Granite Geek: Shutting Bartlett Experimental Forest celebrates willful ignorance

A while back, federal and state biologists spent 12 years —12 years! — studying the reproductive cycles of mice and voles, seeing how they interact with the amount of seeds and nuts that trees produce each year.

Why? Because because small mammals are a major route for seed dispersal in New England’s forests, spreading trees to places they not might otherwise go. Understanding how they live and reproduce helps understand how our forests can thrive amid development, climate change and the onslaught of invasive species.

They did this work at the Bartlett Experimental Forest, a 2,600-acre chunk of the White Mountains near the Saco River that was set aside in 1931. It and Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire are among 77 sites around the country established by the U.S. Forest Service that have been the scene of hundreds of long-term experiments in the past century, adding to our knowledge of forests, waterways and wildlife — the things that we value most about New Hampshire.

The experimental forests and ranges were established because people realized that we can’t understand trees, which live for hundreds of years, and slow-developing ecosystems unless we’ve got a place where outdoor research can continue for decades, undisturbed. Great idea.

But it’s undisturbed no longer.

Last week, in one of the irrational self-destructive moves that has become the hallmark of President Trump’s administration, the Bartlett research station was listed as one of 57 U.S. Forest Service research stations to be shut. The move is part of a downsizing and reworking of the venerable federal agency, including reducing the number of regional offices and putting political appointees in charge of sites in each state.

Details are scant, and what they call the transition will occur in phases.

There’s no obvious goal to all this aside from vague talk of efficiency, and the DOGE debacle taught us to be very skeptical of that. I suspect it is partly designed to make it easier to hand control of federal lands to private industry, which has long been an aim of many conservatives, but who knows?

The immediate effect will be yet another reduction in our ability to understand the world. From day one of this presidency, Trump and his team have supercharged taking money away from science, whether it’s the Office of Management and Budget slow-walking grants to scientists, cutting research budgets from federal bureaus or shutting down entire agencies. The administration is strangling one of the backbones of American strength, our scientific expertise.

The thinking, if that’s the right word, seems to be that if you don’t gather facts about reality then you can pretend that reality is whatever makes you happiest. That seems silly, but remember that during his first presidency amid the pandemic, Trump infamously said: “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

If we don’t do research in our forests, we can’t find out any bad news about them, so everything will be hunky-dory!

People with a long memory in New Hampshire can tell you what happens if you stop understanding our forests and hand them over to industry. Uncontrolled logging starting in the 1880s with little understanding of how northern forests work devastated the White Mountains, clogging rivers with debris and leading to massive wildfires. Things got so bad that the Weeks Act was passed, the White Mountain National Forest created, experimental forests came into being and we started behaving like responsible adults.

It doesn’t feel like we’re responsible adults any more.