When Zadock Thompson wrote his Natural History of Vermont in 1854, he depicted a wasteland. The state was 80 percent deforested within decades after the Revolution. Thompson noted that all larger wildlife, including even beaver and white-tailed deer, was for practical purposes eradicated from our denuded slopes.	Illustration by Suzanne DeJohn

Today, though, thick forests once again clothe the Green Mountains. Not only deer and beaver, but also bear, fisher, bobcats, and moose have re-established robust populations here. The past century of re-wilding in Vermont—and throughout much of the rural Northeast—offers as dramatic a case of ecological recovery as one could find anywhere in the world. It allows us to think about wilderness in the future tense, not just in the present or the past.

SOME JULY MORNING, walk south on Forest Road 49 where it diverges from Route 125 near Middlebury Gap. As the narrow track skirts and crosses Boyden Brook, grasses will crowd closer, their seedheads ripe and drooping. You’ll see ox-eye daisies, yellow jewelweed, and purple flowering raspberry flourishing thickly in the ditches, along with tall nettles that will go to seed at the end of the month and establish waystations for the goldfinches. When you abandon the road and start bushwhacking up the slope to your south, you’ll pass through some old patch-cuts where the red-berried elder are also now at their showiest, with elongated clusters of berries bending down the terminal twigs.

Sunny clearings will continue to open amid the trees, even after those roadside cuts have been left behind. These are stands of aspen, beech, and birch that still show the drastic effects of an ice storm in the winter of 1998. At certain elevations in the Green Mountains—often, it seems, between 1,000 and 1,500 feet—it looks as if a heavy chain was dragged through the treetops. Trunks of up to a foot in diameter were snapped off by the weight of thickly coating ice. The woods above the village of Bristol, where my family and I live, sounded as if they were enduring an aerial bombardment in that ice storm. Explosive bursts followed by reverberant crashes continued through the windless night. But many of these broken trees are now producing healthy foliage on their remaining branches. Thick new bunches of leaves sometimes grow right out of the trunk, just below the break. They match the bright green of herbaceous plants on the forest floor, which are seizing their own chance to prosper in these post-storm clearings and stimulating a correspondent population-surge in the rodent realm.

The colors that brighten this morning’s hike mark the early stages of a successional process. They are tendrils of the forest, quick to repossess light-filled openings in our wet Vermont landscape. Woods like these may not be pristine, but they are a fine place to remember that wilderness is always a process, not a steady state. Old-growth forest in Oregon has achieved an astonishing biotic density and beauty over the centuries. Such deeply interwoven natural communities are sacred legacies for the whole earth. But there is a complementary value here, in our resurgent forests—an invitation to identify with and participate in their highly visible processes of succession and recovery. A hike in the Vermont woods can help us remember that, wherever it may be located, wilderness is never just what’s left, but rather what’s happening.

As you climb past the wreckage of the ice storm, you will come to a much more ancient and significant interruption in the forest’s main flow. The central ridge of the Green Mountains stretches north–south for most of the length of Vermont, in an extension of the larger Appalachian thrust. But just ahead here is a line of peaks running nearly perpendicular to it. Philadelphia Peak, Monastery Mountain, and Worth Mountain make a wall from east to west that joins the central spine at Romance Mountain, the other 3,000-footer in the vicinity.

Such a rampart wedged against the topographic grain largely thwarted road-builders in this portion of the Green Mountain National Forest. Bounded on the west by Middlebury and Route 7 and on the east by Hancock and Route 100, it is an area that extends south from Bread Loaf and Route 125 all the way down to Rochester, Goshen, and Salisbury. Another largely roadless area opens up again to the south of those towns. The higher reaches of this rugged terrain feature spruce and fir considerably more massive than is usual in Vermont, where so much of the forest is second- or third-growth. They also hold much less undergrowth than the more recently cut slopes below. Such groves of mighty columns rising above a spacious but shadowy forest floor recall Frost’s wonderful description, in the poem "Come In," of mature eastern woods as "the pillared dark."

This forest, with its remoteness from traffic and other human activity, harbors one of Vermont’s healthiest populations of black bears. They can venture down to the lower-slope beech groves when putting on fat for the winter, then return to their winter dens with some assurance of privacy. Who knows? In combination with the 22,000-acre Bread Loaf Wilderness Area just north of Route 125, these heights might help provide a more stable base for the catamounts that are sporadically passing through our region again. Imagining those slit-eyed ghosts on the prowl is one exciting aspect of the Romance Mountain Wilderness Area proposed for this remote portion of the Green Mountain National Forest.

MUCH OF THE LAND in this proposed new Wilderness Area belonged to a pioneering conservationist and philanthropist named Joseph Battell. He was a resident of Ripton inspired by the writings of both Thoreau and his fellow Vermonter George Perkins Marsh. At Battell’s death in 1915, he bequeathed most of his vast holdings—encompassing much of what is now the northern tier of the Green Mountain National Forest—to be maintained as "forever wild." A number of factors complicated the implementation of Battell’s legacy, however. These included legal questions of definition, economic pressures, and the sincere belief of many foresters at the beginning of the twentieth century that in order to "preserve intact said wild lands" they must continue cutting. Eighty-six years later, we are still hiking up into his expansive vision of Vermont wilderness, along the logging roads of its postponement. I see the intervening period not as a defeat, though, but rather as a productive time of dialogue and clarification. It has framed a process of succession in our cultural landscape and our natural environment alike. By stages as distinct as the reassertion of a forest where a clearing used to be, Joseph Battell’s vision has come to feel both compelling and practical today.

One important marker in this successional story was the publication, 34 years after Battell’s original bequest, of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. Its essays "Thinking Like a Mountain" and "The Land Ethic," especially, laid the foundation for the 1964 Wilderness Act. In 1975—11 years after that landmark legislation and 60 years after Battell’s death—the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act was passed with the leadership of Vermont’s Senator George Aiken. Natural areas east of the Mississippi that were not as vast or pristine as those in the mountainous West, but that nonetheless had important biological, recreational, or aesthetic qualities, became eligible for full protection as Wilderness. Joseph Battell’s legacy, Leopold’s writing, and these two landmark bills were all necessary stages in the process of recovery that now allows us to conceive of an expanded system of Wilderness in Vermont. Battell himself took a long, but also a hopeful, view of cultural change as dramatic as the wilderness movement:

[I]t is very difficult and in some if not many cases impossible for those educated in a system of either politics, science, or religion to relinquish tenets that they have always been instructed in and supposed to be correct…it is therefore a slow process for the world to leave the paths, however erroneous, in which it has long traveled. ¹

The Romance Mountain Wilderness would be our seventh federally designated Wilderness Area in Vermont and could thus form, with an expansion of the existing Bread Loaf Wilderness, a contiguous block of approximately 45,000 acres of preserved forest. With these additions to the National Wilderness Preservation System, over 1% of the land in Vermont would have this highest level of protection—out of the total of over 12% conserved to one degree or another at the federal and state levels.² These figures are scarcely impressive when compared with the percentages of public lands or the acreage of designated Wilderness in several western states. Still, it seems possible that we have reached a stage in the maturing of wilderness thought when our recovering eastern wilderness has a crucial word to say in the national dialogue about Nature and culture.

The genius of the wilderness ethic has been to affirm natural values that transcend narrow definitions of human utility. I believe that it and jazz may truly be America’s most important contributions to world culture. Jazz has continued to unfold as new generations of musicians celebrate and build upon the innovations of their musical ancestors. At one point New Orleans, at another Chicago or Kansas City or New York, have been the locales for breakthroughs in the jazz imagination. So, too, our thinking about wilderness has naturally evolved. California, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Alaska have been important sites in the development of the American wilderness movement. Vermont and the rest of northern New England may now be able to make a contribution of their own to this process. The recentness of our reforestation and the small scale of official Wilderness Areas in our state may help us both to go beyond apparent dichotomies and to conceive of a larger ecology of environmental thought.

Just as parks and wildernesses are so much smaller here than in the West, so too the pattern of forestry is often quite different. Almost 80% of the forest lands in Vermont (about 4 million acres) are in private ownership. Over the past 22 years—during which our six Wilderness Areas were being established—the Vermont Land Trust was buying conservation easements on 324,440 acres of land. This amounts to 6.4% of the state’s privately owned open land. The past few years have also seen the founding of a new organization called Vermont Family Forests. It promotes green certification for forest lands, along with cooperatives, portable sawmills, solar kilns, and local, value-added manufacturing. Such initiatives give landowners an economic alternative to clearcutting, high-grading, and subdivision.

I would not want to minimize the challenge of coordinating such efforts with an ambitious new wilderness movement. Real compatibility will only become possible if all sides pursue a whole-landscape approach to environmental advocacy. But I want to declare that, in the Vermont context, "conservation" initiatives focused on rural communities and traditional land-based livelihoods have the potential to reinforce the "preservation" of wilderness. They can buffer and connect the wild cores of our state. Just so, the ecological integrity and the balance of farming and forestry here depend upon, and must take their cues from, the recovery of wilderness in the mountainous fastnesses that are Vermont’s heart.

In Vermont, where we have relatively few acres protected as Wilderness Areas, this will require ambitiously expanding the extent of such lands. At the same time, we must take care to surround them with private forests and farms that are managed with an eye to habitat protection and restoration, and that also protect our towns from suburban-style sprawl. Wendell Berry evokes the wholeness of such a vision in his essay "Conserving Forest Communities," when he writes, "Wilderness gives us the indispensable pattern and measure of sustainability."

To see wilderness and traditional rural livelihoods as competing goods, or even as opposed philosophies of environmentalism, would be a failure of ecological insight. Within the map of a humanly and naturally viable Vermont, the farms and cities alike must be managed in relation to the habitat linkages and buffers that replenish and protect wilderness. The human community’s flow of food, energy, and transportation must be coordinated with the migrations, browsing, and reproduction of wildlife. The expansion of wilderness in Vermont is a crucial element of a larger vision of ecological health and cultural balance. A healthy and truly inclusive community of life is the most beautiful and motivating goal, not wilderness apart from that.

1] Cited in Jim Northup, "Joseph Battell: Once and Future Wildlands Philanthropist," Wild Earth, Summer, 1999.
2] I am indebted to Chris McGrory Klyza for this overview of public lands in Vermont.

John Elder is the Stewart Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. His books include Following the Brush, Imagining the Earth, and Reading the Mountains of Home. An anthology of writings about northeastern wolf recovery that he edited, The Return of the Wolf, was recently published by University Press of New England.

Thanks to The Wildlands Project and Wild Earth for their graphic design assistance with this essay.