*Borderland State Park, in Easton, Mass. Another photo below.*

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Many New Englanders know that much of New England used to be open farmland, a lot of it pasturage, but with lots of cropsgrown in the valleys, especially the Connecticut River’s. But as the region’s farming declined, and manufacturingand then modern services became dominant, the woodlands returned, eventually making New England one of the most densely populated but thickly wooded areas in the world.

I once had one of those panoramic photos, taken about 1905 of the hills of Norwich, Vt., as seen from Hanover, N.H., which showed open fields with sheep grazing on them. New England used to have a big woolen-textiles industry. I looked at the same hills the other week and they seemed completely covered with trees. When the leaves fall off in the autumn you can see houses owned by the affluent people who have moved to town, at least from May to October.

The small town-becoming–a-Boston suburb I lived in as a boy had several farms; one was across the street from us. I’m told that one is now part of the estate of a Fidelity Investments executive. We loved going over there and irritating a bull.

Now a new Harvard Forest report says that reforestation had halted. The region was losing 24,000 acres of woodland a year to development from 1990 to 2010, most of it to residential building. Such deforestation is thought to be continuing although more recent data are lacking. The researchers also found that funding for land conservation in the region has fallen 50 percent since the financial crash of 2008 and that the acreage of woodland being conserved annually has dropped from 333,000 to 50,000 a year since 2010.

Jonathan Thompson, a senior scientist at Harvard Forest and one of the study’s authors, told Harvard Gazette: “Peak forest cover is over in New England. For more than 150 years, forests expanded and regrew. That history is how we gained the status of as among the most populated and most forested regions in the world.’’

At the current rate of deforestation, Mr. Thompson said, the region will lose woodlands equivalent to twice the size of Rhode Island by 2060. (Poor Little Rhody – the yard stick for everything.) This would mean the destruction ofsome eco-systems, and thus possibly the extinction of some regional flora and fauna. It will also undermine attempts to slow global warming: Woodlands lock up carbon dioxide.

Let’s hope that state and local policymakers take stronger measures to protect New England’s woodlands, which, with our plentiful water, may be our greatest environmental comparative advantage.

To read more, please hit this link: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/09/harvard-research-reports-major-forest-loss-in-new-england/