Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Zach Porter]: We are live. Alright. Good morning,

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: and welcome to the House Environment Committee. This morning, we are going to be hearing from Zach Porter about wildlands. Welcome back, Zach.

[Zach Porter]: Perfect. Thank you. Great to see all of you, Madam Chair, members of the committee. It's always an honor and a pleasure to be talking to you about public lands. And I could not be more thrilled to help you kick off this legislative session with this discussion about our treasured public lands. So yes, happy new year. I'm Zach Porter of Standing Trees. I live here in Montpelier. We work across New England on public land management. Public lands, as I'll share with you, are a critical part of our landscape, a minority of our landscape, but all the more important because of it. And so we'll dig into that today. You And know, please feel free to ask questions as we go today but for bigger questions, maybe best to hold it to the end and I'm going to do my best to save enough time for ample Q and A afterwards but let's

[Representative Mike Tagliavia]: jump in. There

[Zach Porter]: we go. So my lifelong passion is public lands. I have always been fascinated by the blank spots on the map. This is a map showing does anybody have a guess? What are those dark lines on this map? Population density? This is a close proxy perhaps for population density, but not exactly population. Good really good guess. Roads. Roads. So this is a map showing roads in the Lower 48. And we'll zoom in on New England a little bit later. But I wanted to start here because what we're talking about today really are those largest blank spots on the map in The United States, which have extraordinary value for being what they are. And you can just see how scarce they are East Of The Mississippi. And again, because of that scarcity, how important. And this has been my kind of driving force in my own personal life, professional life, is working for working on behalf of America's public lands, the blank spots on our American Atlas. And that's what Standing Trees does here in New England. Just up the hill here. If you started hiking up the the backside of the the Capital Building, you wouldn't you know, in just maybe a day's long walk, you'd be in in in in the Worcester Range. The Worcester Range, this is the view from from White Rock are our closest wild public lands to Montpelier, a very special place to me and my family. To me, there are few things that say American democracy, that say freedom, the way that our public lands do. I do not feel that sense of just kind of unbounded freedom anywhere in America the way that I do on our public lands. Maybe that's a feeling that you have too when you're roaming in our public lands, through our forests, on top of a mountain. That's something that I treasure about our public lands. And then I know that's true for so many Vermonters. It's a very part about what it means to be American, to be a Vermonter. Our public lands anchor us in our landscape. When you look up at the horizon, no matter where you live in Vermont, just about, you're looking at public lands on our, oftentimes on our ridge lines. These are our compass points. They're our kind of reminders of who we are and where we are, whether that's Campbell's hump on the horizon, as you can see here, or whether that's your closest high point. But that's what public lands mean to us. They they are a core part of our identity. In one hundred and fifty. Years of forest. Regrowth since we were down to about 80 deforestation in the late 1800s and one hundred and fifty years, we've got trees back on our landscape, but I think what we often don't think about is whether we have forest yet here in New England, here in Vermont. And this is an article that was just published here in a newspaper from the Pacific Northwest, but I thought the headline was perfect for New England as well. I think that we all struggle with a little bit of ecological amnesia, which is easy to come by and understandable. That's not a criticism. It's just simply the way, it's human nature. We kind of appreciate what's around us. It's hard to appreciate what we've never seen, what we've never experienced. It's hard to understand that our forest today and without an ecological education, it's hard to understand that our forests today are not the forests of the pre colonial days, and they're not the forests that we could have in the future if we put more of our forests on a path to growing old. What makes our older forest so unique are these incredible micro habitats, the diversity of conditions that you find in a natural forest. I think the term old forest is actually a bit of a confusing term because what we're really talking about are forests of all ages, young through old, that are constantly changing. The dynamism is the key part of a natural forest where you have young and old intermixed. And that's what you can see here with the tip up mounds, the large trees falling over creating gaps in the canopy, that's the diversity that we want to see in our forested landscape, and that's what happens naturally all by itself in an older forest. These natural forests, these older forests were once the dominant forest of much of the forest regions of The United States, including here in the Northeast. This is a map from Penn State that shows at a very broad scale, of course, was more nuance than what's shown here, but across time, how we have seen these major changes in the forested landscape of The United States. Today, the Northeast US has fewer acres of old growth. There's a smaller percentage of the Northeast in older forest, natural forest, than any other part of The United States. So we farther behind any other region of the country when it comes to kind of the transformation that happened over the last four hundred years. And so we have a long way to go to get back to even, like I said in the previous slide, just 0.3% of our forests are over 150 years of age, just 0.3%. So it's an opportunity though for us to put more forests on a different path. President Theodore Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt is a hero for anybody who cares about public lands. And I just love this quote. The greatest good for the greatest number applies to the number within the womb of time compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method. And again, this just to me speaks to the supreme democratic values that are embodied in public lands. This is Will It Be State Forest? So where are our public lands? Who manages our public lands? Pop quiz time for a second. What are our state land management agencies in Vermont? We have several departments within the Agency of Natural Resources that manage state lands. I know it's only day two of the session, but I'm gonna put you on the spot for a moment. Even just a couple of them, feel free to blurt it out.

[Representative Mike Tagliavia]: Fish and Wildlife.

[Zach Porter]: Fish and Wildlife.

[Representative Mike Tagliavia]: Fish and Wildlife.

[Zach Porter]: Fish are the big ones. Yep, Department of Environmental Conservation. So those are the three state lands primarily. Then on the federal side, we have additional, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: I was just saying natural resources.

[Zach Porter]: The Agency of Natural Resources, yep, is the agency within which those departments exist. Then on the federal side, what are the federal land management agencies that care for Vermont public lands? Yep, US Forest Service, great. US Fish and Wildlife Service, those are the two big ones. We have a little bit of National Park Service land, very little bit, in Marsh Billings, Rockefeller, and we also have some Department of Defense lands in Vermont too that encompasses some forms of land. So those are our public land management agencies in Vermont. On this map, what you can see is that the light green are the federal lands and you can kind of see it's interesting how across Vermont, our state and federal lands are kind of imbalanced and that the majority of our federal lands are in the central and southern part of the state. We have a lot more state land and a lot less federal land in the northern part of the state. And so it's just an interesting way that the state and federal lands are broken down across Vermont. But just helpful to think about, we have around 12% of Vermont in public land ownership today, state and federal, and I'll show just another slide with that. Here we go. Vermont is second only to New Hampshire in New England for the amount of public land, the percentage of public land that we have. 12% of Vermont is state and federal land. Now that might not be much compared to say many Western states where a third, a half, or in some cases, three quarters of Western states might be under public land management ownership, but that's a significant amount of land for Vermont. And it's a really important part of our land ownership puzzle. This map here is a little hard to read from a distance, but what you're seeing are the public lands, federal lands in the dark green, the state lands in purple. You can see there's really not a lot of state land across New England, but, it's actually more heavily weighted towards state lands and Southern New England. And the dark kind of maroon color here is corporate ownership. That's corporate timberland ownership across the Northern Tier of New England from the Northeast Kingdom here across to Quebec and New Brunswick. So that's kind of how land ownership breaks down around around the region. One of the things that I began by sharing with you all during the last session when we were talking at first about public lands and public wild lands was how, and I wanna kind of get to this right away in this presentation, is that wild lands, especially wild lands on public lands, are in no way in conflict with abundant wood products in New England and in Vermont. They aren't at odds with each other. I live in a wood house. I enjoyed sitting by my wood stove last night as I was making this presentation. My organization is trying to make sure that a modest percentage of our landscape, what our land managers in the state of Vermont at ANR say should be managed as lands that are going to become old forest in the future. What scientists tell us we need to do to make sure we have protection from floods, from droughts, for our habitat and biodiversity goals. We can do that and have abundant wood products. They're not in conflict with each other, but what we have to do and what I'm here to talk to you all about is how we put different parts of our landscape, how we make wise choices about where we are managing towards different goals on the landscape. That's something that we can do a better job of, and that we have an opportunity to change going forward. So just to go back to this slide, in New England, 2.3% of the average annual timber harvest comes from state and federal lands. It's about the same percentage here in Vermont. 2.53% of the average annual timber harvest in Vermont comes from state and federal lands. Just point 35% of our annual timber harvest volume is from state land. We harvest about 150% of the volume that we consume in Vermont. And we talked about this the last time we all gathered that Vermont is a wood exporter. That's not a bad thing at all, but again, it's just I think an important data point to show that we have still a strong wood products industry in Vermont and that these goals are not incompatible. Protecting our public lands, protecting more wild lands in general, and having abundant wood products. In 2024, this report was published with a lot of leadership from the University of Vermont, Tony DiMato, Caitlin Littlefield, who is the lead author. It talked about a vision for the future of New England, where all of our wood products were produced within the six state region. And it found that we could absolutely do that. We could get every single wood product that we use within the New England region, and we could protect 20% of New England as wild lands, lands that are off limits to timber harvest, where forests are allowed to grow old. Compare that to the about 3% of New England that's in wild lands today. And again, I'll get more into those details in a second, but 20% could be protected and we could still produce all of our wood products locally. That was the conclusion of this report. So I mentioned the Worcester Range earlier, my backyard public lands, and I had a new reason to thank my backyard public lands in 2023 when I'm a resident of the North Branch of the Winooski Valley. And on that day we had record setting rainfall just upstream from me that inundated Montpelier, as you all are very familiar. And if it wasn't for our rewilded public lands, lands across the CC Putnam State Forest here in the Worcester Range, it might have been a very different story in Montpelier in July 2023. Those lands have not been harvested in decades and they have regained their capacity for water absorption. That does not mean that they can't still gain a lot more water absorption capacity. We'll talk more about that too but they served an incredibly important function during that rain event. We came within just a few inches of engaging the spillway at the Wrightsville Reservoir, which would have sent a lot more water downstream into Montpelier, raising the water levels even more, flooding some of our neighborhoods that were fortunately spared. We know that these kinds of events are just gonna become more frequent. No matter where you live in the state, you've experienced this, and you have friends and neighbors and family who have experienced the ravages of our recent storms. We know this is coming our way. The US Geological Survey put out a report just this last year on their conclusions from that July 2023 event, and what they found was that, know, this was just, know, like as I said before, an incredible amount of water, the town of Callis just north of here got 9.2 inches of rain in forty eight hours. It's a five hundred year flood. You can imagine even more rain was coming down on the highest elevations. And what that amount of water does is it flushes an incredible amount of nutrients down into our waterways so that for the week starting on July 10, the Lomoyla River delivered more phosphorus to Lake Champlain than in all of 2022. Say that again. For the week starting on 07/10/2023, the Memorial River delivered more phosphorus to Lake Champlain than the entire year of 2022. So these singular storm events have an unbelievable impact on our phosphorus loading, our waterways, our water quality in general, and the way that we are managing our landscape today, some of the choices that we're making don't necessarily reflect or take into account this changing dynamic, and there's a lot more that we could do to guard against these kinds of events. The state of Vermont has known for a long time that it has to grapple with this, and after Irene, it contracted a report called Enhancing Flood Resiliency of Vermont State Lands. This was published in 2015, but it is not something that you can find on the State of Vermont website. We wish it would be. You can find it on the Vermont Family Forest site. This was published in part by David Brent of Vermont Family Forests and Kristi Underwood. And what it found was that older forests do a better job of slowing, spreading, sinking floodwaters. And our road networks in our headwaters do an incredible amount of funneling of water down into our waterways rather than allowing that water to slow spread and sink. What they found was that reliance on AMPs isn't enough, and AMPs aren't designed to deal acceptable management practices for maintaining water quality on logging jobs in Vermont are not designed to address floodwaters. And this is something that I think is not commonly understood. And what we have dug into even more at Standing Trees with the help of a environmental consulting firm is that, yes, AMPs are an improvement best management practices, excuse me, other improvement on our standard practices, but they don't replace the value of roadless areas of wild forest lands when it comes to absorbing significant floodwaters, storing waters through drought periods, things of that nature. The same goes for protecting water quality for our communities. The city of Auburn, Maine just recently put out a report showing that timber harvest was a real threat to its water supply reservoir. The city of New York is managing all of its water supply lands as unharvested lands, again, to protect water quality, and they are avoiding billions of dollars of water filtration costs by doing that. And again, I wanna state that this is not a criticism of timber harvest. This is just to state that we can manage a modest percentage of our landscape to maximize these ecosystem services that we know we need, that we rely on more and more. So the state of Vermont in 2018 put out Vermont Conservation Design, which you've all had presentations on before from ANR. I put up several, I think, key passages from this, and you'll have the PDF handy, and I hope you'll go back and read these in more detail, but what Vermont Conservation Design says really clearly is that historically, the majority of Vermont's landscape was in an old forest condition. Our flora and fauna evolved in these old forests, and although there are only small patches of old forest today, they can be restored passively. That's the amazing thing about our forests is their power for recovery, all on their own for the most part. And the next speaker later in the day can talk even more about some of the proven track record of that in our neighboring Adirondacks. Vermont A and R noted that old forest protect water quality, sequester and store carbon, provide opportunities for adaptation and evolution. And they're important control and kind of benchmark against which we can measure our active management of forest elsewhere. Something that's really important is the value of large areas, large wildlands, because in order to allow these natural processes to play out, you want as large an area as possible. And so Vermont Conservation Design identifies preferred minimum patch sizes of future old forest lands. And this is broken down by regions of the state. And so, for example, here in the Northern Green Mountains, 4,000 acres is the preferred minimum patch size of an old forest. Now, how many patches of 4,000 acres or greater can you, you know, that's a large amount of acreage for a state like Vermont. And we have obviously a high concentration of those larger acreage parcels on our public lands in Vermont. It makes public lands again, that much more important and valuable for the purpose of old forest management. And you can see that again, when we zoom in on that map that I showed earlier, you can see the spine of the Green Mountains, clearly the Worcester Range right here, and you can see the White Mountains, the Adirondacks, the Catskills all stand out fairly. These are the largest blocks of public land that we have in the Northeast, and these are these areas that are key to future old forests. When it comes to carbon storage, we know that wildlands store more carbon, sequester more carbon. If we leave our middle aged stands unharvested, recent science from the US Forest Service's own researchers show that we can double the amount of carbon by 2,100 in our middle aged stance in New England. Today, public lands store a third more carbon on average than private lands in the Northeast. So there's again just significant value in protecting these public lands that are already maturing rapidly beyond the maturity of many of our private lands. And we wanted to look at what's the economic value of those ecosystem services. And I'll circulate this after this presentation today. We published this report earlier in the year. We calculated, we believe for the first time, I don't think anybody else has done this, the value of ecosystem services on Vermont's public lands, and we also looked at the way that lands are managed, and does that change their output of ecosystem services and their ecosystem service values? And what we found is that, yes, as you increase the protection level, you also get, again, these greater outputs of clean water, of carbon storage, of flood risk reduction, and that increases the ecosystem service value of those lands, and so the comparative value of timber products from our public lands, just talking about our public lands here, is much smaller. And it, again, detracts from, in the case of public lands, their outputs of ecosystem services that are so valuable to the public in this day and age because of these increasing drought and flood events, etcetera. So how public are Vermont's public lands? I just wanna touch on this for a second before we dig into the kind of current state of wild lands management a little bit more, because I think this is really important to keep in mind too, and these are all policy issues that I think this committee could come back to in the future. I think about how public our public lands are in terms of how much the public is able to see behind the curtain of the way that public lands are managed, how well the public can engage in decisions that are made about public lands. Again, we own these lands, the Agency of Natural Resources does not. The Agency of Natural Resources takes care of these lands on all of our behalf and on your constituents' behalf. And so the way we think about our public lands functioning as such is to ask the question, well, is there a rigorous analysis process? Is the Agency of Natural Resources considering options when they are alternatives, when they are making decisions. Is there a cost benefit analysis that they're performing when they do a project on public lands? Are they notifying the public about upcoming projects and decisions? Some state lands have no management plan at all, but decisions are being made for them right now. Other state lands have exclusive timber rights given to private timber companies where there is no input and no management plan. So these are just some of the ways in which public lands don't always act as public lands and are issues that I think that, again, we could do a better job of here in the state. So, like I said before, about 12% of New England is in public land ownership and about 3.7% of Vermont is in wildland management. That's a high estimate, we believe, because it counts a lot of state lands, for example, that the state of Vermont claims are being managed as wildlands, but don't actually have any legal protection. The management of those lands could change overnight, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second, but 3.7% is a tiny amount of acreage. When you compare that to our neighbor to the West, New York State, which John Davis will be talking about more in a second, where about 10% of New York is managed as Forever Wildlands, and there's such a broad coalition of wood products industry representatives, scientific community, all suggesting for decades now that 10% of New England at a minimum should be in wildland management. And and again, Vermont Conservation Design echoes that call. And we've got to make some choices about how we're going to get to that 10%. So as I said, 3.7% is a significant overestimate. Most state lands that the State of Vermont claims are in wildland management are not actually legally protected as such. They could be changed tomorrow if the state chose to by simple decree. It would not even require a rigorous public process to change the way that those lands are managed, and that's not what a wild land is. A wild land is a legally protected landscape that is allowed to grow old in perpetuity. So, as I mentioned, the state of New York is quite a bit ahead of us. The amount of state public land in New York that's in wild lands today is 65% of their state land. State land owned by the people of New York, 65% of that state land is in wild land management. In Vermont today, if we just take ANR at its word, these are the lands that are going to be managed as wildlands, 20% about of Vermont's state lands are managed as wildlands today. But again, most of those have no legal protection. So that's a big delta between New York and Vermont in the way that we've looked at the value of wildland management. Act 59, which this committee was really instrumental in passing, takes a first step towards rebalancing the way that we manage our landscape here in Vermont. Act 59 sets out to maintain and restore Vermont's ecologically functional landscape. It's our biodiversity and resilience roadmap, if you will, for Vermont. And it sets quantitative goals for protecting 30% of Vermont by 2030, 50% by 2050, and qualitative goals to make sure that we are changing the way, rebalancing the way that we conserve land in Vermont. One of those categories that Act 59 recognizes are ecological reserves, those are the forever wild lands, the wild lands that we're talking about most today, Biodiversity conservation areas where lands are manipulated for habitat, certain habitat goals or hunting management, things of that nature. Natural resource management areas, our multiple use, all of these lands are multiple use lands, but our areas that are managed for extractive uses for sustainable timber harvest, etcetera. The Act 59 inventory that was completed in 2024 identified 27% of the state of Vermont that's in conservation status right now. Again, that's a long way towards that 30% goal by 2030. That's a remarkable achievement because again, only 12% of Vermont is in state and federal ownership. That means that our land trusts have been doing incredible work conserving land across the state. But most of that land, again, is conserved for sustainable hopefully, or conserved in ways that will allow continued ongoing resource extraction. That's not a bad thing. We need to conserve woodlands in Vermont, but we need to do more to raise the level of conserved wildlands in this state. So Act 59 defines an ecological reserve area as an area having permanent protection from conversion. You can't convert it to a parking lot or a strip mall, and it's managed to maintain a natural state within which natural ecological processes and disturbance events are allowed to proceed with minimal interference. That's the bucket within which all these different kinds of wildlands fit. Some of those we have today are Vermont natural areas. And I touched on this the last time I visited with you. I wanna touch on it again because our natural area statute has been in existence for a long time. It's protected a lot of really important landscapes in Vermont, like the summits of our Worcester Range right here. But the natural area statute is really only meant to protect those exemplary natural communities that we have in Vermont. The places that are absolutely remarkable, they are in a condition that is unlike most of our landscape, they're not a tool for ecological restoration. They're not a tool for rewilding. They're not a tool for broadening the expanse of ecological reserves. So that's not gonna get it done. Our natural area statute is not sufficient to get us to our ecological reserve and old forest goals in Vermont conservation design. And the state lands working group for Act 59 recognized this and made a recommendation to establish a new statutory designation for ecological reserves. And this was a group composed primarily of agency of natural resources staff. And this came out in that Act 59 inventory report in 2024. So from there, a group of experts worked on what is the bill in front of you, H276, the Vermont Climate Resilience and State Wildlands Act, to make sure that we have a state designation to actually create legally secure wild lands on state lands, to make sure that we have a tool to restore degraded lands and not just protect those that are in an exemplary condition today. It protects about 268,000 acres of Vermont's state lands. That's about two thirds roughly of Vermont's state lands. Beginning with those lands that are in land management classification one point o, highly sensitive management areas, these are lands that Vermont already considers to be wild lands. All of our natural areas are what are called core areas, our highest priority natural communities and habitat features on state lands. These are the largest contiguous blocks of state lands on FPR land primarily to provide for that interior forest habitat and allow natural processes to play out. Critically, that means that a third of Vermont state lands will continue to be open to active management and interventions of all kinds. And again, even if, and I'll show this slide in a second, even if this act was to pass tomorrow, it would move the needle from about 4% of the state today according to Act 59, that's an ecological reserves, to around 7%. That's an ecological reserve. Still short of our Vermont conservation design goals, the wildlands and woodlands, 10% wildlands goal, but an important step in the right direction. This saves and protects taxpayer dollars, because we actually lose money oftentimes on public land timber harvest. It is done at a high cost to taxpayers, And we get the greatest bang for our buck as public land owners from the production of clean water, flood risk production, drought mitigation, habitat provision, recreational use, all of those things have a higher economic value than what we are gaining from public land extractive uses. And this is also really important, and I don't think is discussed enough, but in of the protecting 10% of Vermont as ecological reserves approximately and Act 59 as a minimum, it's far less costly to move the needle on public lands than it would be to purchase private lands, and and you can just imagine the millions and millions of dollars involved in in striving for those private land protection goals. So what does the bill do? Well, it protects forests from road construction, it protects our forests from additional resource extraction, but it does not change existing recreational uses. Motorized and non motorized uses would be allowed to continue that are out there today. Trails can continue to be built in the future. Vermont Agency of Natural Resources will have the ability to make decisions about what types of recreational uses are appropriate where. Campgrounds, cabins, developed recreation sites, leased ski areas, all of these kinds of facilities, infrastructure out in our public lands today would continue to be managed the way that they are. It does not change any of those things. It focuses on protecting, again, those largest blocks of wild public lands that we have today. So I talked about this earlier. 4% of Vermont is in ecological reserves today according to Act 59 inventory, 7% would be ecological reserves after the passage of H. Two seventy six. So where are we talking about? The areas that are cross hatched are areas that the state of Vermont already says are wildlands. So you can see that there's already 20% as I mentioned before, of Vermont state lands in wildlands management. The areas that are in dark blue on this map would be areas that would be added to this network of wildlands with passage of the bill on state lands. Again, moving towards that 7% of the state that would be protected. And here's the Southern part of Vermont where there's again, it's far less state lane. And we can come back to the maps if you'd like. I just want to conclude here by sharing a bit of story from I the, guess the annals of conservation history in The US, the Wilderness Act was signed into law on 09/03/1964. It celebrated its sixtieth anniversary just a couple of years ago. And what is so remarkable about our public lands through the generations has been how bipartisan support for our public lands has always been. And when this act passed, it passed 373 to one in the House of Representatives. That's incredible. 73 to 12 in the Senate. Since the passage of the Wilderness Act, more acres of wilderness on federal lands have been designated under Republican presidential administrations than Democratic administrations. In fact, the president who oversaw the most acreage of wilderness designated was president Reagan, as a matter of fact. So what we know from the history of public lands is that we all love them no matter who we are. And this is something that I, again, treasure about our public lands. They are supremely democratic. They speak to all of us, and we have a chance to do something here in Vermont that New York state did. This is a picture of the High Peaks region of New York's Adirondacks. New York did one hundred and thirty years ago to put today about 10% of their landscape on a path to growing gold, and today that's where you'll find the cleanest water, the greatest storage of carbon, some of the most outstanding habitat in all of the Eastern United States, the greatest amount of older forests in the Eastern United States, as John Davis will talk more about. We can do that here too. Wildlands are a choice. It doesn't depend on the condition of our forest today. That's what makes this opportunity so hopeful, is that all we have to do is flip a switch and my daughter's generation, her children, their children will have incredible benefits beyond our imagination from that choice in the same way that leaders of one hundred and thirty years ago in New York State, leaders of sixty years ago in Washington, D. C. Made really wise decisions for future management of public lands. We can do that too here in Vermont. This is a book that John knows well because he was one of the key editors of it. Mary Bird Davis was the lead author, I believe, and she wrote in this book about Eastern Old Growth Forests, We are between two forested worlds, the natural forest of pre European settlement North America and the recovered forest of the future. The earlier forested world is not dead. We're 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. And we can do that and continue to enjoy all the benefits of our actively managed woodlands in Vermont at the same time. And we have a chance right now to put public wildlands on a better path. So thank you for your time, and I look forward to your questions. And I'm happy to come back again later to dig into, there's so much more science that we can cover, then I wanted to even begin to broach in this conversation today, but I hope this gives you a good introduction as you're starting the legislative session.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Thanks for your presentations. Do members have questions? Representative White?

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair)]: Thanks very much, Zach. I'm useful. It's nice to get a little background on this. So it sounds like current thinking on forest management as you let the forest grow old, is Is that kind of the idea as opposed to going in clearing them? Right? Really, like, you might have seen out west of practices. Is the idea?

[Zach Porter]: So it all comes down to what are the management goals for a particular area. And there's no question, right, that we all use wood products. And so where we are sourcing wood for wood products at the vanguard of forestry today is the idea that we should practice silviculture to mimic natural disturbances as much as we possibly can. So that as we're extracting wood from our forests, we're doing it in a way that tries to replicate the way that nature would have impacted that forest. We know that that is better for all of the ecosystem services that we were talking about earlier. And the reason I'm sharing that is because the forestry community knows, right? Implicitly or inherently because of this push towards more natural dynamic silviculture that that's the direction that we should push forestry to be healthier for the land. And that's a wise choice to make, where we want wood products. But there's an opportunity to get more from our land when it comes to, again, the clean water, the flood risk reduction, the drought risk reduction, the carbon storage if we allow more of our lands to grow old. And so

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair)]: disturbance be in? And natural that's

[Zach Porter]: a great question. What would a natural disturbance be in Vermont? So in Vermont, the primary natural disturbance influences on our landscape are, like we just saw, ice and snowstorms, wind, beavers. And to a lesser extent, but important historically was the impact of indigenous settlement, especially in river valleys in New England, where there was some burning and whatnot, but concentrated impacts, not widespread. And what makes New England forests really special when it comes to, you know, storing carbon, for example, very similar to the forest of Pacific Northwest that you've probably read about, and the redwoods and the sequoias of the West Coast. Our forest developed on millennial time scales without catastrophic disturbances. So fire, rare, extraordinarily rare as a natural occurrence here in New England's landscape. And the Forest Service recognizes that and just recently put out a report showing that fire continues to be a very low risk for our forests into the future. Know, hurricanes, tornadoes, also just extraordinarily rare on several 100 time year kind of interval events. But those are the kinds of disturbances that naturally shaped our forest, and would typically create very small openings in the forest. Our normal wind events would, as you walk through the woods around your homes in Vermont, I'm sure you're used to seeing one, two, three trees blown over. That's the typical scale, less than an acre opening in our forest. It's on a very rare occasion that we would have something much larger than that. And even when that would happen, what would be left behind? Well, typically an immense amount of woody debris. All of that dead wood is actually what's missing the most in many cases from our forests. That dead wood is essential for the health of our soils, for protecting water quality and for invertebrate life. That's really the building block of all of our biodiversity. So those natural disturbances leave behind a legacy that's sometimes depending on how we do forestry different from what's left behind after we practice silviculture. But again, at the vanguard of silviculture is leaving more wood behind. And again, that to me is just another indication of the importance of thinking about having more of our landscape in a in a wild state. Thank you.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Representative North and then Austin.

[Representative Rob North]: Yeah. Thank you, Zach, for your presentation. Good to see you again this year. Here you go. So just some questions on the percentages just so they're clear to me. So how much of the the 7% of Vermont land that's planned to be preserved as wild lands at H 276

[Zach Porter]: Yep.

[Representative Rob North]: Is already Vermont state public land?

[Zach Porter]: So the 7%, if this bill passed tomorrow, that 7% number includes all wild lands in the state. So that that that's private land and public land wild lands. That's what

[Representative Rob North]: was trying to determine is

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair)]: how much of it is private. How much of

[Representative Rob North]: it is already state public? Good question.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: If it went from 3.7 to could you estimate half? I know you questioned it.

[Zach Porter]: Right, it would increase the amount of wildlands in the state by about, it would double about the

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Some of that 3.7 is federal now.

[Zach Porter]: Yes, and a good portion of that is already federal. Today, significantly more wildlands are in state and federal ownership than in private in Vermont. And I can't give you the exact percentages, but that I'd be happy to do the math on that.

[Representative Rob North]: How many private owners would be impacting?

[Zach Porter]: Well, does this bill would not impact any private landowners. Okay. So, it's already all public land. This bill only deals with state land managed managed by Vermont A and R. Yes. And I should have made that clear. So this bill only designates lands managed by either the Department of Forest Parks and Recreation, Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Department of Environmental Conservation. So it doesn't you know, private landowners, as has always been the case, have, you know, the opportunity to voluntarily conserve their lands. That wouldn't change.

[Representative Rob North]: Okay. So the seven percent of of Vermont land that's in

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair)]: February doesn't affect any private bill.

[Zach Porter]: Yeah. And and, again, the the the bill moves the needle from about 4% that's protected today in the mix of private and public. Yep. 27%. But it's it's just that additional three to 4% that would be designated in this bill that's on that's on state lands. This bill doesn't deal with any any other land ownership. Not sure if anybody else in the room wants to jump in, but I hope I'm I'm hope I'm making it think Yeah.

[Representative Rob North]: Doesn't affect any private land.

[Zach Porter]: Not at all.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: No. Although, it's interesting. You say it doesn't affect any private land other than the upstream benefits.

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair)]: Upstream benefits.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: And being adjacent to the wild forest. If you own a forest that's adjacent to a wild forest, I would think you could make a strong case that that was a big benefit. Yeah. For,

[Zach Porter]: you know, values that we enjoy every day, the aesthetic value, the, you know, the the the the recreational value, all those kinds of things.

[Representative Rob North]: So what percentage of currently Vermont state public lands does that get us to in terms of the percentage of Vermont state public lands that are considered actually protected wild lands?

[Zach Porter]: So if this bill again

[Representative Rob North]: We're at about 20% currently.

[Zach Porter]: That's right. So it gets us to what? This would move us to about, I believe it's around 65, 70 off the top of my head. It's about two thirds of Vermont's New York's percentage. Barely more. Yes. It's almost almost the exact same amount.

[Representative Rob North]: All right. Good. Thanks.

[Zach Porter]: Yeah. Good. Really good really good questions. Yeah. Yeah.

[Representative Rob North]: Slightly different tact. So what what are the currently active activities that are currently preventing those identified lands and H276 from just wilding on their own right now? I mean, what's going on that we need to stop with H276?

[Zach Porter]: Great question. So right now, the state of Vermont has management plans for some of its state lands, again, not all. And those management plans call for a variety of uses of those lands, including road construction or reconstruction, timber harvest, other other activities. You know, this bill puts some lands that currently have active management plans on a different path. Some of those lands already have wild lands designated per the land management planning process. Those are the bedrock of the wild lands proposed in this legislation. But there are also portions of these state forest and park lands that are actively being harvested or that could be in the future. And yes, this bill would change the way that some of those lands are are being managed. I can assure you is that, again, this is the the teeniest, tiniest percentage of the timber volume in Vermont. And if we are looking for, again, opportunities to move the needle for wildlands with the least cost to our wood product industry, it makes a lot of sense to focus our wildland designation on state lands. And again, you get, you know, what what do what what happens from public lands, timber harvest? Well, for one thing, you're actually flooding the market with subsidized wood. It actually brings the cost of wood down the more that you are seeking wood from public lands. Private land stumpage value could increase with less logging on public lands. And again, we have excellent foresters at Vermont Department of Forest Parks and Recreation. We know we have private landowners. You've heard in this committee that there are private landowners who need more support to do forestry well on their lands. Why not put more effort into making sure that our private land forestry has done really, really well in this state, and allowing these public lands to continue to grow old. I think it makes a lot of sense. And again, it doesn't have to come at the cost of the production of the products. Yeah. Good questions.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: So we have representative Austin and labor and then Agliavia.

[Zach Porter]: Yeah. Great.

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Okay. I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit more about the economic benefits of maintaining public lands. And, you know, in terms of water quality, I think health, I have to believe health is, there's some savings in terms of maintaining forests, carbon storage, the forest industry, the recreation industry. I mean, I'm wondering what savings Vermonters are getting by keeping these lands protected.

[Zach Porter]: Huge savings. And following this presentation, I'll share with you all this new report that he just published with the help of a economist at the University of Virginia who has been studying natural resource economics for decades. And he put some hard numbers on the value of Vermont's state and federal public lands. I believe it's around here, let me pull up the slide that I showed earlier, just to make sure I get the numbers right. So what he found was that Vermont's public conservation land supply $2,250,000,000 in ecosystem services each year. And in order, the most valuable services are recreational opportunities, air quality regulation, climate regulation, existence and bequest value, moderation of extreme events, and those together accounted for 88% of the total estimated ecosystem service value of Vermont public lands. And so this is using the raw numbers of economics. Right? And there are absolutely additional values that we are still figuring out how to quantify. We're figuring out how to take stock of the value of clean air, clean water, carbon storage. That's still a relatively new field compared to estimating the value of wood or raw minerals or whatnot. But based on the latest ways that we do that work, 2,250,000,000.00 is the estimate for the value of Vermont's public conservation lands, state and federal, in 2025. And that's just an incredible value to the taxpayer. Because again, a lot of these services are best sourced from large, landscapes. And I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but 90% of our state lands are in forested headwaters. So again, not all lands are the same. Public and private lands are key to the puzzle. We need them all. We need to conserve all public and private lands. Well, not all, We're talking about, to be clear, 30% by February, 50% by 2050 in Act 59, they're all important. Public lands have a different value because of their location in the landscape, because of the size of the parcels of public lands.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Can you just quickly say what existence and bequest value is?

[Zach Porter]: That's a good question. I believe that has to do with the kind of aesthetic value of of public lands, and it's a good question. I can I can it it's it's it's explained in the report?

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: The term

[Zach Porter]: I Circulate. I'll circulate the report.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Representative Labor.

[Representative Larry Labor (Vice Chair)]: Thank you. Zach, thanks for the presentation. But I've been led to believe that the roast rate of forest and staple line exceeds the cut rate by 4%. Is that still a valid figure? Number one. Number two, you, earlier in the conversation, expressed that a lot of Vermont's forest products are exported as the in the round as timber. Yep. Also been told from several of my constituents who are large landlords that the reason for that is that imaginary line called Canada. I live in an Aussie scheme, they have diminished their purchasing because of politics, if you will, but also governmental subsidies on their side have diminished. So the balance of our wood is either going south or it's going to Maine. A lot of our wood, especially softwoods, goes to Maine. So my question is, how do we subsidize the cost of building? We have to reimport all that Of course. As structural because of the lack of sawmills state.

[Zach Porter]: Those are great questions. And, again, I think what I want to leave you all with is that Vermont already has great minds thinking about how to address those issues. And the legislature has done quite a bit in recent years through the forest futures strategic roadmap and other efforts to try to get a handle on how do we keep Vermont's wood products industry competitive, right, and make sure that we have the infrastructure that we need in the state. I think my main message to you all is that we can do all of these things. And what I presented today is not in conflict with the goals that you just shared. And I am not sitting here as an expert in how to, you know, bolster the wood products industry, and I would not pretend to be. But what I know is that, again, there are a lot of people involved in trying to figure out those questions, and that we can do both at the same time. We can get more from our public lands in terms of these ecosystem services that we need so badly, and we can also address these really important questions in terms of keeping the forest products industry vibrant in Vermont. It's not a great answer to your question. I want to acknowledge that, but I wanna just be as yeah. Obviously, as honest as I can be with you. So I think it's it. Yeah. They're not mutually exclusive and and and yeah, I think I'll just leave it at that.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Two more two more. Representative Tagliavia then Chapin and then we're gonna put her out.

[Representative Mike Tagliavia]: Thank you. A couple of things. You mentioned that state lands currently are managed for timber. Is it your position that they're only managed for timber and not wildlife and not recreation? Of course not. No, no. Because that, to me, is kind of a it wasn't really a full assessment of what timber management actually does in a forest. So I just wanted to clear that up. And the one thing to Representative Labor's point, I think it can be addressed by this committee, is with respect to the wood products, we do export a lot of wood. One of the reasons we leave is timber is because we have regulated the living hell out of the wood products industry. So we don't have sawmills in log yards because of the regulation. I know that's not your presentation, but since we're talking about it, I wanted to make sure I brought it up.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Representative Chapin. Thanks, Nick.

[Representative Ela Chapin]: It was a really interesting presentation. I appreciate how you framed it and all the information you shared. I really were glad you brought up, and I know it's one of your focal points and it's my back of my woods to Wrightsville Reservoir below the state public lands of Putnam State Forest. And I know we went through this, the state went through developing that, working on that land management plan and got a lot of feedback. And it was right after I think flooding and almost topping of that reservoir. And I've been working on dam safety issues of late. I guess I'd really love to hear your comments since you think have paid a lot of attention to that land area about how the process of land management planning and dam safety, both under ANR, but under separate divisions within ANR, What have you witnessed in terms of how well the coordination of that? And I just wanted to dig in a little bit more. So that sort of addressing some of our physical landscape features like dams that the state is struggling to manage as they age rapidly and flooding exceeds our expectations of what some of these physical infrastructure pieces should and can do. And we're struggling to make the investments, which are very costly. So in that kind of a scenario, and I don't know how many are similar around the state, but I know right here, we've got that probably similar with, I presume it's similar with the Waterbury Reservoir and state lands. Just, are we doing enough? Could we be doing different kind of work to really look at the engineering and the land management and the scientific expertise? So like, look at both issues at the same time, or are we too siloed in how we approach it, which is my assumption?

[Zach Porter]: Great question. And the short answer is yes, I think we've been way too siloed in how we look at all these issues that are extremely interconnected, obviously. State hazard mitigation plan, Vermont has a lot of plans. Our state hazard mitigation plan, Vermont Conservation Design Act 59, all again point to the importance of looking at the landscape holistically. Right now, the city of Montpelier is trying to find inches. We're trying to find inches of water that we could reduce from coming downstream, filling Wrightsville Reservoir because that's how close the city came to a much greater disaster in 2023. And when the state of Vermont put out a draft management plan for the CC Putnam Forest, the Worcester Range Management Unit, the state did not initially do a flood risk analysis as a part of that, and we requested one in our comments that we submitted to the state. And to the state's credit, they did one, They found that under the management regime that they are proposing for the C. C. Putnam State Forest, it would raise the Wrightsville water level by, they estimated, an inch at a smaller rain event than the one that actually took place in July 2023. An inch might not sound like a lot, but here's the thing, is that the amount of timber harvest proposed in the Worcester Range Management Plan is actually pretty small compared to all the timber harvests going on in the North Branch Watershed. So if you think about it, there's already quite a bit happening up there. And if you think of the Worcester Range as like a control for the landscape, as a balance point to everything else going on in the watershed, raising that water by an additional inch when we came within, I believe four inches of the spillway engaging at Wrightsville, that's a significant change potentially in our future from what's proposed in the Worcester Range Management Plan. What we know is that timber harvest does have a major impact on amount of runoff, especially in the years immediately following that activity. And protecting and restoring wetlands is another extraordinarily effective way of slowing, spreading and sinking waters. There's been a lot of focus on what we can do in our built environment to reduce flood risks, but there's so much more that we could do at actually much lower cost to taxpayers by changing the way that we leverage our landscape around us. And this bill is one way that we can start to address that by over time increasing the flood storage capacity of our forest land. Additionally, again, there are other questions that should be addressed by this committee in the future, such as what kinds of analysis should the state be doing when it's considering management actions on state lands? What kind of review should go on of flood risk impacts? All of those are things that should be addressed more clearly in statute or in rule and are not currently. So those are really important opportunities. It also, of course, has huge implications for water quality as we're at the ten year mark of the Lake Champlain TMDL implementation. We need to revisit what are the impacts of all these land management choices on phosphorus loading. So it's all interconnected, you said. Great question.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Last one.

[Representative Mike Tagliavia]: You talked about wild lands and their capacity to either absorb water or slow it down. How much difference is there for, like, my land? I've got trees that are somewhere between eighty and one hundred years old, not all, but some. And the difference between trees that are one hundred and fifty and two hundred years, how forested land that are, has that much difference in age? How much difference in water absorption is there?

[Zach Porter]: Great question. So there is a wealth of science about how the older a forest gets, the better it gets at storing and slowing the spread of floodwaters and runoff, How the fewer, you know, roads and other hard surfaces that are passing through a forest, how you reduce runoff and how water quality is improved. That has a lot more to do with, in many respects, the structure of that forest than it does the ages per se of the individual trees. And what I mean by that is that in any given forest, even in our oldest forest, it's a relative minority of trees actually that are old. Even in our oldest forests, what makes our oldest forests different is not just the presence of older trees, but actually maybe more importantly, the complexity of what's on the vertical and horizontal complexity of that forest where you have from just eons of trees falling over and piling on top of each other, that creates what's called tip and mound topography that is this kind of, if you imagine right now, a lot of our forest growing out of former agricultural lands or pasture, it's like hard pan kind of cutting board. Imagine rain coming down on a cutting board down into our rivers versus onto a sponge, and when that water hits that sponge, it slowly kind of, through all that additional microtopography, sinks into the ground and slows down. That's what's missing from our forests, and it's that additional accumulation of woody debris on top of the pit and mount topography that, really kind of, again, reduces that nutrient flow, keeps those nutrients in place, reduces the flow of storm water. So it's great that you have those older trees, and as that forest ages, it's all of those other natural processes that are taking place that are actually going to lead to that greater structural complexity, and the flood risk reduction benefits, the water quality benefits, all of that. So, yeah, that's a great question. I hope that was a helpful response. Somewhat. I just think back, I know one of the rain events,

[Representative Mike Tagliavia]: I was driving down my road watching the water come off the mountain, not only mine, but my neighbors. And the water obviously wasn't being absorbed, because we had months of rain where the soil had just reached its maximum, and the water running off the mountain was, I never thought I'd see that much water running off of, just across the surface. That's why I asked the question.

[Zach Porter]: It's a great question. And again, the thing to remember is that what you're seeing today is not actually the way that our forests should be functioning and the way that they could function in the future. So most of our forests in Vermont are between the ages of 75 and 150, where we haven't done a recent timber harvest, right? Because the maximum for most of our forest is 150 years of age. We've cut, you know, there's less than well under 1% of our forest in Vermont that's never been cut. And so if you imagine that we had agricultural abandonment back in the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, our forests have been growing back since then. Some harvested more frequently than others. But again, the maximum just point 3% of our forests are over 150 years of age in the Northeast. So what we lost wasn't just the trees, but again, a lot of that structural complexity on the forest floor, because the agriculture that followed the clearing really changed the nature of our soils and just the surface, and so it's going to take time for those flood risk reduction benefits to return. But the amazing thing is that they can return and they will return. And we've already seen in so many places, again, most notably nearby the Adirondacks, an area that also had incredible transformation, tremendous amount of timber harvest, has regained a lot of its ecosystem service value by leaving those forests to grow old. Anyways, question.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Alright. Thank you so much for your presentation. It's really obviously edifying and folks are interested. So if you have further follow-up with Zach, I know he's available to take a break.