Conservationists urge state, regional steps to protect New England’s oldest forests at Simsbury Center event

At a forum at the Simsbury Center, conservation researchers and advocates warned that only a tiny fraction of southern New England is permanently managed to allow natural processes to prevail and called for coordinated policy steps to increase protections for mature and old-growth forests.

Alex, a policy director who opened the session, framed the problem as one of competing land needs: housing, agriculture and forest-based industries versus the space required for resilient ecosystems. "The cheapest climate strategy that we know of is to let trees keep growing," he said, arguing that protecting mature forests would meaningfully increase carbon stocks while costing far less than many engineered alternatives.

Susan Msino, a professor of applied science at Trinity College and Hartford County coordinator for the Old Growth Forest Network, spent much of the presentation defining "wildlands" as tracts permanently protected from development where management is intended to allow natural processes to prevail. "You can deal with invasives, you can have trails, you can deal with public safety," she said. "The intent is that it is a natural area." She pointed to a pocket of old forest along Hartford's Park River — with trees that predate the Revolutionary War — as an example of significant local resources that currently lack special legal protection.

Panelists reviewed state-by-state policy experiments. In Maine, researchers using lidar have mapped small, older stands in vast unorganized territories, and an introduced bill to prioritize conservation of parcels with old trees and to require state reporting was voted down amid opposition from the forest products council and the state forest service, presenters said. In Vermont, a change to the use-value/current-use tax program now enables a landowner category that can be managed for old-growth characteristics rather than active commercial harvests; a separate bill to designate large tracts of state lands as wildlands is under debate. In Massachusetts, advocates described incremental private-reserve purchases, a newer reserve-funding program and repeated legislative attempts to lock more state forests into stronger protections.

Michael Kell, executive director of Restore the North Woods, urged a larger public-lands approach, including proposing about 100 new national park units nationwide (roughly 10 in New England) as a partnership model to raise the share of strongly protected lands toward 20 percent. "Most of these lands are already publicly owned lands," Kell said, describing partnership models that would federalize stronger protections while coordinating management with states, municipalities and land trusts.

Local examples and next steps were emphasized. The presenters said a student-led project by Jack Rudd doubled Connecticut’s known old-forest sites by comparing historical aerial photos to current maps. Speakers highlighted Simsbury’s 40-acre Beldon Forest — donated with explicit intent to remain wooded and managed under a natural-area stewardship policy — as a model of municipal and donor protections. The panel urged land trusts to audit portfolios for parcels appropriate for permanent natural-area intent, recommended state-level mapping and inventory legislation, and encouraged organizers to press sympathetic legislators with drafted bills and data.

The session concluded with practical resources and outreach suggestions: QR-linked reports, a short "old-forest scavenger hunt" for lay identification, and references to recent studies on proforestation and on the ecological basis for limiting clear-cutting in the Northeast. Presenters stressed that the immediate steps are mapping and clarifying intent (public vs. private), strengthening legal protections where possible and expanding public understanding rather than assuming technical consensus will automatically emerge.

No formal votes or municipal actions resulted from the session; presenters framed the meeting as an informational and organizing step toward legislative and local stewardship work.