On Wilderness: Rethinking Climate Crisis

by DAVID CREWS

 for the Northeast Wilderness Trust
and their continued efforts to preserve wild spaces—
especially the Howland Research Forest in Edinburg, Maine

It was once believed the world proved too big, too colossal, grand, that the oceans could not be crossed, the wild animals round up or tamed. Some prayed to the birds in flight, the sun of life and love, and the rains—for months how the rains soaked into everything—dirt, mouth, memory. And then they came. Nothing was left unaccounted for. An abundance of wealth could be found anywhere. They even took the trees.

THE BOOK

One of the most important books I have read in the last ten years of my life—a book that informed much of my own writing, teaching, and self-expression—was written and published in 1967 by a largely unknown English writer.

The year I discovered J.A. Baker, I decided to assign The Peregrine as a summer reading option for students at the high school where I worked. What remains most poignant from that day in September when we all met—a group of scared ninth graders, disassociated seniors, timid and curious students of science—were the blank faces of these thirteen young people. I realized quite quickly not many of them (if any) had even come close to finishing the book. And I am not without empathy.

There are no characters in the two hundred pages of Baker’s text. There is no real story line or a plot. The book comes in one voice: Baker hikes daily for seven months with binoculars and a notepad through the orchards and salt flat marshes of Essex and the Blackwater Estuary near Chelmsford, where he had lived his whole life, to observe and journal the comings and goings of a couple peregrine tiercels.

Reading The Peregrine and later considering Baker’s vision ultimately informed me of an idea I would go on to write and think about: presence—what it means to be present in both mind and body. This idea would encapsulate the ways I would see myself in the world. It came as a true metanoia, what the Greeks referred to as a profound shift in thinking, and it all happened from one book that thirteen teenagers (maybe) did not quite read.

I tried to rally the young people in front of me.

Think about this, I said. Think about the ways humans can affect the environment. We’re in a period of history some now term the Anthropocene. Think about the changes that have happened to the earth since massive industry and modernization separated our sense of and connection to the land (this was Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin). Consider the imagination that comes through a cultural heritage deeply rooted in the land (thinking of Leslie Marmon Silko). Or, consider the curiosity that ignites through observation and experience (as in Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, Ellen Meloy). Consider the alarming realization in the loss of animals and species (Herman Melville, Rachel Carson). How in the end it comes to what ecologists consider a legacy effect and a true developing land ethic (remember Aldo Leopold). It involves ecological injustice, which too is social injustice (James Baldwin), seeing the connectivity of all living things (Annie Dillard), living as part of the land (Masanobu Fukuoka), and getting back to a sense of wonder inherent in the evolution of our sensibilities, joy (Nan Shepherd, John Muir). Ultimately, it must end in retreat, nonviolence, non-destruction; it must end in finding the erotic in each of us, which can come in “sharing deeply any pursuit with another person” (yes, it must begin with Audre Lorde).

Baker was one individual—present in place, here in conscience—a person in the midst of a horrifying realization: that the rise of large corporate industry and its place in our world economy and politics was leading to harmful ecological ramifications, as in, for example, the widespread distribution of chemicals (like DDT) on delicate ecosystems, or killing species (like the peregrine falcon) at alarming rates. Baker must have thought that soon there will be no peregrines left, so he took to the fields and streams with binoculars and a notepad and watched them as they hunted and bathed and preened and slept—because what if one day they were gone?

Talking these ideas through with the group felt astounding to me, and in the end I think the students felt moved too: Baker became a voice for life. He followed the living, gave these animals his presence, and in deep attention gave voice to a much larger intention beyond the self—a recognition of ecological ethos—a profound respect for the biosphere and all the vital ecosystems needed to preserve its existence.

THE WILDERNESS

I first met Jon Leibowitz in the summer of 2018. I had discovered the Northeast Wilderness Trust, a nonprofit based in Montpelier, Vermont, that protects land throughout the northeast United States. They had a project in the works—the purchase and protection of the Eagle Mountain Wilderness Preserve in the northeast Adirondack Park of Upstate New York. Since my ties to this incredible part of the nation’s natural history had deepened in the years after hiking the Adirondack high peaks, I thought it might be inspiring to raise some money to support their efforts. In a time of overwhelming environmental angst, their mission seemed so simple: buy land, preserve it as wilderness.

Of course, that is their mission at the core. The small team of individuals that composes the Northeast Wilderness Trust and their board of directors, which includes scientists, educators, writers, editors, and wilderness advocates, would probably suggest this basic principle of preservation has a much larger reach for species and the land—preservation as part of an ecological conscience, a land ethic. Protecting forever-wild places means protecting nature for its own sake. And 35,250 preserved acres of mountain, stream, forest, marsh, and bog proves to be a fair amount of nature.

Almost twelve months after first connecting with Jon and the Trust, on May 24, 2019, the group invited me to join them on the shores of Lake Champlain in Essex, New York, so we might celebrate the successful purchase of the nearby Eagle Mountain Wilderness Preserve—almost 2,500 acres of northern hardwood and conifer forest that includes over three and a half miles of brooks and 155 acres of wetlands, and that remains a critical wildlife corridor between two blocks of protected public land—home to animals like the peregrine falcon, black bear, moose, dozens of wood warbler species, and brook trout.

Roughly forty-five miles to the west from Eagle Mountain, on the other side of the Adirondacks, sits Weller Pond—the wilderness where Martha Reben lived for over ten years. Reben’s life tells quite an extraordinary story about the possibilities of preserving wilderness. Martha was just sixteen when doctors diagnosed her with an advanced case of tuberculosis, so in 1927, she moved to Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, hoping for a cure. Although she followed the common medical practice of the time, Martha still suffered and her health continued to decline. Over the next three bedridden years, she experienced two nerve operations and suffered a collapsed lung. In a desperate attempt to relinquish herself from the pain and suffering, Martha sought the help of Fred Rice, a local backcountry woodsman and boat builder, who had been advertising in the local paper an alternative to the medical solutions of the time. Martha responded to his ad, and in June of 1931, they rowed to a remote camp on Weller Pond, where she would spend the next ten years of her life living in wilderness. After this period of time, upon consulting her doctors, Martha proved free of TB.

Martha Reben told this story in her first book, The Healing Woods, published in 1952. Three years later, she wrote and published The Ways of Wilderness:

I sat down and ate my sandwich. The sun sank out of sight, and for a while the whole immense landscape glowed rosy purple. Across the sky a banner was flung, thin and wispy, faintly pink, all that was left of the puff of cloud that had come up over Stony Creek two hours before.

Slowly the color deepened to purple, the sky darkened and the stars came out. A peace, profound beyond expression, lay over the woods and waters and a little of it found its way into my troubled being.

I drew the old quilt around me, feeling dwarfed by so much space and beauty. The stars brightened and to the north I could see a few lights, one of them seeming to hang on the tip of a mountain. The only sound was wind rustling through the branches of the shrubby trees behind me, as I sat and watched the wilderness merge into the blue of night. . . .

The isolation of the mountain top, surrounded by miles of moonlit woods and waters was indescribable. Solitude, for me had always been a silent communing with the forces around me from which I drew strength and serenity. Some of my pleasantest hours had been spent in this way, as one might spend them with a well-loved person.

The ways of wilderness cannot always be looked at through a romantic lens, for the wilderness does not always bring comfort or healing. Many know it as a place of danger and mystery, a space one must enter with respect and reverence. Reben’s story, however, speaks beyond lone experience and somewhere in it is this wisdom: to preserve life, and to surround one’s self with life, gives life.

THE SCIENCE

On the 29th of April, 2019, the seventh session of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) began discussing conclusionary findings compiled by 145 expert authors from fifty countries over the previous three years, with inputs from another 310 contributing authors. The response: “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history—and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world.”

The IPBES report elucidates an extensive environmental risk uncovered through this study: the threat of extinction for over one million plant and animal species, many within decades. A globally connected world, findings show, comes with extensive changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation of organisms, intensifying climate change, widespread pollution, and an influx of invasive alien species.

Plant and animal species now find themselves struggling to survive in a rapidly changing biosphere. Ecosystems exist with an inherent interdependency, and the convergence of living beings and the land often operates on a level of great nuance and micro-focus. The integrity of an overall ecosystem proves optimal when left undisturbed. (That seems like an obvious statement.) And yet, an overwhelming collection of research and data published in the science community shows that since the Industrial Revolution, humans have altered the environment in such drastic and widespread ways we are now seeing severe ramifications to ecosystems.

Jerry Franklin, of the College of Forest Resources at University of Washington-Seattle, points out, “Most efforts to preserve biological diversity have focused on species populations.” Franklin shares how the Endangered Species Act stands as a perfect example of these efforts and, of course, holds a proven record of success in a number of respects—black-footed ferret, gray wolf, American crocodile, California condor. Still, many scientists claim there exist simply too many species to account for, and the future of species protection must be rooted in a Gestalten vision for preservation—protection of the ecosystem itself.

Besides containing important habitat for plants and animals, healthy forests protect watersheds, produce clean drinking water, and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Jesse Ausubel and David Victor offer a view of the complex landscape associated with forest management: “Fortunately, the twentieth century witnessed the start of a ‘Great Restoration’ of the world’s forests. Efficient farmers and foresters are learning to spare forestland by growing more food and fiber in ever-smaller areas. Meanwhile, increased use of metals, plastics, and electricity has eased the need for timber. And recycling has cut the amount of virgin wood pulped into paper.” In the last half century here in the United States, Ausubel and Victor note, forest cover has increased.  But what about old-growth forest?

Globally, the World Resources Institute refers to old-growth forest as “frontier forest.” These forests are relatively unmanaged and evolve mainly through natural events. The tree species are native and the forest landscape, which exhibits a natural heterogeneity in tree species, remains for the most part intact. In 1997 the Institute published “The Last Frontier Forests,” in which a group of contributing researchers found that almost half of Earth’s original forest cover was gone. Today, just one-fifth of the world’s original forest cover remains in large tracts of relatively undisturbed forest, and 39 percent of this remaining frontier forest is threatened by logging, agricultural clearing, and other human activity. Only 3 percent of the world’s frontier forest falls entirely within the temperate zone—regions characterized by moderate climate, including much of the US and Europe (frontier forests that are most endangered).

Proponents of land conservation and controlled logging offer a host of reasons as to why cutting down forests proves a beneficial environmental initiative. While ultimately there does not exist any one solution to the ecological issues of our age, managing forests does not always take into account the interdependency inherent in the system itself, nor accounts for a climate that has witnessed an unprecedented rise in temperature, a drastic decline in biodiversity, and an increase of natural disturbances. Managed forests tend to have undesirable consequences that can include a host of environmental concerns, such as soil erosion, the introduction of invasive or non-native species, the loss of carbon (including soil carbon), and an increased density of ungulates that can limit forest regeneration.

Those in support of managed forests often point to new-growth forests as an important preventative measure against climate change, since the percentage growth of a new tree measures high (in comparison to the tree’s relative size). Therefore, it must reappropriate the most carbon from the atmosphere. And perhaps this affirms one of many courses of forestry action humans might consider to revive the biosphere. The statistic most scientists look to with regards to climatic healing, however, is the absolute gain of a tree’s ability to sequester carbon over its lifetime. Nathan Stephenson and a team of researchers report that the mass of a tree is primarily carbon, so naturally carbon sequestration also increases with the size of the tree. And for tree species like the eastern white pine that can live a few hundred years, some even over four hundred, the absolute gain in carbon sequestration measures two, even three times as much, in the totality of a tree’s life in relation to its early years. Preservation discloses an obvious syllogism: the bigger the tree, the more needles; the more needles, the more carbon pulled from the atmosphere.

William R. Moomaw, Emeritus Professor at the Fletcher School for Tufts University, Susan A. Masino, Vernon Roosa Professor of Applied Science at Trinity College, and a team of ecologists have the most alarming statistics of the current life-state for old-growth forests. They note that less than 20 percent of the world’s forests remain intact. In the contiguous forty-eight states, that statistic is reduced to 6-7 percent, and in more developed areas like the eastern US and New England, intact forests are even more scarce—comprising only about 3 percent. Their research refers back to a study published by N.L. Harris et al., who found that of sites across 2.1 million kilometers of forest in the forty-eight conterminous states, during a period from 2006 to 2010, carbon had been lost from forests in several ways. Damage from insects, pathogens, fire, drought, and wind accounted for nearly 12 percent. Forest conversion roughly another 3 percent. It was the managed, harvested forest that lost nearly 85 percent of its carbon. Gone too, essential habitat often missing in younger, managed forests—the necessary, dense understory for salamanders and various species of lichen and moss or the many hollowed-out holes from woodpeckers in old, aged trees that provide nesting sites for screech owls, fishers, or opossums. Consider too site fidelity for globally threatened bird species—Bicknell’s thrush, spotted owl, dozens of wood warblers—gone.

THE RESEARCH FOREST

The 550-acre Howland Research Forest just outside Edinburg, Maine, remains an unknown developing old-growth woods to almost everyone outside a small circle of ecologists. The forest was protected as forever wild in 2007 by the Northeast Wilderness Trust and now serves an important role as one of the most closely studied patches of land in the United States.

The Howland site includes rare forest of hemlock, spruce, and white pine—some trees so vast and old they proved already middle-aged when Thoreau passed through on his way to Katahadin over one hundred and fifty years ago. The Howland Forest was established in 1987 as a research site, and for the last twenty years, ecologists at the U.S. Forest Service and University of Maine-Orono have been quietly churning out groundbreaking data on carbon storage and sequestration.

Site manager John Lee and the team at Howland hold one of the longest records of carbon intake/output, or flux, in the world. Howland scientists have been studying how the intact forest stores carbon. In recognition of this work, Leibowitz confirms the mission of the Wilderness Trust: “With roughly a quarter of greenhouse-gas emissions globally coming from agriculture, logging, and habitat destruction, wilderness recovery offers a powerful complement to efforts to reorient the energy economy toward renewables and implement regenerative agricultural and forestry practices. The latest science from Howland Forest confirms the miracles of technology alone cannot save us from the dual threat of climate chaos and extinction catastrophe. One of the most cost-effective and rapidly scalable solutions to both of these crises is startlingly low-tech: Conserve more wild forests.”

On a hilltop in the Maine woods, wind often blows. It echoes as it moves through the bee balm and basil, into grapevine before an open door, windows. Young hummingbirds chase one another around sunlit blooms and the nesting phoebe silently catches bugs. It’s August, and the living prepare for the dying. Morning into afternoon to evening feel like three seasons—putting on a shirt, taking off a sweater, the birch trees flickering. Will the monarchs come back, will the worm-eating warbler come back? Goats bleat in the clang of chimes.

Tomorrow, John Lee, with professor Shawn Fraver and Dave Hollinger of the U.S. Forest Service, will offer escort for a tour of the site at Howland about a half-hour drive from the Orono campus. I’m reading about these Maine woods—home to moose, black bear, bobcat, bald eagle. Imagine the site where a meteorological tower stands just above the tree line like a needle amidst a widening mass of evergreen. Consider how many trees remain and what comes with their loss. (I want to hear the forest breathe.)

“It’s all part of the carbon balance,” John Lee says. We are standing underneath the primary meteorological tower not even a stone’s throw away from a swamp of black spruce, sundew, Labrador tea. “There is a meter of peat moss underneath the cedar planks,” research associate Holly Hughes tells me, and the swamp itself dates back over nine thousand years. Below it, packed marine clay. Earlier, Hughes showed us how she measures respiration in the soil. The forest continually takes carbon in, but also releases it in various ways—root systems of trees, microbes decomposing—all of it proves part of the complex and nuanced equation that helps determine the carbon flux of the forest. Data Hughes gathers calculated alongside the atmospheric readings of eddy covariance coming from the towers—a series of five data points taken each second that measures the movement of carbon (up, down, horizontal) in the swirling air—assists scientists in building a larger understanding of the forest’s ability to sequester and store carbon. At the moment, our own breathing skews the carbon numbers streaming to the tablet.

Shawn Fraver refers to himself as a dendrochronologist, and his passion for wood decay and decomposition feels contagious. Fraver was born in Pennsylvania and attended Penn State, but completed his doctoral studies in the dynamics of old-growth forests at the University of Maine. After asking us to refrain from stepping on downed trees and limbs, some felled over a hundred years ago, he elaborates on the strange request: fallen tree branches and trunks of wood on the forest floor slowly decomposing under blankets of moss, he knows, still store carbon. “It should be considered wildlife,” he tells us.

Hiking deeper into the forest, Fraver stops at a red maple and begins to gently pet the lichen at arm’s reach. He tells us there are not many red maple trees in this forest, but they are still important. This species of lichen (common name, lungwort) only grows on the trunks of hardwood trees. We were entering a section of Howland where over three decades earlier a NASA researcher by the name of Kate Lejeune mapped tree species in a 30,000 square-meter plot. This research has also been supported over the years by graduate students Aaron Teets and Erin Fien. On the computer screen in Shawn’s office I remember the colored dots: red for red spruce, white for eastern white pine, blue for eastern hemlock.

First, Fraver takes us to the stump of a white pine where, back in the 1890s, it was hand-sawed to the ground. We all stare at the decomposing stump (maybe three feet in diameter) where spruce seedlings pop out, making it look like a kitschy sort of flower box. Fraver points to the decaying trunk immediately next to it. “Do you know why they left the trunk?” he asks. “See, they made a second cut here, a third one there—trunk was rotten.” Now it lies just a long bump in the forest floor fully covered in species of moss, lichen, fungi, and fern. A short and delicate walk from there takes us to a yellow birch Fraver cored back in 2015 with a couple of graduate students. He wound the increment borer, chest-height, to measure the tree’s age and found its life to be over 363 years old.

The older trees get, the more valuable they become, because there is ultimately more wood that can be harvested. But they hold a much more important value: they store incredible amounts of carbon. Fraver talks of soil respiration, carbon released in wood decay, and the carbon sequestered in some very old trees as living proof of the importance in preserving old-growth forests. From an environmental perspective they are vital; from a scientific perspective they are filled with possibility for research and study—now and for future generations. Howland holds the second longest data-flux record in the country behind the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts. But Fraver ends with something perhaps unexpected for a scientist: “The trees should be protected for their own sake.”

The Howland Forest, since 1996, has existed as part of the “AmeriFlux Project,” a Department of Energy program administered through the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that also maintains connection and support for a number of eddy covariance carbon flux sites. Funds from this project provide one hundred percent of the support for some of the researchers at Howland. And, though the ecosystem here proves vital to the scientific community, the land itself was once in jeopardy.

In 2004, Howland Forest was purchased by a timber investor as part of a larger land acquisition and scheduled to be logged the following year. Concerned about the fate of their research, scientists from the University of Maine and the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts with the U.S. Forest Service contacted the Northeast Wilderness Trust and, together, with the help and support of conservation partners, were able to raise the one million dollars necessary to purchase and protect the land.

Protection of whole ecosystems with regards to climate action proves cost effective and scalable. It proves a simple way to address the exponential curve of rising parts per million in the atmosphere. But it does something else: it preserves important habitat for species and biodiversity. It preserves and protects an ecosystem and the multitudinous elements that most of the time remain unseen to those not measuring, observing, or calculating. Holly Hughes points out that Howland sits on the border of boreal and temperate forest: the biosphere offers distinctive study at the ecotone.

Scientists at Howland study both the forest’s structure as well as function. As eco-physiologist, Dave Hollinger points out, the forest may not be considered old-growth in some respects, though on site here there are some really, really old trees. And now that the Trust has preserved the Howland Forest as forever wild, it ages each and every generation. The forest itself contains mostly hemlock and red spruce—spruce, like pine trees, can easily live a few hundred years, and the oldest hemlock species recorded was 555 years old. But the function of the forest matters too. Wood decay and decomposition, soil respiration, photosynthesis—all are part of the delicate balance inherent to the ecosystem. “Carbon is in everything,” John Lee tells us, so it becomes important to study processes of photosynthesis, how the forest metabolizes, and the various unseen ways it might store and release carbon.

The state of Maine, Dave Hollinger shares, is now the most forested state in the nation. Hollinger is from Massachusetts and received his PhD at Stanford. He even served in the forest service in New Zealand for a time. Hollinger’s work with the U.S. Forest Service and at Howland runs deep, and his connection to the other scientists and to the site itself proves both a personal and professional endeavor. Since the mid-1990s, Hollinger, with full support from the U.S. Forest Service, has kept Howland running as an important research site and has served as a principal investigator on the carbon data recorded there.

With so many important people, groups, and organizations maintaining connection, and giving the woods here the sustenance it needs to remain, the Howland Forest holds tremendous possibility in its already aging woods, in the valuable data emanating from the trees, in the forever-wild land that will be available for research for future generations. The chime of a wood thrush, faint and just a ways off from our group, is a vital reminder that the forest is alive, that the fauna and flora under the dark spruce and hemlock canopy are alive, that even the decaying trunk of pine that hosts moss and lichen and fungi and fern is alive.

THE METANOIA

Henry David Thoreau’s second excursion into the wilderness of Maine began when he left on a steamer for Bangor at 5:00 p.m. on September 13, 1853. This trip ended in a telling recognition: “Those Maine woods differ essentially from ours. There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood-lot, some widow’s thirds, from which her ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan, too, and old bound-marks may be found every forty rods, if you will search.”

Thoreau follows with another telling recognition for the land: it may not be long before the woods of Maine look in sight and sound to the shores around Boston.  

We did not know retreat.

As a species we have always moved, escaped, fled, spread, conquered—from Africa into the Middle East and back to Africa, into Europe and to the Arctic and back to Europe, across an ocean and into other oceans and back, around the world, from continent to continent, to globe into space and around the globe and to the moon and back.

What if we stopped spreading, invading, conquering? To live to preserve life—preservation beyond the self.

Baker writes early in The Peregrine, “I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.”

There is a world beyond the self. One on the edge of the living. To feel the land and the living is to feel our presence.

“As I sat under the immense arch of the sky,” Martha Reben writes, “looking down upon the slumbering wilderness I knew that nothing, for me, would ever be the same again, that hereafter the bigness and littleness of things would forever have a changed significance.”

It was once believed in life the trees held medicinal power, the alchemy of deep forest, some called it healing woods. It was deeply wild, the self-willed land. And it was here long before the name for it. We praised it as ancient wisdom, a music in the leaves. A quiet place in the dark forest we remembered, the brook cold as stone. We returned to it again and again—without plan, without reason.

Sources

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Bryant, Dirk, et al. “The Last Frontier Forests.” World Resources Institute, 1997.

Crist, Eileen. Abundant Earth. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Franklin, Jerry F. “Preserving biodiversity: species, ecosystems, or landscapes?” Ecological Applications, 3, 2, 1993, pp. 202-05.

Hansen, A.J., et al. “Conserving biodiversity in managed forests.” BioScience 41, 6, 1991, pp. 382-92.

Hardin, Garrett. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science, 162 3859, 1968., pp. 1243-8.

Harris, N. L., et al. “Attribution of net carbon change by disturbance type across forest lands of the conterminous United States.” Carbon Balance Manage, 11, 24, 2016.

Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. “Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating.’” Media Release, 7 May 2019.

Leibowitz, Jon. “Maine wilderness can help save us from climate, extinction crises.” Editorial. Press Herald, 21 June 2019.

Moomaw, William R., Masino, Susan A., et al. “Intact forests in the United States: Proforestation mitigates climate change and serves the greater good.” Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 2019.

Stephenson, Nathan, et al. “Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size.” Nature, 507, 2014, pp. 90-3.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods. New York, Penguin, 1988 (reprinted).

Winter, Kate H., editor. The Woman in the Mountain: Reconstructions of Self and Land by Adirondack Women Writers. Albany, SUNY Press, 1989.

Wood, Alan K. “Parallels between old-growth forest and wildlife population management.” Wildlife Society Bulletin, 21, 1 2006, pp. 91-5.