Jordan Barbour reported this story on assignment from The Bradford Journal Opinion. The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.
PIERMONT—Lake Tarleton, nestled in the thick forests of the White Mountains, attracts plenty of summer tourists and local boaters and hikers looking for a place of quiet contemplation. But for the last two years, a heated debate has swirled around the serene setting, stemming from the U.S. Forest Service’s plan to cut and harvest 690 acres of trees around the lake.
Concerned members of the Lake Tarleton community formed a coalition to fight the logging plan. One of their advocates is Standing Trees, an environmental conservation group based in Montpelier that unsuccessfully sued to stop a logging project on Camel’s Hump earlier this year.
The forest-loving group’s efforts appear to have, again, met with defeat. On Nov. 13, the Forest Service formally approved the project in a 34-page decision.
“After acquisition of the Tarleton lands [in 1998], the WMNF allowed the landscape to grow and restock, this timeframe has brought it into silviculture alignment with treating landscapes every 20 to 30 years as part of the habitat and forest management cycle,” wrote Brooke Brown, a U.S. forest ranger in the Pemigewasset district of the White Mountain National Forest. “It is now ready for active management to advance the Forest Plan’s goals, objectives, and desired conditions for vegetation as a working forest.”
As part of the decision, the Forest Service largely dismissed a list of objections to the Tarleton Integrated Resource Project that Standing Trees submitted with the help of the Vermont Law and Graduate School. Among the points raised, the project’s opponents argued that the federal agency failed to “meaningfully involve the public” or “take a hard look at impacts on the human environment.” The Forest Service, the conservationists wrote, also dismissed “reasonable alternatives” to its plan to cut down the timber or remove it by other means.
The federal decision marks another step closer to the alteration of a beloved patch of wilderness that locals have long believed was protected from such invasion. Almost 30 years ago, the community spearheaded a move to acquire the land around Lake Tarleton and transfer it to the White Mountain National Forest, assuming that its federal caretakers would keep it preserved in perpetuity. The Forest Service now claims that its caretaking includes the removal of older trees to make way for new growth and a diversity of habitat for wildlife.
“We all thought that this was land that had been saved and that was going to remain, essentially, as is,” said Rob Wipfler, whose family has owned Kingswood Camp for Boys on the edge of Lake Tarleton for 38 years. “We didn’t know that it was going to be subject to so much cutting, essentially a timber sale.”
Standing Trees and the law school submitted their objections to the logging plan in May and received an initial response letter in September from a forest supervisor and reviewing officer, Derek J.S. Ibarguen, who concluded the federal agency had complied with all applicable laws and regulations. Ibarguen agreed that some of the opponents’ points needed additional internal review, leading to the final decision this month that allows the project to move forward.
“We are deeply disappointed that the Forest Service has ignored the public and decided to proceed with the Tarleton Integrated Resource Project as proposed,” Zach Porter, executive director of Standing Trees, wrote in an emailed comment to the Journal Opinion. “This decision is a betrayal of the agency’s promise to this community that Lake Tarleton and its stunning surroundings would be preserved forever.”
Standing Trees and the community opponents are considering their options for next steps but have made no decisions, said Christophe Courchesne, director of Vermont Law and Graduate School’s environmental advocacy clinic.
“The decision utterly fails to correct the major flaws in the Forest Service’s environmental review process, which Standing Trees and the Lake Tarleton Coalition have repeatedly raised,” Courchesne emailed in response to the JO’s questions about the federal government’s position. “We will be diligently evaluating all available legal options to challenge this project.”
Lake Tarleton has come under threat in the past, Wipfler said. In 1994 the surrounding area was slated for a housing development project, but community members joined with several national and state land trusts and raised about $7 million to buy more than 5,000 acres around Lake Tarleton and nearby smaller lakes. After the transfer of the property to the national forest, the federal government created a management plan in 2005 that gave residents reason to believe Lake Tarleton would remain undeveloped in the future, Wipfler and the conservation groups said.
In 2021, Wipfler and other community members were shocked to learn that the Forest Service planned to log nearly 800 acres of forest near the lake. They formed the nonprofit Lake Tarleton Coalition and spoke against the project in public meetings. This led Brown, the U.S. forest ranger in the Pemigewasset district, to agree to reduce the logging area to 690 acres.
Still searching to stop the tree removal, the coalition reached out to Standing Trees and the Vermont law school.
“There was a very clear assumption at the time that this land would be permanently protected,” said Courchesne. He acknowledged, however, that the transfer of the land to the Forest Service included no deed restriction or “some sort of formal encumbrance on the land that would prevent them doing what they’re proposing here.”
The final decision for the project outlines the Forest Service’s plan to “conduct silvicultural treatment” in its management area and notes updates to its environmental assessment, including extension of buffers around the lake, designs for sensitive plant species and potential impacts on the tricolored bat and the endangered northern long-eared bat, which live in the area.
“This is land that belongs to each and every American,” Porter said, adding that the people who did the initial work to protect the lake were kept out of the federal government’s process.
“It’s really kind of an abomination,” he continued. “This was a promise the Forest Service made to the local community, that they would hold this land in trust and take care of it for the future to enjoy just as they had enjoyed it. And that’s not what’s happening right now.”