PACHAUG FOREST, Connecticut -- The trail through the woods meanders along a gurgling stream beneath a canopy of oak, maple and beech that filters sunlight into shades of yellow and red.

We clamber over a collapsed stone wall and stop beneath a grand oak tree that could be the centerpiece of a Sierra Club poster . . .

With a twist.

"A hundred years ago this was pasture or cropland -- probably corn," says Marty Cubanski, a veteran state forester. "I've taken core samples in this area. The oldest trees are about 75 years old."

As we walk, he points out the foundations of a 19th-century barn reclaimed by what appears to be a forest primeval.

Don't look now, but the trees have returned to New England. While we bicker over the future of Northwest forests, these woods tell an environmental success story.

Authorities say forests now cover more of New England than at any time since the Revolution. Connecticut, for example, is the fifth-most-densely populated state, yet 60 percent of the state is designated as forest --mostly in small, private parcels.

With the trees come wildlife. Just a generation ago, wild tukeys were on the brink of extinction. Now their comeback is so dramatic that some folks consider them pests. Deer have become nuisances. Beaver dams block creeks and culverts, causing floods. Even wild bear and moose have been seen in these woods..

"Wildlife thrives in transitional forests," says Cubanski. "I love to see nature coming back. There's so much going on here."

For centuries, people battled these forests. Long before the English arrived at Plymouth Rock, Native Americans cleared land for crops or burned forests to make wildlife accessible.

Colonists accelerated the process. Despite poor, rocky soil, they tried to farm the land, stacking the stones into fences. They used wood for everything--lumber, cooking, heating, and eventually to stoke furnaces to make iron and steel.

By early in the 19th century, the forests had retreated to the Catskills and Appalachians. Early photographs show homes, barns and stone walls cries-crossing a stark, nearly treeless landscape.

The resurgence began more than a century ago, when farmers moved west in search of cheap land and fertile soil while coal replaced wood as the primary fuel.

So the forests began creeping back.

"Nobody planned it that way," says Cubanski. "The pattern of ownership was so fragmented, it would have been difficult, at best, to manage. But values changed from fuel and heat to aesthetics and recreation."

The results are dramatic. Seen from Interstate 95, the major freeway linking Boston and New York, the landscape is a sea of trees with the occasional church steeple peeking over the top. These woods produce a steady flow of commercial timber -- mostly pine and hardwoods. But they also have become a major tourist attraction -- particularly in their fall regalia.

Most of the regeneration was natural.

But Civilian Conservation Corps workers planted millions of seedlings during the 1930s -- including much of the Pachaug woods that are Cubanski's domain.

Cubanski leads us further up the trail to a quiet glen, where the creek is backed up by a long-abandoned dam.

Today's forest is not the same, he says. The chestnuts that dominated two centuries ago have been replaced by oak, maple and pine. But it is difficult to make value judgments from that. "The original forest was not original either," he says. "It had been altered dramatically by the Indians."

"Nature is dynamic," Cubanski says. "A dozen years ago, the gypsy moth was a horrible problem here. Then along comes a fungus that turns out to be the enemy of the moth. Something disappears and something else takes its place. It may or may not be what we want, but here it comes anyway."

Perhaps there's a lesson for the Pacific Northwest. Sure, our conifer forests are different. But conifers, like any other tree, grow back. Those ugly clear-cuts are not permanent.

John Gordon, a former Oregon forester who moved to the Yale School of Forestry 13 years ago, suggests a deeper lesson. The biggest difference between our forests and theirs is the pattern of ownership. Most Northwest forests are owned by government or timber companies that harvest forests like a cash crop.

New England's forests are dominated by small, private landowners, who respond to different incentives. They harvest timber in smaller parcels, even tree by tree. They rarely clear-cut. An economic process leads to ecological rewards.

"The Northwest needs to deal with its forests on a smaller scale," says Gordon. "We need to ask: who owns the land?"

That doesn't mean selling off our national jewels; public ownership is too deeply imbedded in Western values. But as they reevaluate our much-abused forests, Northwest timber managers would do well to take a walk in the woods of New England.

Subscribe Now!

Originally published in The Seattle Times, Nov. 11, 1995. © Copyright 1995 THE SEATTLE TIMES COMPANY. Reprinted by permission.