Your Role in Wildlands and Woodlands
Here's What You Can Do:
- Learn More: Get informed about topics of interest to you or ask questions from our panel of experts.
- Contribute to the Discussion: Join our Wildlands and Woodlands (W&W) listerve and participate in moderated on-line conversations.
- Contact the W&W Writers and Speakers Bureau: Are you interested in highlighing the subject of Wildlands and Woodlands in a newsletter, magazine article, or meeting?. If so, we can connect you to people who write and provide presentations about W&W.
- Join our Partnership: Invite your organization, town, school, employer, place of worship, or club to become a Wildlands and Woodlands Partner.
- Participate in an Event: Join in on one of many Wildlands and Woodlands events.
- Support Us: Here's how you can support various Wildlands and Woodlands Partners and the Partnership as a whole.
- Take Action: Urge your legislators to support Wildlands and Woodlands and other measures to reduce and sequester greenhouse gas emissions.
Doing Your Part Is In Your Self-Interest
There is a role you can play in helping to make the Wildlands and Woodlands Vision a reality on your land, in your neighborhood, community, watershed, region, state and country!
We believe:
- At least half of New England's remaining forests,1.5 million acres in Massachusetts, for example, should be protected from development as natural infrastructure to support human and non-human communities alike.
- Some existing state forests should be managed as large "forever-wild" reserves where natural processes would dominate and human interference minimized, and
- Half of the remaining privately-owned forests should be protected from development and managed for many objectives including local wood production and drinking water.
If Protecting 1.5 Million Acres Sounds Like Too Much Conservation, Read On!
Of Massachusetts' 5 million acres of land, 1 million acres are already developed. The Wildlands and Woodlands vision still allows for land to be developed at its historical rate (1951 to 2005) even while an equal half is protected. Based on the current rate of development, new housing, roads, and big box retail would deforest another 1.5 million acres by 2050, equal to doubling the current level of development and then building on another 500,000 acres.
It sounds like a lot, but imagine instead if we were not successful with Wildlands and Woodlands. Consider the quality of your life if all the remaining 3 million acres of forests became new subdivisions and malls?
It's also important to keep in mind that temperate, mid-latitude forests, like ours in the Northeast, provide a significant sink for carbon dioxide, a green house gas. In fact, our forests, unlike tropical forests, will be absorbing carbon for the next 100+years (Wofsy, S. C. The Harvard Forest and Understanding the Global Carbon Budget in Forests in Time, edited by D.R. Foster and J.D. Aber; 2004). Our forests play a critical role in mitigating the impacts of global climate change.
Go to What you can do
Still Not A Believer? Keep Reading
The Wildlands and Woodlands vision still allows for a troubling rate of development, but would set aside for natural processes and for local economies those forests critical to clean air and water, carbon storage, biodiversity, recreation and local wood products.
Unfortunately, much of this new development could be a continuation of sprawl - a conversion of our forests and farms to 2-acre house lots, for example.
One way to bring the W&W vision home is to think about the number of 50-lot subdivisions that could be built in your town, on average, if sprawl is allowed to consume all of the remaining forest or just half of the forest by 2050.
Each city and or town in Massachusetts would have:
- With W&W: 18, fifty-unit subdivisions
- Without W&W: 36, fifty-unit subdivisions
This will be a "hard" deforestation in which forests will be unlikely to grow back once land is covered with houses and pavement.
We need at least half of the remaining forestland to remain as forest to provide clean air and water, rare species habitat, climate change adaptability for native plants and animals, and current and future sources of renewable energy.
The time to act is now!
