Land of Many Uses

 The motto, if you will, of the National Forest system, is "land of many uses". You can see it right on the signs. The first time I can remember seeing that motto was scrawled across the bottom of a sign for the White Mountains National Forest. One of the most striking landscapes in the northeast, the White Mountains feature some of the more severe topography in the Appalachians. Unlike much of the old mountain range, which Westerners often write off pretentiously as underwhelming hills, the Whites stand tall, rocky and steep. The Presidential Range features a stark tree line and some gorgeous high elevation habitat as well as some of the harshest weather on earth at the top of Mt. Washington. But you can drive to the top of that mountain, or ride a train there, and I'd be lying if I said that didn't make me cringe just a little. The White Mountain National Forest feels refreshingly beautiful and natural though compared to a lot of New England. But the reason I remember that signage so distinctly was that my father called my attention specifically to it, elucidating a point my young mind was not yet privy to: a National Forest designation, though it denotes protection to some extent, also seeks to maintain usage of a resource. In the case of the White Mountains, that often meant logging. And on that very same trip we'd hike into a patchwork of cuts, where the star filled sky was visible through where trees would otherwise be visible. It was strikingly beautiful, a far cry from the meagerly star-studded, light-polluted sky in most of Connecticut. 

I think it's very important that I not that cutting down trees often promotes biodiversity. That may seem counterintuitive, but as our forests mature, they often do so in unnatural ways. We've altered the woods here so thoroughly that if you dragged a pre-colonization native American into a time machine and brought them back to present day, they'd think they were somewhere else even if you brought them somewhere without a single building or piece of infrastructure in sight. There is hardly any old growth left, the species diversity has entirely changes, and we manage the land in an entirely different fashion. It is in part because of this alteration that we need to manage habitat now. And cutting down trees can be a part of that. In 2022 and 2023, I surveyed timber rattlesnake habitat with CT DEEP Herpetologist Mike Ravesi. Mike was performing frequent surveys in preparation for a "daylighting" project, which would involve selectively cutting down trees to ensure that sunlight could get to the forest floor in some key areas. This can have significant benefits to a lot of plants, insects, mammals, and birds but we were interested in cutting down trees in this zone to improve basking conditions for state endangered timber rattlesnakes. Sometimes, cuts are done without a direct conservation point like that but still result in positive outcomes and increased biodiversity. And, of course, logging can be very damaging and disruptive as well. But it that clearing in the White Mountains- where the harvesting of trees was done in a scattered, selective manor -berry bushes flourished where little but moss and ferns would otherwise. So use doesn't always hurt. But it does dissuade notions of wilderness or a completely natural setting that would otherwise creep into mind at the mention of a National Forest. 

This was very centered in my mind as I passed the first sign for the Allegheny National Forest in western Pennsylvania on a grey, cool-ish August day. The land of many uses. This can well describe much of Pennsylvania, which is a treasure trove of natural resources. Especially fossil fuels. In 1859 Edwin Drake was hired by New York lawyer George Bissel, who founded the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, to travel to Titusville and drill for crude oil. This was a pivotal moment in the industrial revolution, one of many Pennsylvania has been responsible for as a provider of coal, oil, and more recently, natural gas. 

One of the "many uses" for Alleghany Natural Forrest is mineral extraction, and that includes natural gas. The resources bellow that landscape are abundant and in some cases very much up for extraction. There are literally thousands of gas wells in Allegheny National Forest. And according to the Forest Service there were 11 fracking wells as of 2018. For those that may not know what fracking is exactly, it is a method of natural gas extraction using pressurized fluid. If not properly and safely performed, fracking can contaminate groundwater. In Dimock, Pennsylvania faulty wells drilled by Cabot Oil & Gas leaked methane into the ground water, apparently leading to residents of the town being able to ignite their tapwater on. In Oklahoma, fracking and wastewater disposal (pumping the contaminated water into the earth below the water table) resulted in a steep increase in earthquake activity with some rumbles exceeding 3.0 on the Richter scale. Though these are not devastating in magnitude, anthropogenic earthquakes can't be a good sign for the health of the land. And here, in the Allegheny National Forest, corporations spurred on by the gas rush were happy to drill baby drill. Many emphasize the lower emissions and efficiency of natural gas compared to other fuels, hoping to combat the widespread opposition of the practice. 

The Marcellus shale layer containing the gas was far underneath me on that road, on fact it was a geologic feature I'd never knowingly layed eyes on. But the wells tapping into the earth- new and old, gas and oil -were a very common sight all over Pennsylvania. They'd been a fixture of the background throughout my childhood, a relic of history anyone growing up there couldn't really avoid learning about in some capacity. In Connecticut, you don't see oil wells or derricks, large refineries rusting into the ground, or gas wells for that matter. We're far removed from that, though pipelines carry the gas to us and some of us use it. In schools here we didn't learn about the oil rush, other kids didn't believe me when I told them oil "came from" where I grew up, that it was Western Pennsylvania that initially fed that oh so vital part of humanity's growth and development. 

I was back in this part of the world in large part to use it too. The land here has rivers, into which many were introduced a glorious salmonid from the European continent. Ah, the brown trout. What a spectacular fish. Unwittingly they did quite well in part of the Allegheny watershed, and failing natural conditions in some places took good advantage of another use of the land. A handful of large dams have permanently altered the landscape of this part of the world, and in doing so made the rivers below them far cooler. This was an accident, we had no intention of such things. The water was needed to make power or to drink. Mostly to make power. But the deep reservoirs make tailwaters, and the tailwaters provide nice year round homes for non-native brown trout. I was there to use the rivers for my own recreational enjoyment through hunting down those non-native trout. All throughout Allegheny National Forest, non-native trout exist, some succeeding in making more of themselves but many being carted their by trucks from hatcheries to live out a short time before being caught or simply dying of ineptitude. This may be one of the weirder uses on a National Forest: we use it as a vessel for fish we make, fish that wouldn't naturally be there, but fish we like to catch. 

There are plenty of natural fish in and around Allegheny National Forest. Smallmouth bass, suckers, muskellunge, brook trout... all present for thousands of years and all perfectly good at making more of themselves when we don't use their habitat so hard it ruins it. Unfortunately in some case we did use the habitat a little too hard. That was often the excuse for adding new fish. Ironically, in some cases the habitat is used so hard that even the new fish struggle.  Johnsonburg, Pennsylvania was not a particularly hospitable place for fish, native or otherwise, for quite some time. Johnsonburg is a small town near Allegheny National Forest. Really, it is a ways east of the National Forest and tucked between massive chunks of Pennsylvania State Gamelands. Johnsonburg has one primary use, being the site of a big paper mill. The Domtar Johnsonburg Mill is an imposing cluster of structures that puts of a pretty unpleasant smell and according to Domtar's website, "manufactures uncoated freesheet papers used by customers to create brochures, direct mail, stationery, checks, envelopes and hardbound books".

In an earlier time, this mill and other industry in the area were absolutely raping the Clarion River and it's forks. The East Branch flows essentially through the Johnsonburg paper mill. For a long time, these were essentially dead water. But by the 90's, improved regulation and cleanup efforts rendered many rivers in the industrial towns in Western Pennsylvania viable fisheries once more. 

Now, I hate talking about places in fishing. I don't like burning spots. But I'm not going to talk about fishing here much now, if you care to know what these rivers are like there are plenty of resources online that will tell you all sorts of things, much of it old, much of it certainly untrue. I will tell you this: the rivers I've fished in that part of the world were not earth shattering in any capacity. Some were very pretty, some fished quite well. Often though, I struggled to find fish, access was difficult, and there wasn't anything particularly universally appealing. At times there were very obvious drawbacks to the casual angler. That is precisely my cup of tea though; high risk, high reward. Coupled with relative proximity to the place I was born but never got to fish these rivers of western PA became highly appealing to me personally... even if I walked and fished miles of them without seeing a trout. So, yeah, you know where I was now. Good for you. Good luck with that. 

Though Johnsonburg has one defined use in the paper mill now, the land around it was just as much the land of many uses as the National Forest was. More so, really. It was being used to live on, travel on, grow food on, find and kill food on, have fun on, dispose of waste on, and all sorts of other things. Though the amount of users here was much smaller than back at home and it felt a little easier to get away from obvious signs of use, the signs were still there. A low hum of anthropogenic alteration was always a little bit audible. But when darkness fell and a light rain began, after I'd caught far fewer and smaller fish than I wanted to and trotted through a setting no less urban and industrial than cities I fish in other parts of the world, I went about looking for a place to spend the night. 

Two things struck me in that search. There were far fewer cars whizzing around at 9:45 than would be at home. And there were far more animals in the road. In mere miles I saw dozens of frogs, mostly green frogs and pickerel frogs, quite a few smaller salamander species as well as red efts, a few possums, numerous very healthy deer, and three snakes of three different species, all robust and happy. In the same amount of time and distance traveled in Connecticut I'd be hard pressed to see the same abundance and diversity of wildlife under the same conditions at the same time if year. This wasn't mass migration season, this was a light drizzle on a cool August night, barely enough to keep the wiper blades going. These were just animals going about their normal nocturnal patterns, and though the roads were there they weren't so traveled that most wildlife populations forced to trek across them had been smashed to pieces by speeding vehicles. 

This land has a great many uses. It had been used and used hard. But our use hasn't ruined it yet. It is still vibrant and lively, much in the way the White Mountains always felt to me. There were things here and there that made me cringe like a road up Mt. Washington. The smell of the paper mill, the stands of invasive knotweed along the river, gas wells in the National Forest- all scars, deep and painful to the touch. Between the deep scars were just shallow ones. Land still used, but less hard. It was impossible to find land the way it always had been without interference. There isn't any left. 

I think the National Forest signs are misleading, perhaps on purpose. They try to convince us that they're protected from abuse. The signs have rounded, happy edges and the same color as signs for parks and historical landmarks. But they don't fully hide the truth, it's right there at the bottom. What do people sometimes say when we feel like someone takes advantage of us? "I was used!" "You used me!" The feelings associated with that are not positive ones. Sometimes they are deep, lasting scars. In no way am I suggesting that the land has a conscious to feel used, but perhaps it is best to think it does. It seems that in human history the cultures that treated the land as though it were aware and alive were much more sustainable in their impact. Those that treat the land with dominion, lording over it as owners and users, often lose sight of the value of that land and its resources to the point of depletion and destruction. We need to stop viewing the land as something inanimate for us to use. 

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