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A conversation with David Foster about the past and future of landscapes on Martha’s Vineyard.
David R. Foster was the director of the Harvard Forest, a 4,000 acre field laboratory in Petersham, Massachusetts, from 1990 until 2020. As an ecologist and forest historian who is also a Vineyard resident, he’s a keen observer of this landscape’s past, present, and possible futures. You might know his book, A Meeting of Land and Sea: Nature and the Future of Martha’s Vineyard for its deeply textured profile of the Island’s ecosystems and human history, and for its coffee-table illustration and readability.
In 2005, Foster helped found Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities, an organization which set ambitious targets for forest conservation in New England. In 2017, their goal became even more ambitious: protecting 80% percent of New England by 2060, in a mixture of strictly protected wildlands, productively-managed woodlands, and working farmlands, a mosaic landscape intended to support people and nature. (Visit the dashboard on their website to see where we stand now and find land use breakdowns for each state.)
This vision calls not only for accelerating the pace of conservation, but for setting aside at least 10% of New England as wildlands, protected in perpetuity and with strict limits on management by people. Under the definition Foster laid out, wildlands currently make up just 2% of the landscape in Massachusetts; on the Vineyard, despite 40% of the land being in some form of conservation, there are none.
I spoke with Foster about the future of Vineyard landscapes, and what the WWF&C vision might look like on the Island.
Interview edited for brevity and clarity.
Sam Moore: Can you give us a broad overview of Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities?
David Foster: Wildlands and Woodlands initiated out of a recognition that very few planning agencies, conservation organizations, or state leaderships actually define where they're headed or what their goals are. And this is especially true in terms of land protection goals. Most of these groups are trying to protect more land. But what does that mean? What's the vision that ties land protection together with, for example, land use planning?
Without that kind of thinking, there wouldn't be a way to balance the different uses of the world out there. We started in Massachusetts with much more of a focus on forests. But over time we ended up developing not just a vision for the forests of Massachusetts, but a vision for the entire landscape of New England that tried to integrate land conservation and planning.
When you first state those goals, conserving 50% of Massachusetts in forest or conserving 80% of New England in forest, they sound bold. But when you look at them from the other perspective: how much of Massachusetts would you like to see developed? And how much of New England would you like to see developed? It turns out that they actually are quite reasonable.
SM: Martha’s Vineyard has more land conserved by percentage than many other communities, but is still facing substantial development. Could you talk about the status of conservation on the Island and how that relates to the Wildlands and Woodlands vision?
DF: We love the natural landscape of the Vineyard. We love the cultural landscapes, the farming landscapes, and other places that have been intensely shaped by people. And we need to have places to live. So what is that mix?
For a very long time, conservationists and others have been suggesting that we should define those limits. What is the capacity of the Vineyard, how do we define that through planning, and how do we reinforce that through conservation?
You want to conserve the forest. It probably makes sense to conserve a lot of it as wildlands, where you're just letting nature prevail, because that's the most efficient way to do things like store carbon and grow big trees and diversify the landscape. And then there’s the need to manage some of that for diversity, and for aesthetics, and a variety of other things.
The Vineyard has also been successful in developing remarkable farm communities. Farming actually ties into conservation objectives really strongly, and farm landscapes are tremendous places to breed biodiversity in nature. So clearly there's a big role for farming.
We love the natural landscape of the Vineyard. We love the cultural landscapes, the farming landscapes and other places that have been intensely shaped by people. And we need to have places to live. So what is that mix?
– David R. Foster
And then you have to plan your communities. So those are the three big elements, right? Forests, farms, and communities. If you're actually going to define what the remaining naturalized and cultural landscape would look like on the Vineyard, you want to define that now, because development is proceeding rapidly.
SM: I just read the 2023 Wildlands Report that you co-authored. Could you talk about working forest lands as part of that landscape mix, and how that applies to the Vineyard?
DF: Our idea right from the beginning was that forest protection was essential because forest is the natural state of most of New England. But you can't talk about either preserving forests as guided by nature in wildlands, or conserving forests to be used in different ways to produce products, without talking about the other. They're kind of like the yin and the yang, and they're mutually supportive.
You've got cores of nature which are intact and not actively disturbed. And you want to buffer those from the developed world and the agricultural world with forests that are intact but are being used in a variety of ways. So you have this kind of gradient of use.
The Vineyard could make more use of its forests. There are a lot of people who continue to use wood for a variety of purposes, whether that's heating their homes or making boardwalks for Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation. You can do it in a sustainable way. You can do it in a way where people can hardly even tell that the forest has been managed. Yes, we are using resources. Those resources have to come from someplace. We better do a really good job of making sure we do that well. Everybody can benefit from understanding that our timber doesn't just come from Home Depot.
So I think there's a role for that — but there's a much bigger role for it off of the island. Wood has always been shipped into the Vineyard. You can go back to the earliest days of the Vineyard Gazette in the 1840s and find records of lumber being brought in from Maine.
SM: And in the Island’s case, maybe agriculture provides more of that working-landscape buffer around core areas of preservation.
DF: Yeah, that’s true. And it’s also true that in the history of the Island, there are a lot of areas that were never cleared, that were always kept in forest. I just came back from Seven Gates Farm, and there are trees there that are over 300 years old, and there are old forests that are just beginning to get into that very mature, almost-old-growth characteristic. But on the periphery of all of those areas are all these old farm fields that have been abandoned and have become forests. In a sense, those secondary forests provide a buffer to the agricultural lands or to people's backyards.
So I think there always will be that kind of tension zone, buffer zone, and that's one of the reasons that it's really important early on to define: what are your permanently preserved areas, where are your wild lands? And right now on the Vineyard, as you can see from that report, there are none.
SM: I spent a lot of time looking at your definition of wildlands, which I found interesting and a bit contrary to the kinds of active ecological restoration people may associate with conservation work.
“‘Wildlands’ are tracts of any size and current condition, permanently protected from development, in which management is explicitly intended to allow natural processes to prevail with “free will” and minimal human interference. Humans have been part of nature for millennia and can coexist within and with Wildlands without intentionally altering their structure, composition, or function.”
Could you talk a little bit about why most of the protected areas on the Vineyard might not qualify as wildlands?
DF: Everybody's familiar with, ‘we can buy a piece of land and conserve it. We can put a conservation easement on it and we can conserve it.’ But all that means is we're conserving it from being developed. It doesn't mean that the forest couldn't be turned into a field, or the forest couldn't be actively managed.
The wildlands criteria say it's not a wildland unless there is a definite intent to make it a wildland. In other words, it’s an intent to allow the area to develop naturally with as little human impact as possible. And backing that intent up with a strict approach to conservation, either a conservation easement or bylaws establishing it, or some other guarantee that the management plan from this decade is going to work in the next decade and so on. And then there needs to be proof on the land that you're doing it. There are plenty of places on the Vineyard where people are not actively managing. And maybe they have decided they're not planning to manage, but they never made that intent known.
SM: One piece of your definition that I found really interesting is this concept of not managing in pursuit of a desired state, whether that's trying to reclaim a past landscape, whether it’s the pastoral Vineyard of yesteryear, or some imagined landscape in the future.
DF: Yeah, that's key. The test is: did they try to move the landscape in any particular direction? I benefited incredibly by reading this interagency wilderness group that works in the federal government and has spent decades on these issues. That's where I came up this notion, which I think makes great sense, which is: if you're trying to maintain a rare species, or inhibit another species, or if you're trying to selectively increase one thing over another, or trying to make it more healthy by doing this, that, and the other thing — you are trying to impose your own values and your own future onto that landscape. That's when it stops becoming a wildland. And that's not bad, as long as you recognize that and are comfortable with it.
SM: For example, if we look at the state forest on the Vineyard, which you don’t consider a wildland, compared to the state forests out in Western Massachusetts that you do — what's the distinction?
DF: The big distinction is intent. The Massachusetts Department of Conservation & Recreation has management plans for every forest and all of its forest reserves. There's a long history in most of those areas of not being managed, and people recognizing they are really special and we need to leave them the way they are. The only two that call for active management are Corellus and Myles Standish. The state would like to manage them, they'd like to burn the scrub oak, they'd like to manage the forests to make them more diverse. They would love to do more, and the fact that they haven't managed the landscape much so far doesn’t make it a wildland.
If you look at some of the really beautiful sand plain forests across Massachusetts, most of them have been really actively managed now by the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife or by DCR for habitat, for their idealized thought as to what that should be.
So the point is, on the Vineyard no one has yet stepped forward and said, okay, we don't intend to manage our forests, and we're not going to manage in the future. They haven't done that and maybe they won't, because they worry about the future and want to have their options.
I think it's incredibly difficult for people to do nothing, and I think it's really difficult for foresters and land managers who are trained to be active people, and who get paid for making decisions on what to do, to say: “I've done all my research, I've looked at the situation, I've talked to best people I can find, and the way to proceed is to sit back.”
SM: What is the rationale for having this portion of the landscape set aside in these very strictly unmanaged, undirected wildlands?
DF: Four arguments. One is the historical and ecological argument. The history and the paleoecology that I do, and work with other people on, argues that the vast majority of New England was treated that way in the past.
Yes, there was a sizable indigenous population of 75,000 or 100,000 people in all of New England. Yes, they undoubtedly had an influence on the forests, but they weren't trying to manage the forest extensively or intensively.
So that argument is: there is something big missing in New England, and it is the environments, conditions, and forest qualities that are shaped by nature over long periods of time. We've done everything we can in the last 400 years to make those disappear. Our ponds, our streams, our forests should be filled with big dead trees that have fallen down, and big standing dead trees, and lots of adjoining big old trees. Those don't exist. And associated with the ecological argument is that, because we don't know what's missing, there are habitats, and there are possibilities for species that should be here but aren't.
Then there’s the environmental argument, that if you want to maximize carbon storage and long term sequestration of CO2, the absolute best thing you can do in almost any forested landscape in North America, or in the world, is to do nothing. There's no way, by managing, that you can gain more carbon than you would have by not managing. When you go in and you kill trees, and you release carbon, and you move carbon out of the forest, you already start from a deficit, and even catching back up to where you were is incredibly difficult.
There is also the human argument, the spiritual argument, the aesthetic and emotional argument of knowing that you're in a landscape that isn't being driven in a particular direction, that is kind of relaxed from human oversight. I just spent the last week on Monhegan Island, where 70% of the island has been set aside as wildlands. And even though it's recovering from historical use, it has been long enough now that there's almost no evidence of human activity. Time has healed so much of what had happened out there. There's something emotionally refreshing, a release that comes with that.
And then the final argument is of course, how can you judge what your impact is if you don't have scientific controls to evaluate? The first predecessor in my position as the director of the Harvard Forest was the guy who established it in 1907, and one of his first steps was to find examples of old growth forest as close to the Harvard Forest as possible, and preserve them intact so they could study how nature operated, and use that to guide their management.
Then there’s the environmental argument, that if you want to maximize carbon storage and long term sequestration of CO2, the absolute best thing you can do in almost any forested landscape in North America, or in the world, is to do nothing.
– David R. Foster
That pertains to everything we see on the Vineyard today. If you're going to cut trees down for southern pine beetle, set aside some big areas where you don't do that. If you're going to tweak the forest for beech leaf disease, or if you're going to do a bunch of other things to your forest, you want to have some controls so that you can see what nature does without you.
SM: A sort of thought exercise, if you're up for it, is to try to describe a hypothetical Vineyard, fifty or a hundred years from now. or even longer. What is the landscape like in a future Island that meets the Wildlands and Woodlands targets?
DF: To give you some sense as to how fruitful or fruitless those exercises are: if you look at my book, one of my great predictions was that beech would become a dominant species, because beech was originally very important on the Vineyard. Much, much more important than it is today. And it is a naturally successful tree because it is so shade tolerant. Who would have guessed that beech leaf disease is going to come in here and potentially eradicate beech? It's just remarkable.
As the future plays out, the first thing that needs to happen is the Martha’s Vineyard Commission and the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank — to use them as two examples — need to come together and we need to map the development envelope for the Vineyard. It doesn't mean that you can't pack more people into that, but we just can't keep spreading and converting forests and farms and other natural areas into development. We just can't do it. So that really takes land planning and land conservation.
Then within the conserved land landscape, I think there is a huge opportunity to create some really wonderful wildlands, and to have some areas where people will be able to explore and be able to go, and sit, and know that this is not going to be shaped by people. It's not going to be the same in 100 years, because we're going to get hurricanes, we're going to get beech leaf disease, we're going to get other things. But by and large, it's going toward a wilder and wilder condition.
And then the other extreme is the agricultural land. Everything happening on the Vineyard is moving in the direction of trying to make outdoor agriculture as diversified and as organic as possible so that it can provide benefits to nature as well as benefits to people. It doesn't kill insects because it's laden down with pesticides. So you're planting in ways that accommodate native species and pollinators.
And then the big question is the woodlands. What do we manage those woodlands for? The Vineyard isn't big enough to make all that much difference. But it's really important for people to understand the power of forests to combat climate change. And the less that we manage them intensively, the better. There's a good opportunity to let some more areas become forest.
SM: Last question: looking at the map from 1850 that you digitized, and toggling between that, the aerial photos of the Island from 1938, and current satellite imagery, you see farmland turning back to forest in plenty of places. But you also see development surge in those intervening periods, in Katama, for example. Are there particular spots on the Vineyard that you're watching closely?
DF: To my mind, that map represents one of the keys that everyone should have for conservation and land-use decision making, because that history determines what we have. If you look at the distribution of invasive species in woodlands on the Vineyard, they're almost all in these areas that were completely cleared and have now become forest.
That's just one example of how history shapes what we have today. In many places, if you take that map out when you're walking through the woods, you can find a stone wall or a place where there was an old fence line. And that may all be invisible, but there's a sharp break in the vegetation from one side to the other.
One thing we've tried to keep track of is how much forest clearance is going on these days, and how much of it is happening in these primary forests that have made it all the way through from 1850. There's one map in the book which is just glaring in the amount of ancient forests — forests that have gone for 15,000 years without being destroyed by people — being converted. I think the history map can help to prioritize. Not that I really like saying this forest is more important than that forest, but areas that have never been converted are not the obvious places to produce new grasslands or put solar fields or plunk down big houses.
SM: That is a continuity that you can't get back once it's gone.
DF: No, absolutely not.
What you can do
- Find David Foster’s book A Meeting of Land and Sea: Nature and the Future of Martha’s Vineyard on Amazon.
- Check out the MV Map Explorer to compare maps of the Vineyard from different periods of time, including the 1850 map of the Island, aerial photos from 1938, and present-day satellite imagery.
- Find art, poetry and science writing from the Wilds and Woodlands project in their new quarterly magazine, From the Ground Up.
