Forestry is a strange beast. It provides renewable building materials when done with a modicum of care and restraint, but even then it has profound ecological impacts in terms of soil disruption and water quality impacts. Vermont has many decades of experience in striking this (im)balance; we are currently both leasing state park land for "managed" clearcutting and creating rain gardens and catchment to mitigate the soil damage resulting from the cutting. Clean water and money are still competing priorities for humanity, at least in this tiny economy. 

 

This is a recent development of course. Forests in Vermont used to be "managed" as Medicine Woods. It is a means of relating to the greater ecology in a manner that fulfills human needs and builds the complexity and depth of the wildlife around them. It is concentric intensity of relating to the land around settlements starting with daily use familia: White Birch, Black Ash, Red Spruce. It expands into perennial sylvaculture species of Juglans canopy, the old friends Walnut and Locust, Elderberry, Currant and Gooseberry understory. On the outside of the Wood the diversity is guided towards the needs of the animals: Brother Bear and Sister Deer, fed by Beech and Butternut, Oak and Hickory. The untouched forest, being much of the Green Mountains, would have largely remained as the siberian Taiga ecology that existed during the last ice age. 

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It is unlikely that this was a "management method" however. It was probably the result of the natural interaction of the Abenaki relationship with their ecology and their patterns of use. Different ecologies had different relationships with the people, and were shaped by them in different ways. This entire country as we know it was first shaped by Pleistocene beavers (estimates of population ranging from 100 million to 400 million beavers weighing in at around 400 pounds each), then by many various populations of migrating humans for about 12,000 years, and most recently and obviously by western culture. Vermont still has ecotypes remaining from those enormous beavers, which we find as flat meadow patties high up in the mountains resulting from their ancient dams evolving from ponds to bogs to incredibly vital terra firma.