let's come back to that. Let me, let me just share a few more of these things here. So the general management, what I want you to focus on here is that they're in the light, the, the special management and the general management categories make up what is essentially open to potential timber harvest in, in the plan. And even though this plan only, shouldn't say only, but it's proposing 1900 acres of timber harvest. It's all of these lands that will be open to teacher timber harvest in theory in the next version of the plan. Right. So this is a 20 year plan. There will be another 20 year plan and those lands will be in rotation. That's how, that's how this works. And so that's about 50, 50. The blue is about 50% of the haul. That's right. Are you suggesting that it's just in the next time period that that's going to become no, but it'll rotate. They'll, they'll rotate harvest within the general management and within the special management. So it's just in the light green and red. And so, and so the next, the next map is, is more helpful. So what I wanted to show you is that if you take the green in the red areas, that's how you get the potential vegetation management areas. And this is, you know, map 17 in the plan. But those are what add together to form the pool from which they are selecting lands for timber harvest. And so the green on the left side. This area here on, yeah, on the Stowe side with designated, designated seeding. I'm not sure. This, this, the highly, the highly sensitive management, yeah, the highly sensitive management is just the areas in blue. But or special man, the light green, the light green, special man. Right. And then within the special management, there are, there's a wider variety of kind of purposes and uses that will potentially restrict the kinds of, you know, cutting that happens. But, you know, the, the major point is that I want you all to take away is, is that these are the areas in which harvest can happen based on, on the plan. So, you know, that's more than half of Elmore State Park. It's pretty high up on the mountain on the morning. Yes. It's a, I couldn't believe it when I saw that. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any specific Yeah, go for it. I've got the harvest map on the next slide. Oh, okay. So, but but I want to talk about it. Yeah, go ahead. So, so this is Worcester here. It's about a minute or so going up here at George Richardson. So, you can see the harvest. Most of the harvest, I'm going to give you some numbers. Here's Middlesex. The access to the Hummer Mountain Trailhead is here. So, the general management acres located in lower elevations in Middlesex and Worcester make up a contiguous block of 3,400 acres. Most of the plan's timber harvest are proposed for the Worcester Middlesex block here in the next 20 years. And of the total timber harvest over those 20 years, which is 1,900 acres, 71% are planned for this block. And so 1,370 acres to the law represent 40% of the block's total acreage. Okay, so we're doing 40% of 3,400 contiguous blocks of a lower elevation here. Wait, you're not? It's 40% of the color things? 40% of what was green over the last four. Yeah, on the last slide. So, you know, there's just and there's no protection for what's called the Community of Northern Hardwood Farms, which is primarily beach, sugar, maple, yellow birch. Yeah. And I don't know, can I take more of your time? No, please do. And actually, let me skip ahead. No, you stay up there. I was going to mention a few things about that. Yeah. Because, you know, the work that they did is unbelievable. The inventory, all of the data they collected is fantastic. And, but the plan is so long, you can keep finding places where they contradict what they said. Exactly. Yeah. So, well, and that's what I've got right here, Bodo is. So, like Bodo was saying, it's ranked as a, you know, a ranked natural community, the hardwood forest, and the management unit. And when, so when you read the ecological descriptions, you know, it's all superlatives. When you get to the timber management section, the first thing you see is these areas are not defined by their ecologically sensitive features or important wildlife, right? Because they're just run of the mill forest. There's nothing to see here. And this is, I think, how we think about the, what's called the matrix forest across Vermont, which is a terrible name for what is our, you know, Northern hardwood forest. That it's just so common. Bodo, I didn't mean to run you off the stage here. No, that's where I was going. You should, you should come back up if there's anything else you want to add. But, you know, I feel like, you know, there's, I think, two competing voices that work within this management plan. And you'll see that if you dig into it. We have, like Bodo said, there are amazing staff at A&R doing fantastic work, identifying what's out there and what's missing. But then, when you look at kind of the proposed actions, it doesn't follow. It doesn't, doesn't seem to track with the ecological significance of the area. And so it's almost like a, there's this disconnect in the plan. Oh yeah, go ahead. I called the state forester and they said that they weren't clear on what percentage of the harvest that they hadn't worked that out yet. And as sensitive as they were describing it in the plan, of how careful they were going to be, they said, well, we haven't decided that yet. And the state ecologist is going to be talking with me and we're going to work it out somewhere right before they mark three. The thing is a little shaky. Yeah, especially when this is actually pretty darn specific about what they're planning to do. Yeah. Starting in 2025. Right. Right. Yeah. So, you know, the state has in again, when we were taking the state to court on this, the argument the state made was that this is not a final decision for these individual timber harvest, that there is a point in the future where a final decision will be made about the details of each particular harvest. But the state has never produced any kind of paperwork explaining what that process is of finalizing a timber sale. So there's no way you would know or I would know how to track from this point forward how the timber sale actually comes to fruition. You wouldn't know when to weigh in or how to learn more about it. So the state is going to have to kind of catch up with its own arguments that it's been making about, you know, that this is not a final decision, you know, on the ground. And so there's, it's very confusing. Yeah. That's a great question. And I have a couple of slides that I think will really get to the heart of that in a second but I think honestly, we have, you know, trained foresters on staff at the state whose job is silver culture, the practice of growing and cutting trees. And that's very different from, you know, what our state ecologists and biologists are trained in doing. And, you know, I think the word forestry is not well understood you know, that I think people often I think see forestry and ecology it's kind of the same thing. And they're very different. And so I think the disconnect and the plan as I see it is that, you know, there are people who are really focusing on the timber harvest goals. And then there are people who are focused on the habitat. And, And if you focus on the recreation. Yeah. And so I think that that's, that kind of splitting of the professions in some ways has created the situation where pieces of the plan aren't talking to each other as well as they could. I can't say that I'm aware of any of that. And I will give the state some more credit too. I mean, like I said, they have, we have amazing staff at Fish and Wildlife doing some of the ecological assessments. And one thing that they said to me at the Stowe public meeting is that, you know, the Rough Grave Society is really after public agencies right now to cut more forest to make places where people can go hunt for grouse, even though as we all know grouse is a forest growing species and grouse are very common in Vermont. But the state of Vermont pushed back hard on that and they're not proposing management kind of to meet the goals of the Rough Grave Society in this plan, which is very different from what the Green Mountain National Forest has been up to lately, which is to partner full on with Rough Grave Society, American Woodcock Society and do a lot of even what's called even aged management. And so, you know, it's good to see that the state is not putting those kinds of goals, you know, out front and center for this. I really, I do appreciate that. And there's a new clear pressure in my mind that I've seen with the politics is that housing crisis in the Nile's costs and politicians looking for some way to bring down costs and people look at the forest and say, there's, there's solutions just to harvest it and it's easy and then it, it kind of minimizes the value and it makes that, I think it makes the conversation much more important. And I'll get to that too, but public lands provide a very, very tiny part of the puzzle. So yeah, exactly. Yeah, I want to make sure you all leave with some key, key statistics kind of in your back pocket on that question because I think that's essential. Really, really, I think FPR is arguing that we need to cut trees to cut trees and provide lumber into the wood products ecosystem, I guess you could say. But I hate to use that analogy. I don't know why I said that, but but what's that? Yeah, yeah. I'm going to choose things that I want to make sure it's got connected, right? Sure. A&R doesn't have a goal to produce forest products, right? No, A&R does have a currently, right, the obligation to think about if not to actually specifically reach a target for wood products. And the Putnam State Forest also doesn't have like the only other option to expand the wood farm. Yep, right. Or creating forest fail, all of a sudden that's the purpose is to cut resource protection forward and enhance it, right? And it sort of shackles into that commercial management versus I don't know resource for commercial management which could be done much more broadly and much more like touched, right? So I feel like they're like, like you said, they just put the blinders on like all of a sudden they're like, yeah. And right now in statute that's one of the things that they need to consider as they're, you know, that's part of their multiple use kind of consideration but they don't need to emphasize it everywhere which is, you know, where I think the creativity comes in and the discretion of the commissioner comes in. So really quick, what's missing from this plan? I haven't seen much in the way of a Beniki input. You know, the state I hope would do a lot more to involve Vermont's Beniki community in shaping this plan. The Community Resilience and Biodiversity Protection Act, Act 59. The planning process for that is ongoing right now. And so this plan is really kind of getting ahead of that whole visioning exercise. The Global Warming Solutions Act requires the state to account for carbon emissions in any major decision that it makes. And there is zero carbon emissions analysis in this entire plan. So that's something that we're waiting to see if the state decides to do. There's no mention of the Lake Champlain Restoration Plan and the contributions of forest management to, you know, phosphorus loading in our waterways. And there are, you know, reductions in phosphorus from logging that are required in the Lake Champlain TMDL. Why is that connection not being made in a range that feeds into two of the largest tributaries into the lake from Vermont? And then, you know, there's kind of celebration of the rare, threatened and endangered species in the Worcester range. But there isn't really anything other than, well, we will look for those species before we cut these trees. There's nothing about how could we actually leverage this range to benefit those species? How could we leverage this range as, you know, and to recover species like the northern long-eared vet, which, you know, are known to be present in the Worcester range. They're federally endangered. They were just went on to the Endangered Species List this last year. They depend on, you know, older forests. So all of that seems a bit missing from the plan. Okay, now it's going to get really punchy and to your question about, or whoever, I think, can't even remember now who is asking really good questions about kind of what's what's going on behind the scenes here at the state. This plan, not plan, but this report, Enhancing Flood Resiliency of Vermont State Lands was put out in 2015. It was contracted by Forest Parks and Recreation after Irene and the plan has never seen the light of day. FPR contracted the report and then it has done its best since then to pretend that it never came out. You cannot find it on any state website and it has never been cited in any management plan that's come out since this report. We got it because David Brin, one of the co-authors of Vermont Family Forest has it up on his Vermont Family Forest website and we started to ask the question, why is this not cited in these management plans? Like the one for Campbell's Hump that came out two years ago. This plan looks at the quality of forest, not just forest cover. We are told over and over, we've got 80% forest cover. Our forests are doing great but that says nothing about what the health of those forests are beneath the canopy. And what this report looks at is the missing forest structure, the forest complexity the road networks that contribute to flooding and how we can address all of that. Well, this is on your website? Yes, it is. Yep, yep. This is how the District 3 stewardship team responded to the report when it came out. If flood resiliency was highest or only priority for management, the concepts and practices contained in the report could be effective at increasing flood resiliency on state lands, provided there was massive amounts of funding associated with it. Fully adopting the recommendations in this report as written will completely gut FPNR's long-standing state lands silvicultural timber management program by taking tens of thousands of acres out of active management. And we obtained this on public records request looking for what had happened to this report. And we got a really long string of emails, communication about you know why they wanted to make sure this report didn't kind of make its way into state land planning. And this was not just the sentiment of one person, there were many people who were afraid of the repercussions of this report. I'm sure there are some different people and also some of the same. And I want to be really clear my goal is not to throw any individuals under the bus on this one. My goal is to show that there's a lot of institutional inertia. And if you look at some of the other emails that we obtained, what they say is our obligation is to cut trees. This doesn't jive with our obligation to cut trees. You know, it's almost like it's begging for the state to reevaluate what the priorities of state land management should be, what the purposes should be, moving away from timber as a primary or co-equal purpose of state land management. And so if the legislature needed any reason to go into 10VSA 2601 and make an amendment to the purposes of state land management, I think it's right here in the way that state agency staff responded to this report when it came out. So this is, I think this is a bombshell. We tried to get news outlets to cover the story when we found all this material and we weren't successful at the time. I'm still hopeful that we will get more coverage of this at some point though. I don't know the numbers on that, but what I'll say, yeah, but what I'll say, I'll just cut through this and then I'll show you a chart that shows the amount of state lands harvested per year, how that factors into our total wood supply. So hold that thought, Brian. I'll get to that. So I just wanted to show you why is it so important to protect the Worcester Range? I think you all know at an elemental level why the Worcester Range is sacred. And honestly, to me, that's all I need to know. The Worcester Range is a really special place. It's a wild place. That is reason enough to not go in and do anything in the Worcester Range. But if we needed more scientific justification, you know, public lands in New England store on average 30% more carbon than private lands. And then the Worcester Range is potentially even higher than that because it has been growing for, you know, 90 to 120 years, as the state has said. Those are old forests by the standard of New England forests today, not old in the sense of what our forests could be, but old compared to many around the region. Timber harvest is what drives carbon fluxes in our forests. There is no greater factor on carbon in forests in New England than logging. That is the forest that changes the amount of carbon more than any other insects, disease, fire, even development. We lose far more carbon each year in New England forests from logging than we do from development pressures, from expanding, you know, suburbanization. So, you know, the best thing you can do for carbon storage is to let forest grow older. And we've learned this conclusively in the last several years. Where you do let forest grow old, you store a tremendous amount of carbon. This statistic is mind-blowing to me. 30% of all of the above ground carbon in the Northeastern U.S. is stored in protected areas that cover just 5% of the land area. So where you leave forest alone to grow old, you store an amazing amount of carbon. Is that the picture? This is from the study. It's a really, it's a terrible picture. Is it the quote? The 5%? This is, how do you mean? Is the red stuff the 5%? Oh, yes. The red is showing the 5% of the land area. Yep. Sorry. Okay. But, you know, we have almost no old forest today. And I guess I just want to end on this note that, you know, we have less than one tenth of one percent of Vermont in old growth today. Less than one tenth of one percent of Vermont's forests are old growth forests. You know, the largest patch sizes are in the dozens of acres. So we have so far to go and here we have a landscape of 15,600 contiguous acres and thousands more acres on the periphery that is already maturing and, you know, among the healthiest watersheds in Vermont, why not just let it keep growing? Okay. So state lands in Vermont provide just 2% of the timber supply. 2% of all the wood harvested in Vermont annually comes from state land. Another 2% comes from federal land about. So when we're talking about the difference that you're making, when you don't cut in the Worcester Range, it is such a small impact on, you know, the overall supply of timber in Vermont's wood products economy. So the choice here is not between whether we get to have wood products or no wood products as I think is often portrayed in the news media. It's not a, you know, are we going to have wood to build our homes tomorrow? That's not the question here. The question is, where does it make sense to get that wood from? And if you get wood from all of our forests, which is essentially the de facto management for New England today, you don't end up with older forests. It's pretty simple. And old forest function best at a large scale. Vermont Conservation Design says old forest function best at 4,000 acres in size or larger. So again, you know, should we focus on old forest recovery at a large scale like this? I think so. It makes a lot of sense to keep this forest growing older. Okay, last slide. You all know this already, but we're running out of time for this common period. There's just two weeks left, less than two weeks. Friday, February 2nd is your last day to comment. And I want you to think about if you're a part of any civic groups or maybe you're on a planning commission, I want to throw kudos to the Middlesex Planning Commission, which just submitted a comment letter in support of protecting the whole Worcester Range Management Unit as an ecological reserve. And, you know, if you're a part of your town's commission, Middlesex, excuse me, Worcester or Woodbury, Cabot, anybody can weigh in. And that doesn't have to happen by the February 2nd deadline either. So that's when comments are due. There's no reason that this can't be an ongoing process that we can, you know, we can work on our town select boards and these commissions over the months ahead to get more endorsements for protecting these lands. And then, you know, get ready to weigh in again. The state says that, you know, this draft rule for state land management could come out this winter. And it'll be up to all of us to get as strong a rule as we can possibly get to guide, you know, public land management going forward. So I'd be happy to talk more about what that rule could look like and what it would say and how it could have an impact here. But, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, great question. It's an indefinite amount of time that the state could take. So the scoping, which was the first phase of this planning process, that was three years ago. And I definitely didn't think it would take this long to get to this point. But I think COVID probably contributed to that. It could be six months from now. It could be six years from now. There's no set timeline. But we have to be ready for it to be irrelevant. I think it could happen within the year. And so I think, you know, keeping this momentum going with all this focus on the Worcester Range is really important. And telling your legislator that you care about the Worcester Range and that this is an unacceptable management plan is a really important thing to do right now. Because, as I mentioned, the legislature can do a lot to change the purposes of state land management. It can create an ecological reserve network in Vermont that protects these lands as wildlands permanently. So, you know, so we need to start thinking about, you know, bigger picture, longer term, you know, work to protect these places. Yeah. One thing that I, to me, it's just, it's like, why does this have to move so fast? It's like pull back on the range. Because it's really ridiculous because Act 59 asks for an inventory of lands that is due July 1st or before. So they're ready to implement this and it says in the inventory, it says an assessment on how state lands will be used to increase conserved ecological reserve areas. So here we are ready to do this and yet we're going to have an inventory where we have to figure out where or, well, like here's where, right here. It's like, you know, rethink the plan. And I just think old change is really hard. And I think new science, Vermont Conservation Design, Act 59 is calling for change. And I think, you know, foresters have been trained to do civil culture to take care of the woods. And I think now, new science is saying, okay, it's not just that anymore. And I just think Worcester is the place to start it. And now is the time to start it, just like the law says. So it's like, pull the reins, reevaluate this, you know, go ahead with the project for the recreation areas. And what you have to do at Perry Hill or up at Elmore State Park. But for the timber harvest, I think it's time for them to stop and say, okay, I just don't understand where you're supposed to have an inventory or how you're going to put a priority on ecological reserve areas and hasn't even been talked about in the plan. Yeah, I agree. What's the rush in? You know, Commissioner Fitsco is brand new in her job. And so I don't think anybody knows what Commissioner, I mean, except people may be close to her, what her inclinations might be for, for, you know, this, well, the legacy she'd like to leave, you know. And so now is a great time too to send Commissioner Fitsco a personal email. Let her know how much this place matters to you, how much it matters to you to start doing things differently. We don't know if she might be willing to do something, you know, creative and bold here with the Worcester Range. So I didn't put her email up here, but I can send that around to, to everybody who came out tonight. You know, Vermont's a small state and I think that even our commissioners are, you know, accessible here and I would encourage you to reach out to them, even, you know, ask for a meeting. But yeah, go ahead. Oh, Commissioner Fitsco. Yep. Yep. I was wondering two things. First, is there any example of a desired best practice or management plan that could be put forward when people aren't making comments to point to something positive of what they would desire? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think what I would suggest is that the state of Vermont think of putting this entire Worcester Range management unit into, you know, ecological reserve management, which is what, again, Bodo was mentioning is highlighted in Act 59 as a potential, you know, key use of state lands. Can we play some example from like Acadia or Baxter where that's happened to Park if there's a national park or, you know, Worcester? Right. And so, no, I think you could absolutely suggest, you know, we want to treat the Worcester Range like Vermont's version of Baxter State Park or, you know, that would be a fine thing to say, but we don't have a great example in Vermont. I would say the closest thing is the West Mountain wildlife. The premise of Vermont, you don't want anywhere. Yeah, yeah. Do you just have a So, which is the strongest of almost like a wilderness act? Yeah. The adirondacks are the strongest example. The adirondacks are the strongest example in the U.S. Yes, the whole adirondack state park is the same size as Vermont. And so, We're talking about really to look at that. Adirondack Forest Preserve. And say, and look, you know, do we want to be, we have a tiny fraction of old forest wood and what would it take for us to be look at this map and be proud of what we've been able to set aside? Because that map is a visual map. That's really, that's really powerful. Yeah. That could really speak to flamboyancy, forward thinking, and being, keep it up with the Joneses that having neighboring states doing a better job than us, I think is powerful. I think so too. I mean, the adirondacks have been putting us to shame for 125 years. So, I mean, I wish I had a better answer for like a specific management plan that I would, you know, but I think the way to say it is this should be Vermont's very first ecological reserve. And, you know, and again, is the single largest contiguous block of state land that is currently in a wildland you know, essentially wildland management today, you know, in Central or Northern Vermont. So, or North of 89, I guess anyways. Yeah, go ahead. On the flip side of it, is there an example preferably of a federal mandate or just again, with any best practice that the current proposal is contradicting? I mean, like another, another timeline of different places. Well, like essentially saying you're out of compliance on this. Yeah. I think, I think, I think the fact that I would say the fact that the state of Vermont has no rules for state land management is the biggest contradiction that there is with, with this plan. That's across the board. I deal with AHS a lot. I write a state plan for independent living as my day job. And there's no mechanism to enforce any of the plan. Right. And so really, our only enforcement mechanism ever is to know that they're out of compliance with the Fed. And AHS has plenty, you know, the documentation's there. Looks like a much different situation here. We have plenty of resources to go back on. But that's kind of the only way, you know, you can litigate or you can say, you can know, you can friendly or politely say you're out of compliance. Well, there, there, avoid litigating. There may be a variety of ways that the, the state is out of compliance. And so we're working with Vermont law and graduate school and Jim Dumont, who's an attorney in Bristol on drafting, you know, really hefty comments on this. And we're looking at violations of the Endangered Species Act, you know, federal and state acts. We're looking at, you know, there's, it's like I said, this is currently a violation of the Global Warring Solutions Act because they haven't done any emissions analysis for this plan. I think there's a lot of those kind of push points. If you look at the blog that I put up on the Standing Trees website, I list some of those out there. And, you know, I'm happy to send more talking points your way. You're asking great questions. I'm not sure if I have exactly the answer you're looking for. No, those, actually those examples are perfect, in my opinion. Endangered Species Act would be, yeah. Yeah. I'm happy to chat with you more about it. Awesome. Yeah, bye. Do you have a sense for why, like, maybe culturally, Vermont is so far away from the everyone acts where we mentioned at the beginning one time and I like, do you, do you have a sense for why we're doing that? It's a big budget. I think you're balancing the budget, you know, with, it has, well, not with New York, but if you, Vermont and Maine have really big state budgets. New Hampshire has it's much smaller budget. Wyoming has a much smaller budget. They don't have the public. Did you say Vermont has a large budget? Large budget. Vermont and Maine have very large budgets compared to the population. New Hampshire has a small budget. If you go to Wyoming, they have small budgets compared to the population. Right, so I'm asking about Vermont versus. I think they need money. That's good. And you're saying that's why you think that they are cutting? I would say about that, I'm going to do that question and they're trying to balance their budget. But it didn't seem like, I mean, looking at the timber percentage from state parks versus Yeah. Yeah, no, my sense culturally speaking is that really all over New England, it's not a unique thing to Vermont. All over New England, I think we're really stuck in a utilitarian mindset when it comes to natural resources. It's, yeah, I mean. The Adirondacks happened a long time ago. Yeah. It was vacationing and well, and it was watershed protection. I mean, yeah, it was, it was, it was all, it was all in the Adirondacks, it was all done as, you know, in large part as protecting the, you know, water supply of New York City, the Hudson River, you know, and, you know, the Catskills Forest preserve, same, same story, you know, very centered on water. Also, absolutely. There was an urban population that had a really close connection to that landscape that kind of, I think, overwhelmed, you know, maybe some of the desires of rural New Yorkers, you know. Like that. And, yeah. And then, and in Vermont, we don't have that kind of overwhelming urban presence, or we didn't have it historically. I think that, you know, I think perceptions are changing. But in, really in New England, I think we have looked at forests as a wood basket since we got to these shores, you know, from Europe. And it's, you know, been a really hard thing for us to think differently about, about the forest. And I don't think there's any part of the U.S. that has figured it out. So I use some other examples, you know, but I, I don't, I don't think that it's, there's any one state that you can look to for kind of perfect, perfect management. But I do think New York is a, you know, pretty close. Can I stop for a second? Yeah. Thank you. My family's been over in the Adironics for 120 years. And the locals really feel like you, you put us in a museum. We're here, we can't do what we want to do. You know, so that libertarian spirit is there, as we all know. But right, you know, it's a state at the APM. I think you should look at in the context of, well, the Adironics might be doing a lot of things well there. It's still within the state of New York. And if you look at the rest of the state of New York, it has not bothered me. Yeah. If we, if we don't, if we don't, if we don't, if another part of why it's kind of driven by the urban landscape is, is when you don't have it, you appreciate it more. So that's why here, the folks tend to push it more. And when we're surrounded by it, we're more likely to do it. I think it's a lot of truth to that. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. What are the chances that we can, you can, that someone can pull in the reins and stop this plan? What are the chances over the next two weeks? I mean, I was hoping to hear a list of the things that you're going to do that's going to stop this. No, no, your organization. Yeah. And one other point I want to make before you answer, we've talked a lot about forestry practice. In my mind, the recreation possibilities have got to be limited. I've hiked with a five-year-old boy who said, why did they always put the trails where there's streams? And those trails are going to turn into streams. And every microflake of sediment is carrying phosphorus to Lake Champlain from the erosion that's going to be associated with mountain bike trails and hiking trails. It's going to be fragmenting the forest when you, you put in ATV trails. Can I ask you a short question? What? And there are no ATV trails, just to be clear. I want to keep people to know that. But what, you know, what chance do we have to stop this? And when I see your hand up, do you mind if I respond or do you want to go first? Go ahead and respond and I'll just stand here and wait. Okay. Well, I don't want you to stand there and wait. You go, you go, go ahead and then I'll respond. Well, I think Harvard is a language and what I've discovered and trying to understand old growth protection is that nobody can agree what's old growth in Vermont because everything got cut down. If it's over 90 years old, it's old growth. But that doesn't exactly fit the definition. And I think what we're really talking about is not protecting old growth, although that is the objective and the goal. What we're talking about is protecting forests and leaving them unresturbed. Yeah. And that includes recreation to a point, that includes the timber harvest for sure. It includes areas that should not be disturbed by human traffic that can bring stuff in on their boots that could introduce problems. So I'm just saying the language is really important and maybe we need to change the way we talk about it so we say that we want to make it undisturbed. So that it gets to be really old. Yeah and just I don't think I've said this today but just to be really clear, we aren't at Standing Trees talking about protecting old growth. If we try to protect old growth, we'd be protecting this little postage stamp here and that little postage stamp there. That is not what we do by and large. We're protecting future old growth. That's our mission as an organization. So old growth is not generally what's at stake in this management plan. That is not what is going to get cut down. The title of it. Future old growth. Or the question that John Dillon was posing in his story was whether or not to let it grow old. And so that's the question that's in front of all of us right now. And that's the question that was answered in the Adirondacks 125 years ago by putting that many million of million and a half acres on a path to old growth. Yeah. It does like in Act 59 it says restore old. So give it a chance to grow old. And like in the plan where it talked about what you read earlier it's you know I think it's it's well on its way to becoming old growth. It says however based on partial inventories conducted in 1990 mean stand diameters were determined to range between 9 and 14 inches. As these means were measured over 30 years ago and no removal by harvest has occurred since it is reasonable to estimate that the dominant tree range is between 90 and 120 years old. These figures would indicate a dominant forest cover of relatively old and large trees. So it's on its way. That was the forest fire in 1928. And you know I think like Stuart's question what can you do you know I've been beating the bushes I have never I'm going to say a double negative. I haven't gotten so passionate about something in a long time. So you know I put myself out there so people can see my spelling mistakes and my punctuation. But I'm hearing from a lot of people. I got a personal call from Susan Morse the tracker. She said she cut her teeth in the Worcesters tracking bobcat. She wants to help me. She doesn't do technology. I sent her my letter through the mail and she's gotten back to me. I heard from represented Sheldon today. I'm hearing back from a lot of people. And if you beat the bushes and you make your feelings known people are people are listening. And I think there's some traction is is starting. I agree 100% and I want to say I think that you know to be clear this has never been done before. I don't think there's ever been a management plan that's been stopped in Vermont. But I think the stars are aligning right now in a way that they haven't. I mean people are more aware of the importance of forest protection than they have been in recent memory. And this is a moment where I think like Boto said you know there's just a lot of people taking notice and interested in taking action. We have the ear of key legislators. And we're going to take this. You know I hope we don't have to but we'll take it to court. If it comes down to it. Absolutely you have my word. I mean that's why we're here. Which legislature? Well you know I would say Boto just named Boto just yours. I went and looked at the maybe four major committees. You know Anne Watson is right here. Anne Watson responded to me personally. I mean you and they're crazy busy now at the start of the session. But you know we live in a place where people get back in touch with. Oh yeah I was just wondering if we already knew we had something to draw on. Well I would say I think any local legislator should be where you start because the Worcester range is our collective backyard here. But then I would also say that Representative Sheldon please reach out to her. Let her know how much this matters to you because I think she of anyone in the state house has the ability to really you know take a stand for the Worcester range. So the more that she's the chair of the Energy and Environment Committee in the house. And she's the reason that Act 59 came to be. The Community Resilience and Battery Versailles Protection Act. So she's the main person behind Act 59? Yeah. So I do I think I need some guard rails. I've joined up with Standing Tree. I'm going to be a foot soldier. You tell me what to do and so forth. But honoring with this person behind me said I mean my emphasis for years been on people in the streets. And it's not at that point right now. But you know so I might forget the names you've mentioned. And I'm hoping I'm wondering maybe as a lot of us are how you get this energy. And keep it don't lose people. So thus the list. And the names that you mentioned if that can go into your blog into your onto your website. So people can reference that because I'm going to forget the names and I've taken a few notes. But I'm interested in the organization. Yeah. And this is very organized. I'm so impressed. Those are great questions. We can put all that on the website. Make sure you don't leave here before putting your email down so that we can stay in touch. But here's the other thing. If there was a keep the Worcesters Wild Coalition homegrown from the communities around the Worcester range that would add a lot to this campaign. What's that? Well that's what we're starting it right here right now. So you know. Yeah. Go ahead. A real direct question. Do you have somebody that can put together some group that is a subcategory of you just with our names on it right now. Yeah. We can think about creating a Google group or something like that. Make a name that I mean a group for us because I also feel exactly the same way. A lot of people around that we can. I'd like to see keep the Worcesters Wild bumper stickers all over. You know the area. Is that that report that you talked about by Underwood and Gennet? Everyone should read that. And I would like to say that that report addresses the issues that Montpilter is struggling with right now from the flood. And the outline of what the trees can do to keep us from going through more damage from the next flood. That is so vital. You can address that because people. Katie Trouts with Montpilter Alive is trying to come up with a plan to restore flood plains around here. But it also requires keeping trees in the ground. You know. Does that report have an economic analysis in it or is it. Can we go for which they did the flood. I'm not sure. I don't I don't think so. Yeah. But there's a new economic forester that just started. And I've got her name. I can send it to you. Yeah. What I would say is there's been great studies done on the value of healthy intact ecosystems for flood mitigation in Vermont. There was a huge study done on the impact of of the you know Cornwall swamp on reducing flooding to Middlebury. And you know there's been a lot of attention on on all of that where the I guess the focus needs to go now is not just on whether or not there are trees there right or whether there's a you know we need people to think about is how we can actually get under the canopy and increase you know the the attributes that make a healthy forest right. And the best way that we have doing that in a landscape like this is just to keep letting it grow older because at this age of a forest it's beginning I mean all these windstorms we've had this winter it is fantastic for the health of the Worcester Range. Every time we've had one of these crazy windstorms I'm like hallelujah because that's creating the forest structural complexity that we want. You know it's it's hard on our communities absolutely I get that I'm not not wishing it upon anyone's home or power line but in the woods that is the best thing that can happen to help rapidly mature a forest. So you know I celebrate when we have those kinds of storms come through. Yeah in the back. I think you went over this earlier in in your presentation on what standing trees is. Yeah. But correct me if I'm wrong my understanding is that standing trees your focus is on holding the government and accountable in terms of like policy and making plans and whatnot correct. That's right yeah. And so what we're I'm also hearing those asks for how do people get involved in a way that's like on the street. We have that that's us too. So and I should have I should have gotten to that earlier and I don't know why I didn't but you know we have a very active coalition like I was saying at the beginning save public forests which is comprised of people and organizations across Vermont and we have a we have a bi-weekly every every other week meeting on Tuesday mornings. Yeah and we would love for you to be a part of that effort and we need people out on the ground doing the you know door knocking and and you know talking to legislators talking to people at FPR so absolutely that's a huge part we started as a grassroots community and that's very much what we are today still we're using the law you know in a way that we couldn't have even dreamed of two years ago. But we are still at our core a a collection of grassroots activists you know forest defenders and so many people in this room are a part of that community and yeah if you again if you get on that list I'll send out a note and if people want to be added to you we have a Google group for regular communication I mean multiple times a day there are updates being sent around about the latest in forest management you know science advocacy opportunities so the sky's the limit if you want to to get involved in that way I'm glad you asked I'm glad you asked that question and let me say this too you know standing trees success in you know depends on we've made this very low bar all cost to be a member of standing trees is one is one dollar that's so that anybody can be a part of our organization and it really matters when it comes to potentially challenging the state or federal government in court because it comes down to who your members are to gain standing in litigation so if you live with the Worcester range in your backyard as I know some of you do you know that matters and it also just helps us to show you know the strength of our organization it's absolutely not a requirement to be a part of our our you know community but it's something I hope you might consider um so do you know what vorac is the orc yeah and they're making a entire plan for the recreation of Vermont and that's finalized in like august 2024 so they're they're doing you know there's never been this whole huge plan and they're looking for public input just like they did with this and stuff so yeah I mean I'm not really one for engaging with the government that way but you know that is they are doing that right now they're saying but I think you know the most of the small trails and stuff um and so on the draft on the plan the color things are say one two three four right and one is the blue yep and then there's subcategories they go one point eleven and one point eight yeah and uh it's and one is says highly sensitive management area right so you say that means no no activity one generally means there will not be timber harvest yeah it's not it's not as strong a prohibition as I wish it was but it is as close as we have at one point eight right and that's a specific designation a natural area designation that um you know is given to exemplary natural communities around the state of Vermont so what makes a natural community a natural area unique compared to say what we're calling an ecological reserve in this conversation which is defined by act 59 is that a natural area is geared to protect what is there right now something really unique the whole purpose of the ecological reserve designation that we just created with act 59 is to rewild it's to start with something that might be really degraded and to allow it to become healthy again and that is that is the whole idea of of you know the forever wild lands in the Adirondacks you know that was the same same story and we haven't had that tool in Vermont and we most new england states most states don't have a tool like that so it's a big deal that we now have this new category of land management to help bring forest lands back into health over time yeah i'm also wondering if you're blue the blue and the article in bridge says that this is not going to be logged it's correct at this time yeah well you say ever you say in the next ten years they're going to go more on the green but they're called highly sensitive in the area the blue areas are the state is theoretically committing to managing those as wild lands going forward yeah and then you say in this plan no management we're doing nothing in 20 years yeah but we need we need we need something stronger than what we have right now so great questions i think we should probably wrap this up and if you have more questions come find me and i'd love to chat i'd also love to just get coffee or a beer anytime and talk about any of this so look me up my info is right here get get in touch but thank you so much for coming out tonight i hope you got something out of this and hope you'll stay in touch thank