This commentary is by Jonathan Leibowitz, the president and CEO of Montpelier-based Northeast Wilderness Trust, and Robert T. Perschel, author of “Numinosity: A New England Forester’s Search for the Ineffable” and former executive director of the New England Forestry Foundation. The closur e of Finch Paper’s pulp mill in Glens Falls, New York, is a blow that will echo across the Northeast for years. For loggers, truckers, foresters and woodlot landowners, this is not some distant threat to worry about in the future. It is — today — lost income, lost markets for wood and the continuing fraying of a way of life. One of us has spent a career practicing and advancing forestry; the other leads an organization devoted to wilderness protection. You might expect us to disagree about what comes next. We don’t. Because we both understand a truth that gets lost in moments of crisis like this one: The amount of land we can set aside as wilderness depends wholly on how well we manage the rest of the forest and thus the health of the timber industry. Both wildlands and managed woodlands are needed. Conservation underpins it all. Wildlands and managed woodlands are not competitors. They are two halves of the same landscape, and the fate of each is bound to the other. When local mills close and markets for timber disappear, landowners lose the income that helps keep forests whole. Land then gets sold, subdivided and paved over. That fragmentation is the true threat to the Northern forest, and it takes everything with it: the logging jobs, the deer camps and a way of life. It also takes away the possibility of conserving wild places. Put simply, a wilderness advocate who wants more wildlands should be rooting hard for a thriving forest economy. And a logger who wants strong markets and a healthy land base should welcome a network of wildlands that keeps large forest blocks whole, stores abundant carbon, provides the wildlife habitat and ecological processes that are difficult or impossible to maintain in managed forests, and models the full range of what these forests can be. Neither vision succeeds on a landscape carved up, fragmented and developed. Keeping forests as forests is something we ought to all agree on. We all have a responsibility to work together toward that end. But forests won’t remain forests without conservation. The forces battering the forest products industry are enormous: global commodity markets, consolidation, tariffs, shifting demand for paper, rural development pressure and the rising cost of doing business. These forces are confounding precisely because no logger, landowner or policymaker controls them on their own. And we know that when the ground shifts beneath us, it’s easy to seek a convenient scapegoat. Recently, there has been a lot of finger-pointing at conservation. But the honest answer is harder: The threats to forestry and to forests largely come from the same place, and they are bigger than any of us alone. Vermont has lost more than 5,000 acres of forest per year on average since forest cover peaked in 1997, while the forests that remain shrink into smaller parcels. Conservation is the counterforce to that trend. READ MORE Conservation — whether of wilderness or managed woodlands — and a viable logging industry are complementary, not opposed. And the research backs that up.  In 2024, a team of New England forest scientists laid out exactly how conservation and the logging industry fit together in a report called “Beyond the ‘Illusion of Preservation,’” reviewed by us. Its central insight should be read aloud at every meeting where conservation and forestry are pitted against each other. New England produces only about three-quarters of the wood it consumes, and we make up the difference by importing wood from places with often far weaker environmental and social protections than ours. So when we reduce logging while keeping our own consumption static, we are not saving forests. We are simply exporting the environmental costs of our lifestyle elsewhere. The Finch closure, which will merely send pulp production elsewhere, is the illusion arriving on our doorstep. The report’s answer is not to choose between conservation and logging or even between wilderness and managed forests. Rather, it is to protect far more of both: 70% of New England permanently protected as a mosaic of both wildlands and actively and responsibly managed woodlands. The report even shows that up to 20% of the region could be permanently conserved as wilderness while still meeting our timber demand. The better we care for the health of managed forests, the more of the landscape can be left wild. It bears repeating that the overwhelming majority of conserved land in Vermont and across New England remains open to logging. When done well, conservation is not the end of forestry; it is one of the few tools that guarantees a land base for forestry. The path forward for the Northern forest, here in Vermont and beyond, will be built by loggers, foresters, farmers, landowners and conservationists working together with a shared vision for the forest’s future, or it will not be built at all. The woods have always asked us to take the long view. We argue that the long view says this: Keep the forest whole, keep people working in it, and keep some of it wild. Conserve as much as possible before it disappears. These goals rise and fall together. Read the story on VTDigger here: The future of logging and conservation is one and the same. ...read more read less