Last August, a Canada lynx — a long-legged wildcat that likes to prey on snowshoe hares — was spotted in Rutland County, in southwestern Vermont. Over the next several weeks it was spotted again and again as it made its way north through Addison County.

This was big news locally, as Canada lynx are almost never encountered in the Green Mountains. They are, in fact, considered endangered in the state, and nationally are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. According to Vermont Fish & Wildlife, this was the first confirmed sighting since 2018. The agency determined this was a male “dispersing,” or seeking his own territory, something he was presumably able to do via the networks of wild forest that stretch up the spine of the Green Mountains to the Canadian border.

But those wild forests may not be so wild for much longer. Only a few miles north of where the lynx was first recorded, in the Green Mountain National Forest (GMNF), federal Forest Service officials are preparing to sign off this spring on what some activists say is among the most reckless proposed logging projects in the country: the Telephone Gap Integrated Resource Project.

As Earth Island Journal has previously reported, Telephone Gap has become a major site of contention over the last several years between the Forest Service and environmentalists. Many local environmentalists say that ongoing climate breakdown — including the dramatic flooding Vermont has seen in recent years — demands a more progressive, resilient, and forward-looking approach to managing publicly owned forests.

Especially vocal among this camp is Zack Porter, director of Standing Trees, a Montpelier-based organization that advocates for wild public lands throughout New England. In Porter’s view, which he and I have discussed at length over the last couple of years, federal Forest Service officials in Vermont are pursuing logging plans that are environmentally reckless and insufficiently regulated, doing serious damage to the measly 8 percent of the state that is federal public land.

He argues that the Forest Service is is exploiting a loophole in its own rules around logging in roadless areas — areas theoretically protected under the 2001 Roadless Rule — as well as misrepresenting the supposed ecological benefits of selective cutting in mature and old-growth forests. He says the agency is twisting the latest science around the importance of older forests, and effectively ignoring the implications of Biden’s 2022 executive order calling for the conservation of mature and old-growth forests on federal lands.

Pressure from Standing Trees, Extinction Rebellion Vermont, Vermonters for a Clean Environment, and a host of other groups and activists — amplified by the project’s inclusion in the national Climate Forests campaign aimed at protecting mature forests — led Telephone Gap to receive more public input than any GMNF integrated resource project since the 2006 Forest Plan revision. After presenting four logging proposals in March 2024’s Preliminary Environmental Assessment, this past December, the Forest Service, in its Draft Record of Decision and Final Environmental Assessment, settled on what it earlier termed “Alternative C.”

In certain respects the proposal appears to have incorporated some criticism, and for this reason, some environmental groups have gotten behind it. Alternative C has slightly reduced the acreage to be logged, included new mitigation measures around logging on unstable slopes and sensitive soils that could contribute to more severe runoff, put some restrictions on logging in areas with older and larger trees, and emphasized harvesting with less-intensive silvicultural methods.

But Porter believes federal officials are missing the forest for the trees. He sees public communication around the draft decision — including the new plan’s endorsement by the Audubon Society and the Vermont Natural Resources Council, who have called the plan a model of “ecological forestry” — as misleading, the changes as cosmetic.

“The Telephone Gap project remains a reckless and destructive carbon bomb that will cut nearly half of the existing old growth in the entire Green Mountain National Forest, and log 2,000 acres of an Invaluable Inventoried Roadless Area, jeopardizing clean water and increasing the likelihood of downstream flooding,” he wrote in a statement sent to journalists after the December announcement. “Does the Telephone Gap logging project really represent the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ in 2024?” he asked, referring to the Forest Service’s mission statement.

Among many objections to the proposal, Porter listed the size of the project (around 11,000 stand acres, down from closer to 12,000 in the Forest Service’s original proposal but still an enormous project for the region); the nearly 2,000 acres of logging in the Pittenden Inventoried Roadless Area, parts of which are already being logged in a separate, ongoing logging project; and the substantial emissions that the Forest Service itself estimates will come from the project — its conservative estimate being around 250,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (which, coincidentally, is awfully close to the 240,000 metric tons by which the Conservation Law Foundation says the state of Vermont will miss its 2025 emissions reductions targets).

Particularly galling for Porter is the destruction of old-growth forest in Telephone Gap, something he says is being obscured by competing definitions of old growth.

One definition comes from the Forest Service’s old-growth definition for Region 9 (the Eastern Region, which includes the Northeast and Upper Midwest), a product of the National Old-Growth Amendment, itself stemming from Biden’s 2022 Executive Order. This definition, quite specific, emphasizes stand age (141 years or older) and tree size and density (10 trees per acre of trees at least 16 inches in diameter at breast height) for northern hardwood forests.

A federal inventory from earlier this year estimates about 2,000 acres in the GMNF meet the R9 criteria for old growth, which would amount to less than 1 percent of the entire national forest in the state. Porter says that, under this definition, 817 acres of old growth could be logged under the Telephone Gap proposal.

However, another definition comes from the 2006 Forest Plan. Here, old growth is defined vaguely as a “patch of relatively old forest of at least 5 to 10 acres that has escaped catastrophic or stand-replacing disturbance associated with the prevailing natural disturbance regimes of the Forest [and exhibits] a long history of continuity and a demonstrated future via replacement dynamics.” Under this definition, which is the one the Forest Service has used for the Telephone Gap project, only 737 acres in the entire GMNF are classified as old growth, and none of those fall within the Telephone Gap project.

Asked about these competing definitions, Jay Strand, Forest Planner & Environmental Coordinator for the Green Mountain National Forest, emphasized that no old growth would be harvested in the Telephone Gap Project based on the 2006 Forest Plan or the state of Vermont’s definition of “old forest.” However, he did not answer specific questions about R9-defined old growth, instead referring me to the National Old-Growth Amendment website.

At this point, the public has one more opportunity to give input on the proposal, which can be done at the project’s website. The 45-day comment period will end on January 17, 2025, and the final decision is estimated to arrive this March.

Standing Trees has been involved in litigation around logging projects in New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest and on Vermont state-owned lands, but Porter wouldn’t talk specifically, at this point, about his organization’s plans if the project goes forward.

When we spoke in mid-December, we did, however, discuss the recent lynx sightings. Porter told me that the dispersing lynx had actually been seen right in the GMNF Forest Service parking lot in Mendon, and was captured on the office’s security cameras. He also pointed out that, ironically, Telephone Gap’s Biological Evaluation, released last November, determined that Alternative C could not impact Canada lynx populations. The report states that Canada lynx are “not known to occur within the project area on the GMNF, [are] not likely to occur within the project area in the foreseeable future, and [have no critical habitat] located within the project area.”

“A record number of people commented on the Telephone Gap logging project, nearly all in opposition,” he wrote me later. “And yet after all of this public outcry and a Presidential Executive Order, we seem to be right back where we were three years ago, with rare old-growth and roadless forests on the chopping block.”