Forests in Time: The Environmental Consequences of 1,000 Years of Change in New England (review)

What a pleasure it is to review Forests in Time, Foster and Aber's highly readable account of the 60,000 square-mile largely forested landscape of New England, a region of the country once described by Bernard DeVoto as a "finished place . . . the first American section to achieve stability in the conditions of its life" (quoted in Neal R. Peirce, The New England States [New York, 1976]). For me, after more than seventy years of living in and helping care for the New England environment, it has also been an opportunity to stroll down memory lane and re-encounter thoughtful, pipe-in-hand Hugh M. Raup, the Harvard Forest's early director-philosopher; Ernest M. Gould, its much-beloved economist and New England forest specialist; and the remarkable new generation of scientists and policy analysts assembled by David R. Foster, the able present-day Harvard Forest director.

Forests in Time is one of a series of syntheses of multidisciplinary research projects supported by the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program, now twenty-five in number throughout the United States. The Harvard Forest LTER, launched in 1988 as a joint venture of researchers at the University of New Hampshire, the Marine Biological Laboratory's Ecosystem Center, the University of Massachusetts, and Harvard, has stimulated the efforts of more than fifty investigators from many different disciplines whose contributions are featured in the twenty-four chapters contained in Forests in Time. But unlike more traditional summaries of research, this one is distinctly and purposely different. First, the synthesis is the result of three years of discussion among the researchers themselves about what should be included. Second, the text is mercifully bereft of much of the usual scientific documentation, which has already appeared in the published literature, thereby enabling the authors to write more broadly about the significance of their work. Third, unlike many other traditional research compilations, the editors themselves have been active contributors and participants.

Forests in Time divides the New England analysis into five sections: forest ecology and change, regional history and landscape dynamics, legacies of historical change, understanding forest ecosystem dynamics, and lessons from the forest and its history. More than two-thirds of the book deals with the history and landscape dynamics of New England's forests. We learn, for example, that in this human-dominated region, there is little left that is truly natural. We are reminded that many desired conservation goals, such as preserving pastoral viewsheds, often turn out to be more cultural than ecological and actually require continued human intervention. We were encouraged to find that in one central-Massachusetts study area, 40 percent of the land is already receiving a measure of protection, but sobered by the observation that the pattern of these protected lands was often haphazard, making the action collectively less effective than it might have been.

The bottom-line finding of the synthesis is the need for New England to incorporate landscape change as an integral component of its long-term planning, and to start to fill the void between local and global concerns with actions at intermediate and/or regional scales. The emphasis should be on protecting functioning ecological systems, not just preserving individual species, assemblages, or sites. Thus, Forests in Time is a treatise as much for planners and policymakers as for scientists.