Over the winter, David Foster wanted to cut down some trees. His neighbor didn’t want him to. Foster is the director of the Harvard Forest, a 3,500-acre experimental forest in the middle of Massachusetts. When you are the director of an experimental forest, people aren’t sure you should be cutting down trees. “We’re cutting an acre of forest, nonnative conifers,” he told me calmly on a day in February, while grabbing some snowshoes. A forest ecologist will tell you that if you cut down some woods — not all the woods, but some of them — a new forest will quickly replace them. There’s a joke in Massachusetts that if you forget to cut your lawn, you will have a forest. For an ecologist, tree-cutting can be a stimulus plan that actually works.
This cycle of forest succession is an observation that Foster attributes to Henry David Thoreau; when Foster is walking in the forest, something he does a lot, he will spot some young white pine trees, for example, in a freshly cut field and say, “There’s Henry Thoreau for you!”
The forest is back in New England. It returned, counterintuitively, while the population increased: Massachusetts, the third most densely populated state, is on the Top 10 list of most forested ...