In New Hampshire, the most beloved swath of public land is the White Mountain National Forest. People interact with it as they would a national park – hiking, swimming, camping, and more. But a national forest is NOT a national park.

The difference comes down to a fundamental concept: the “multiple-use” land mandate. In the WMNF, you’ll find parts of the forest preserved for wildlife conservation, recreation, climate resilience, and, most controversially, logging.

This episode looks at one patch of forest from three different perspectives: a conservationist who would like to see cutting halted in the WMNF, loggers who would like to see it ramped up, and the US Forest Service that has to somehow appease them both.

Featuring Zack Porter, Jeremy Turner, Charlie Niebling, Jasen Stock, Jim Innes, and Luke Sawyer.

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

Zack Porter references this study that shows the potential carbon storage in Eastern forests by 2100.

Conservation groups and logging advocates filed an amicus brief together against Standing Tree’s lawsuits.

In 2024, the Southern Environmental Law Center sued the Forest Service over its timber targets.

NHPR has been covering the legal fight in the White Mountain National Forest over the past year. You can read some of our previous coverage here and here.

SUPPORT

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CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported and produced by Kate Dario

Mixed by Kate Dario and Taylor Quimby

Editing by Taylor Quimby and Nate Hegyi, with help from Rebecca Lavoie

Our staff includes Marina Henke, Justine Paradis, and Felix Poon

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio

Music by Blue Dot Sessions

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio

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Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Nate Hegyi: Outside/In producer Kate Dario has been out in the woods… a lot lately.

Kate Dario: How far from where you’re thinking, our goal for place are we…cause I have some follow-up questions…

Zack Porter: Probably half a mile? Maybe a quarter? We’re getting pretty close.

Nate Hegyi: That was Kate with conservationist Zack Porter. It was fall. They were hiking in New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest.

Zack Porter: We're here at the Great Gulf Trail, trailhead on the edge of the Presidential Range. One of the most, you know, iconic, magnificent landscapes and the whole of the eastern US.

Nate Hegyi: At the trailhead… the Forest Service had posted instructions for hikers… Leave No Trace… stay on the trails… carry in…carry out.

Zack agrees with this advice.

Zack Porter: But what I see when I look at the sign are all of the ironies in what we see here.

Blue Dot Sessions - Kettletopper

Because while the Forest Service is telling people to leave no trace… they’re also planning to allow the timber industry to cut down thousands of trees…. right near this spot.

Zack Porter: When I read a sign like this and I see these admonitions to, you know, be careful out there, be respectful. It just doesn't sit well with me knowing what the Forest Service is planning to do in this really special place.

Nate Hegyi: I recently moved to New Hampshire from out West – where logging is a fact of life. But here, in the White Mountains… with its ski areas, popular hiking trails… only three hours from Boston… many people treat it more like a national park. But:

Deputy Chief Chris French: National forests are not national parks

MUX SWELL

Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi.

And I hope you brought your intellectual machete, because today we are cutting a path through some thick and thorny territory.

We’re going to hear two very different perspectives about how this forest should be used… First, from a conservationist who is suing to stop logging projects in The White Mountain National Forest.

Zack Porter: It's the public's land. It's not the Forest Service's land.

Second, from loggers who say this work is being done responsibly.

Charlie Niebling: This is going to sound strong, but it's morally reprehensible that we don't do more to try to satisfy our demand on the resource.

And, we’ll try to understand if these perspectives can co-exist.

Producer Kate Dario has the story… stay tuned.

Act 1:

Kate Dario: So we’re gonna spend most of this episode deep in the woods… but first, we gotta begin in the history classroom.

[archival mux here]

The US Forest Service is a federal agency with roots that begin in the late 19th century…

This is the Gilded Age… and you know what that means… industry tycoons are constructing massive new railroads across the continent… cities like New York are booming, pushing their skylines upward.

So people needed a lot more wood… and they went to town on our forests…

Archival audio: 1:01 “The loggers slashed into the virgin forest with little to no thought for the future… they left scenes of desolation as they moved onto to new forests to be despoiled.

Blue Dot Sessions - Miniatures

After a few decades of this… Timber was in short supply… Parts of the American landscape were looking a little hellish.

So the federal government took action…

Archival tape: 1:28 “In 1891 Congress began setting asides large tracts of timber as forest reserves and watersheds…but the fact that some of these tracts are called reserves does not mean that no trees are cut.

At its start, the Forest Service had a somewhat contradictory goal… to preserve forests, yes… but for future timber extraction.

Archival tape: For trees are like any crop. They must be harvested when mature. Otherwise they rot away and are wasted.”

[short mux swell]

But in the 1960 and 70s, national attitudes about the environment shifted. A new law mandated the Forest Service balance timber extraction… along with things like protecting wildlife… watersheds, and recreation.

This principle is called “multiuse.”

It became the bedrock of the agency’s work. But it’s also the source of a lot of conflict.

[mux swells and fades, sound of leaves crunching under boots rise]

Few federal forest lands are as famous or beloved as New Hampshire’s.

The White Mountain National Forest is bigger than Rhode Island. It’s home to some of the tallest mountains east of the Mississippi.

Zack Porter: I think of the White Mountain National Forest…These are my backyard, too, you know. And, um, I've always felt that way.

This again is conservationist Zack Porter.

Zack Porter: This is the way our forest should look. This is a time capsule. It’s a glimpse into the past, and an idea of what the future could look like. We aren’t going to be able to ever recreate what was here 5 or 600 years ago, because our forests are different now.

When I first moved to the state, I was awestruck by this place. It’s a sea of green (or orange and red… if you’re here in the fall).

I was surprised this wilderness had survived “untouched.”

But the truth is that this forest hasn’t been “untouched” in a long, long time.

There is evidence that, for thousands of years, the Abenaki people burned large swaths of this forest.

And in the 17 and 1800s, European colonizers cleared most of New Hampshire’s tree cover for agriculture.

Walking through the woods today, you can still see the scars of that time: crumbling stone walls and old trails from fading logging roads.

Zack knows all this, by the way.

He’s executive director, and as of now, the ONLY full time employee of a nonprofit called Standing Trees…

…And what he wants is to see this forest become something most of it hasn’t been for hundreds of years: Old-growth forest.

Zack Porter: We’re already in an extremely old stand here. This stretches from here all the way into the Great Gulf Wilderness. And I don’t know many hikers start down this trail realize how exceptional it is here. I think many appreciate it’s beauty. I’m not sure how many realize it’s unique across the entire White mountain National Forest.

Ecologists quibble about the exact definition of old-growth… which can also vary based on species and climate… but generally speaking here in New England… we can say old-growth forests are about 120 years old or older.

Based on the history we went over there is basically none of that left… Less than 1% of the National Forest. And the Forest Service has restrictions in place against cutting what remains.

But there are lots of middle-aged and mature trees… trees on their way to becoming old-growth. And they are right in the crosshairs of any proposed logging project. And Zack thinks we need to do a wayyyy better job protecting them.

Blue Dot Sessions - Chequered Blue

Now, Zack isn’t against ALL logging. He says that's out of step with our society’s need for wood.

But he’s got three reasons why he thinks it should only happen on Private lands.

First… he says public forests in New England are good for the planet.

Zack Porter: Here we have a forest that is on average much more mature. It's recovering from intensive cutting a century and a half to two centuries ago. Some of it, though, has even escaped perhaps timber harvest since colonization.

Trees in New Hampshire’s National Forest tend to be older than their privately owned counterparts….

And older trees store more carbon than younger trees. Keeping carbon out of the atmosphere is essential for mitigating climate change.

Research shows that New England could store even more if we just let middle-aged trees develop into true old-growth forest.

Zack Porter: We could double the carbon in most of our mature forests here by 2100 if we just let our forests continue to grow older.

[mux swells and fades]

So that’s reason number one: the global climate.

Reason number two, is that Zack also argues logging here is bad for the local environment.

Older trees form vital ecosystems… They’re a bulwark against extreme weather events like floods, droughts, and fires… and provide habitat for endangered and vulnerable species like northern long-eared bats, and cerulean warblers.

At one point on our hike, we were standing on a suspension bridge over the Peabody River… This is where the logging project that we mentioned at the start of the episode would take place. And Zack started musing about all the ways it would disrupt water quality…

Zack Porter: This is clear, cold, clean water pouring out of the presidential range… Timber harvesting leads to increased sedimentation and runoff, increased amounts of nutrients that are causing the algal blooms that we're experiencing in our New England water bodies today.

Finally, … These forests are just special to Zack. That’s his third - and maybe most abstract - but also most deeply held point.

Zack Porter: “The White Mountain National Forest is our collective backyard. That's what public lands are. They are our shared space to reconnect with something greater than ourselves. To build stronger relationships with other people in our lives. Um, to ground ourselves in the very frenetic world that we we live in.”

Blue Dot Sessions - Burrough

[mux swells]

For these reasons, and believe me… a lot more… Zack is on a mission to stop the proposed project that would approve commercial logging in about 3,000 acres of this public land

Zack’s non-profit, Standing Trees, is suing the Forest Service… alleging they broke the law by failing to adequately investigate the project’s environmental impacts.

It’s one of a handful of lawsuits he’s filed against the agency over similar projects around the region.

The Forest Service, by the way, has argued they’ve followed the rulebook.

Now… Let me underscore that Zack is hardcore on this issue. Like really hardcore.

He stands apart from most mainstream conservation groups in New England.

In fact… a handful of them filed an amicus brief against Zack’s lawsuit.

We’re talking about The Nature Conservancy… the Audubon Society… Big name groups that have been protecting the White Mountains for a lot longer than Zack has been alive.

They believe that this project is part of what it means to be “multi-use.” Yes, there is logging. But this project also includes new backcountry ski zones, and 6 miles of mountain-biking trails.

They’ve also pointed out that the proposed logging project only represents less than half of one percent of the entire National Forest.

In other words, they have worked with the Forest Service to preserve the principle of compromise.

[mux]

But Zack doesn’t think different stakeholders get equal seats at the table. He thinks old habits die hard.

Zack Porter: Timber harvest still reigns supreme on Forest Service lands. And it outweighs and it outbalances all of the other uses and values that we know we need, even more now that we acknowledge and knew we need based on the science that we had available to us in the 1960s and the 1970s.

Each year… the Forest Service sets timber targets that determine how much wood it should extract nationally.

Recently… that number has been as high as 4 billion board feet… which would encircle the globe more than 30 times.

And Zacks says meeting this number often trumps all of the agency’s other aims…

Zack Porter: “The multiple use mandate is being subsumed by these timber harvest goals and how, you know, protecting clean water, storing carbon in our forests, providing wildlife habitat. It just can't compete with these, you know, top of the agency directives to get out the cut. And all of a sudden multiple use doesn't mean very much anymore.”

Blue Dot Sessions - When in the West

This is a tension in national forests across the country.

A 2024 investigation by the Southern Environmental Law Center obtained internal Forest Service documents.

They said that, in the Southeastern United States, meeting these targets was the agency’s [QUOTE] “number one priority.”

It’s not clear that’s the same here in New Hampshire.

But these fights are happening at a critical moment for climate change. 2024 once again set a record for the hottest year ever recorded…and Zack says the Forest Service is behind the times.

Zack Porter: Today, we haven't seen a commensurate shift in Forest Service priorities, a rebalancing of those multiple uses that matches what the science is telling us about our public lands, about our national forests.

[mux]

After the break… I go out in the woods with the people Zack disagrees with most: loggers.

ACT 2:

Kate Dario: This is Outside/In and I’m Kate Dario.

I had gone out with a die-hard conservationist. Now, I wanted to hear from the other side: …the loggers.

Kate Dario: Great. Okay. A lot of interesting points. I just realized I forgot to button my jacket and put my mic on. So I'm going to do that very quickly…

I met up with a group of loggers - or, local timbermen – Lumberjacks, if you will – in central New Hampshire.

[tape of machines whirring around… of trees being cut]

I watched them process logs based on size and species.

Jeremy Turner: The northern red oak will usually be furniture or fixtures in homes, the soft wood is exterior – typically structural in buildings. Parts and pieces are locally used as fuel, for firewood…

This is Jeremy Turner… a local forester.

We met at a private timber land… which was the best way for me to see the machinery in action…. But we talked about logging in the White Mountain National Forest.

As expected, Jeremy and the other guys he was with saw the issue through a totally different lens.

Jeremy Turner: Just because we’re harvesting trees here, doesn’t mean we’re harvesting all the big, old trees. We’re leaving an array, a spectrum of age classes and sizes…

Blue Dot Sessions - Heather

Gone were the terms “mature and old growth” and “endangered species.”

The phrases they used were “economics” and “renewables” and “board feet.”

It was like they were looking at the same trees but speaking a totally different language.

Jeremy Turner: The intent here is to put the right tools in place for the outcome, to meet and exceed the objectives as the owner….

One of the most stark differences was how they saw time compared to Zack.

Zack spoke with one eye on the sands of the hourglass. To him… if we cut down mature trees … we’d be resetting the clock by about 100 years… a century he says we don’t have to spare.

Jeremy sees it differently.

Jeremy Turner: Time is very different, tree time I call it is quite different than people time.

In other words, logging may look rough to some of us. But trees grow back. Long-term, Jeremy says the forest is going to be fine…

And unlike fossil fuels… which are gone as soon as you burn them… we can keep growing new trees on the same patch of harvest land again and again.

Here’s landowner and logging advocate Charlie Niebling

Charlie Niebling: And wood is actually a far preferable product than the artificial alternatives: concrete, steel, plastic.

To them, It’s just like that video from the 1940s said: trees are a crop. Don’t let them go to waste.

[mux swells and fades]

These guys are not climate deniers… but Charlie is skeptical of how climate science has rapidly begun to dominate forestry conversations… often overpowering management practices that have been around for decades…

Charlie Niebling: The hook or the strategy of using climate science or perspectives on climate science to try to influence public land management in particular, is a more recent phenomenon that's really only entered into the, uh, the debate or the dialogue in the last, say, 10 or 15 years.

[mux]

This is particularly confusing, because there is also a set of advocates who say logging isn’t inherently bad for the environment.

That’s because – even though older trees can store more carbon over time… Younger trees, that grow after a logging operation, store carbon faster.

Having some new growth as part of an overall forest ecosystem… some argue that’s just as important as protecting the old stuff.

Charlie says, this is the kind of active forest management that allowed the National forest to reach the state it’s in now.

Charlie Nebling: What happened in the White Mountains 125 years ago? They were stripped, uh, through pretty indiscriminate practices, and the recovery of that forest is an incredible success story of very active and conscious management decisions.

The timber industry we’re talking about isn’t the same as it was in the 1900s.

Roughly 60% of the White Mountain National Forest is completely closed off to logging… though, to be fair, a lot of that is at high and hard to reach altitudes.

Only about 1% is being cut at any given time.

And when public lands are reserved for logging, - that means they’re not at risk of being turned into parking lots, like could be the case on private land.

Jasen Stock is Executive Director of the New Hampshire Timber land Owners Association

Jasen Stock: Frankly, the biggest threat to our forest is development and loss of land to development. You know, once you put down six inches of blacktop, those regeneration rates, nothing really wants to grow there. So keeping forest as forest, you keep coming back to that.

Blue Dot Sessions - Base Camp

Of course, a big reason Jasen and these other guys want to keep cutting is that timber harvesting makes money.… especially in the rural and often poorer northern parts of the state.

The timber industry here brings in $1.6 billion annually and supports around 7,000 jobs.

Giving that up doesn’t mean logging doesn’t happen. To Charlie… it just means it happens somewhere else.

Charlie: It's, um, this is going to sound strong, but it's it's morally reprehensible that we don't do more to try to satisfy our demand on on the resource instead of exporting that demand to other parts of the country or other countries around the world that may not have as stringent environmental safeguards and forest management as we do here.

[Mux swell and fade]

These two points of view… to cut, or not to cut… They can seem completely incompatible. But that’s “multi-use.”

Which brings us the ultimate arbiter of all of these decisions… the Forest Service itself.

Jim Innes: I’ve reffed soccer games. So, you know if you’ve ever been to one there’s people on the sidelines, “hey ref this is stupid!” They’re yelling at you, and you’re trying to like, get the plays right. It’s easy to stand on the sidelines and wag your finger and criticize. It’s another thing to try and be in it, and make it work.

Jim Innes is one of the three district rangers in the forest. And wise management to him is multiple use.

Jim Innes: Well, it’s the multiple use mission. That’s important. We provide a lot to the public. Clean drinking water. Timber. Wildlife habitat… that is the purpose of the Forest Service, the purpose of the Forest Service is to manage that land wisely.

Innes doesn’t think it has to be contradictory.

Jim Innes: If we wanted to manage forests for climate mitigation, we need to have young stands and old stands for storage. So I think folks need to understand that, that we can't just say, okay, we're going to stop all forestry because then we'll sequester all this carbon. We need to have a steady supply of of wood products to the to the public.

As I reported this story, I really struggled to understand how both sides of the debate could be true at the same time.

I found myself getting caught up in all the details – is local wood really better than importing? What are the emissions costs of logging itself? What’s better for climate: fast-storing new trees, or the bigger carbon investment on old-growth forest?

One forestry expert I spoke with told me these two ways of calculating the carbon math can often get hijacked by different sides of this debate… people can focus on one while ignoring the other.

And the truth is, this is really a difference in value systems.

Take the new trees vs old-growth debate.

If I told you to give me $1000 of your savings, and in 10 years I would give it back – you’d say, no way. You’d be better off keeping it in the bank and getting interest.

That’s what Zack thinks – why cut these trees when keeping them on the land will grow their carbon storage? And protect habitat?

But let’s go back to that $1000 I borrowed.

What if I told you that I used the money to build a house, or heat a home, pay a contractor… and in the end, you still get your money back...

People on this side of the debate say we rely on wood as a species.

This divide even shows up in the science.

There are studies that count new growth as carbon storage – even though we had to cut down old trees to get it. And there are other scientists who say that doesn’t make any sense. Would you say you made 1000 dollars, if you had to spend 1000 dollars to get it?

In other words, it’s not that one side is getting the math wrong – it’s that the two sides are starting from different numbers.

[Mux beat]

When I was out with Forest Service officials… they took me to a young grove.. The trees were about shoulder height… there was nothing to block out the bright daylight. I had to put my sunglasses on.

Luke Sawyer: So we are standing in a harvest unit that was completed in late summer of 23. It's a clear cut, and it's about 18 acres in size. And it was predominantly um prior to cutting was predominantly hardwoods, uh, birch, a lot of beech, oak, ash, various species.

That’s Luke Sawyer, a timber sale administrator for the Forest Service.

He helped organize this timber sale. A local private company cut the trees.

Clear cut is a phrase that evokes a lot of fear in people… they imagine desolate fields with only sad, lonely stumps left.

But that wasn’t this grove.

Luke Sawyer: And we are now looking at a little over a year's worth of growth, a year and a half of growth on it. And we have thousands and thousands of stems per acre of paper birch, aspen, pine, cherry that are all three plus feet tall.

They told me that this young growth had opened up habitat for different species… helping songbirds, moose and deer.

Jim Innes: [FS 3; 5:13] And this is the side of forestry, The story that doesn't really get told. So if you know, a lot of times people present a picture of, you know, day one, after everything has been all the timber has been removed. And, you know, this evokes a lot of emotion.

Blue Dot Sessions - Scals Derby

Jim Innes: Uh, I'd like to see people come back and take a picture, you know, a year or two years, three years after. Because this is the result. Now, next year, these are going to be much larger, these trees, and it'll quickly fill in.”

[Mux]

We live in people time. It can be hard to see tree time… even with my sunglasses on.

And it can be hard to parse out the carbon math… how do we balance the different carbon draws… and drawbacks of differently aged trees? And how do we balance this all with the reality that we use so. Much. wood.

Your walls…your floors… your notebook pages… all were once a tree.

Does public land mean a place we can all extract from? Or is it a place we all protect?

Some want the Forest Service to be a protector … and some want it to be a user of the forest… and so it does a little bit of both… and that leaves both sides a little disappointed.

What does it mean for something to belong to all of us?

[Mux]

Nate Hegyi: This episode was produced, reported, and mixed by Kate Dario.

It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby, with help from our director of podcasts, Rebecca Lavoie. Our team also includes Felix Poon, Justine Paradis, and Marina Henke. I’m your host, Nate Hegyi.

If you have any questions for us, the number of our voicemail hotline is 1-844-GO-OTTER. We love hearing from you. Please call us with your questions, your feedback, ideas for the show. No question is too silly or too serious.

Music in this episode came from Blue Dot Sessions,

Outside/In is a production of NHPR.