Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Justin Lindholm (President, Vermonters for Clean Environment; former Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board member)]: Oh, yeah. That's fine. You're live. Go ahead. Okay. Good. Thank you for inviting me to speak today, all of you folks. And my name is Justin Lindholm. I live at Chittenden, town of Chittenden, Vermont. And I have been on Fish and Wildlife Board for several years. I'm also a member of Vermonters for Clean Environment. I'm the president of that outfit, even though it really doesn't give me a whole lot of power, but Annette Smith, who runs the place, put me as president. And I've done a lot of work for Vermonters for Clean Environment on environmental issues over the years. And we sometimes we don't make the right happy, and sometimes we don't make the left happy. And actually that shows we're doing something right because we try to deal with what we think is the best way of doing things in Vermont, proper renewable siding, things like that. We're not against renewables, but we want proper siding, things like that. Anyway, what I'm gonna talk about today is h two seventy six, and I'm gonna give you a couple of backgrounds on myself. One is that I have a perspective from both sides on this bill. I have used a chainsaw for thousands of hours. I have permanent nerve damage in both hands from using a chainsaw. I wake up twice a night at least and have to shake my hands out to get back to sleep because they're on fire. That's from using the chainsaws. They rattle all all the time when they're in your hands. I have done a lot of work usually fifty, over fifty years of using a chainsaw. So I do cut trees and a lot of them have all my life. Even though I'm in my seventies, I still use a chainsaw. The other thing that you should know, I'm gonna act like I'm into myself a little here, but you need to know, I grew up in deep woods. From five years old on with no adult supervision, we lived back in deep woods. My mother, me, and my seven year old brother when I turned five. My father had just died the year before. It's now considered child endangerment to let a kid do what me and my brother did. We went into deep woods with no adult supervision constantly starting at an early age. Because of that, I really understand woods. I have only been lost once in my life, that was for three quarters an hour when I was 14, and I enjoyed every second of it. It felt weird. I don't get I have a sense of position. I think Native Americans had that when they were growing up also as kids deep in the woods. And I do understand the woods, when you really don't know the woods, it seems like a humble jumble out there, but it isn't. It's an orchestra. Everything is interacting. The plants interact with each other. The wild animals interact with each other. The wild animals interact with the plants. The plants interact with the wild animals. It's fascinating to sit out in deep woods all day long and watch some of this. At least it is for me. Okay. So we've got that. Now we can get into this panorama photo here. Over fifty years ago, this is taken from Birds Eye Mountain, this photo was taken probably twenty years ago, but over fifty years ago, my dream when I moved back to Vermont, I've always been a Vermonter when I grew up, but I had to leave Vermont for junior high and high school, go to another state. When I came back to Vermont, my dream was that this everything you see in that picture, almost everything you see in that picture, I wanted the state of Vermont to own it. The state of Vermont had no interest in it. I bought the Birds Eye Cliffs. This is taken from the Birds Eye Mountain, which is inverted 300 foot cliffs. It's one of the best peregrine falcon sites in the state. Ranked number five usually of all the sites in the state. It's a beautiful, super wild area. The state has done research on it now, and they have found a lot of rare things they don't even wanna talk about. That's how rare and unusual this place is. Now the state finally stepped up to the plate and bought this. Vermonters for Clean Environment worked on it really hard to get the state to own this. Now they absolutely love it now that they own it. They have done a twenty year long range plan just ended last year to help preserve this place and propagate it for hunting wildlife, the wildlife that hunters normally hunt, bear, deer, partridge, things like that, as well as some of the really wild species like bobcat. This place is full of bobcats. Because of the bobcats, there aren't too many coyotes because they don't get along with each other. They get out of the way. Bobcat will always win against a coyote. But what has happened is they went through several years of research to figure this is a wildlife management area owned by the state. The different than a wildlife management unit, we have units everywhere in the state. The whole state is nothing but units. But this is an area. It's owned by the Fish and Wildlife Department of the State of Vermont through Pittman Robertson money. Pittman Robertson money, 1937, they decided they had to preserve land in this country because there was very little preserved at that time. So they came up with special tax on guns, ammunition. It's 10% at the wholesale level. We never see it when we go buy a gun or ammo, but it's paid 10%. That's a pretty good tax, and it's been done ever since 1937. And the money from Pittman Robertson is most of what is involved in buying this 3,600 acres here. So this is one of the crown jewels, only eight miles from the center of Rutland City, and it is it just feels nice. Nice and quiet. Now what they did with their long range plan was excellent. I helped out a little bit with it, and what they did make excellent sense. And this is what I want to go at. You don't want to go one side totally or the other side totally, no logging or all logging. There can be some compromise that makes really good sense, especially on a place like this. What the state decided to do for the twenty year plan is all the steep stuff, and it probably is forever now, all the steep stuff upon the high mountains it goes way down to way down into wells almost. All of this very steep stuff, they decided don't log it again. That was a brilliant idea as far as I'm concerned. The lower lands, log those for the hunters. Now remember this, Pittman Robertson money was made for hunters. That's what it's supposed to buy land for hunters, mostly, but also for people who like to just enjoy it when hunting season isn't going on. And it just it was a very nice you can call it a compromise, but it's actually common sense the way they did it. If you have very steep land, it's hard to log anyway. I wouldn't think a logger would wanna get on a lot of that stuff. He's not gonna make a lot of money. He's gotta build these roads, then watch out for erosion. He has to do wicked erosion control. He's on very thin soils, it's just a very expensive thing. When you do logging, you do come up with early successional, but it's only temporary for like eight to ten years. What I like to see is successional that is continuously maintained. And on this Birds Eye Wildlife Management Area, they're talking about continuously maintaining some lowland areas for early successional for the deer and the grouse and other animals, rabbits and whatever, that makes sense. But to just log and then eight years later, it's not early successional anymore, all the feed value for the animals and wildlife and the, it just goes away. So you have to watch when you hear people talk about, oh, creates early successional. What I've been telling even the federal government is to create early successional and continuously maintain it. We have done that at my relatives' camp. We have 20 acres with apple trees, planted apple trees, let the brush grow up under the limbs, keep a three year rotation of cutting it, you should see the wildlife come into that place. And the wildlife gets way out, this is all surrounded by national forests, the wildlife spends time up in the national forest during the daytime and everybody's happy. It's wonderful, I'd recommend that the state and the federal government do this all over Vermont, so that we don't have to worry about logging this stuff. Now, logging also brings on invasives. They love going right up where it's been logged. One of the worst places of invasives we knew this was going to happen was up at Lowell Mountain. They logged it all off for the wind turbines and the place is full of invasives right now. They tried herbicides, it didn't work. That's what happens when you do that kind of stuff. So you have to watch the logging. Course invasives can go anyway. They can always be there. The forest floor always heats up when you've just logged. You can actually smell the turpentine in a lot of the it's like a turpentine like sap out of softwood trees. And that can actually create a forest fire if somebody throws a match. Much easier because it's now wide open for a few years until it grows back. So you have to watch it. They always say, Oh, you have to log out West. Maybe you do have to do some more logging to prevent some forest fires because they have huge conifer forests. We don't have huge conifer forests here. Most of ours are deciduous broadleaf trees, and the deciduous broadleaf trees never get hot like those conifer huge conifer forests that they have the fires out west and out in Canada where they burn hundreds of thousands of acres at a time. Fortunately, Vermont does not have that problem. Wildlands. If you leave some land alone, the good thing about wildlands where you let it just keep growing and leave it alone forever is it cools the forest floor. It creates a cathedral. It's like walking into a church cathedral. You see the the big ceiling way up there. On a hot day, it's still cool in there. This is what happens when you go through a very mature forest. The canopy is way up there, about a 100 feet. And the ground is moist. Even in dry times, it's moist in that kind of woods. There's very little of it in Vermont yet, but I've been in a lot of it. And it is really I go way, way back. I love getting steep as I can in the wildest places, both Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. And our wildest place in Vermont is the Aiken Wilderness. And the Aiken Wilderness has not been logged for, I don't know when, but it is really getting good. And I've been in the Aiken Wilderness over 20 times. It's the wildest place in Vermont, beats anything in the Northeast Kingdom. And it creates its own early successional habitat once it gets super mature because windstorms will bring the trees down. They will actually there's a place down there that I got into a couple years ago where it's a couple 100 yards wide and somebody told me it's a mile long, but I know it's several 100 yards long, this place where everything got blown down in this one spot. That happens naturally, so you have natural early successional if you leave things alone in certain areas. Lots of study was put into the Bird's Eye wildlife management area. Lots of public input. I like to see that around forest areas too. And let's see. Over here, the Pittman Robertson Act, we have to watch. I read that bill, and it wants to stop logging in a lot of the wildlife management areas that were bought with Pittman Robertson money, most of the money was Pittman Robertson and other sources also. But I think that's illegal to just say no logging. I've heard in other states they've tried to do something different besides help the hunters out and because the money is for hunters. So if I was the state, instead of getting embroiled on a bunch of lawsuits over these wildlife management areas, I would leave them alone and let them be managed with these long term plans as they have been. I think that's for the fish and wildlife areas. This is my idea. The other thing I would do, the state parks, I would say, yeah, you don't have to log those. They're a park after all, and they're made for looking at beautiful big trees. Of course, you're still gonna have a lot of that early successional created through windstorms, so sometimes it will get ugly in those. But on state forest lands, what I would do is anything steep, Hamel's Hump State Park, leave it alone. Anything that's up on steep high mountains, things are fragile the higher you go up on mountains. I've been way up on Killington, Middle Killington, Shrewsbury Peak, that's down around Rutland County. And you can see how fragile things are. The soil is very, very thin. The growth is extremely slow. You can actually look like a piece of spruce down, a spruce, little spruce trunk, and you would think, well, that's probably five, ten years old. I actually did one of those and cross centered. A low growing spruce, It was like sixty years to get to that. And that's fascinating how slow things roll up there. It is very fragile. Leave it alone. So when you get a higher elevation so there's plenty of room for us to do leaving things alone. But if we don't compromise, as I've said to a lot of people doing rules and laws around here, you don't compromise. Sometimes you get nothing or very little. So let's go for a lot of no logging, but make this bill so that it is more compromising. Get rid of the idea of, say, no logging on wildlife management areas. Say, yes. We won't log on state parks. And then state forest down low logging, steep hillsides, leave those alone, high elevation, keep those alone. That's my idea. And I will tell you one thing about experts. I'm going give you expert testimony on why you should not believe experts all the time. My stepfather was in federal government and he pounded this into me growing up and boy, have I seen it. You have experts who work for federal government or state government. Lots of times, they have somebody breathing down their necks who's political up above them. They either twist testimony or they don't give you the full testimony. And one of those that happened to me was the state owns a fish and wildlife shooting range down in Hartland, Vermont. It was so unsafe. I couldn't believe it. People were using full automatic machine guns down there and blowing up over the backstop, blowing all the trees apart. The state got the town of Heartland is right beyond it, plus the interstate, plus playgrounds, schools, everything. This is in the trajectory kill zone of all these bullets. We learn about it in in hunter safety. Every person in the room, there were, like, 30 some officials, the fish and wildlife department that told me to go pound sand that I was wrong. They found an expert who came in and said, well, all the bullets are hitting freeze. You can see that. They're not going be the blue sky between the tree trunks? So I finally, really put my foot down, and they stopped that shooting range and made it safe. That's why you have to watch expert testable from state and federal government. Very important. That's my presentation.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Thank you. That was great.

[Justin Lindholm (President, Vermonters for Clean Environment; former Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board member)]: Anybody have questions?

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: So you said you hunt lost. Yeah. Do you still hunt?

[Justin Lindholm (President, Vermonters for Clean Environment; former Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board member)]: Oh, yeah. Yep. Yeah. I do hunt. I don't I'd rather guide people. In fact, over on Birds Eye on state land, I've got a really good deer stand over there, but it's it's so hard to get to. Nobody ever goes back. When I bring them in, uh-uh, we ain't going back. I'm talking rugged folks. And I have actually injured myself in there getting into it. I fell 11 times one time just getting to this place. But I took this young fellow in, and he had just had a kidney transplant. So I got him in there, here comes a four pointer opening day. He had four chances to shoot this thing walking slowly by him. And I'm looking at him. I didn't bring a gun. He's got the gun. He didn't pull the trigger. I'm happy. He was happy. He didn't want to. That's good. Hunting is not about killing. It is about getting out there. And half the time, it's just seeing what's going around and going by. I've had chances to play with bobcats where they try to sneak around they always know you're there too. But they're they'll sneak around and look at you, and, oh, it is it's quite entertaining if you sit quietly and just observe.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: We don't have a lot of time to get to the floor, we're I'm or there's a bill that we have that is considering bringing back, doing a feasibility study about bringing back the cat a month. I was wondering if you could just quickly.

[Justin Lindholm (President, Vermonters for Clean Environment; former Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board member)]: Yeah. I just talked to a person who's on that side out there. We get along very well. This is what I recommend to everybody. When I was on the Fish and Wildlife board, I would reach out to the other side. Other board members wouldn't. This is so important to do, to reach out to the other side. And, like, I'm just talking out here for about twenty minutes to one who's on normally the other side. At amounts. Uh-uh. It won't work. There's a lot of non hunters who would be horrified by the idea because they will eat people under certain circumstances. The only thing I tell people, like I told somebody today, catamounts and wolves hate eating people because they have to pull the clothing off first. Otherwise, it bungs up their bowels. That's a good one. But, anyway, I would not reintroduce wolves. I would not reintroduce padamounts. Let's just leave this alone. And on the other side, the state wants to charge non hunters $5 a day at $20, a season for walking on these wildlife management areas. Uh-uh. That will go nowhere. I don't know why. People got to think a little deeper and wider to see what action we can have.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Thank you, Sarita. You very much. We all need to hear

[Justin Lindholm (President, Vermonters for Clean Environment; former Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board member)]: that. Good.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: You want to start?

[Justin Lindholm (President, Vermonters for Clean Environment; former Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board member)]: Yeah.