Interview: Mary Sisock

Mary Sisock

Assistant Professor of Forestry Extension

My job is 100% extension. So that mean most of my work is off campus and its taking the science and the research we have around forestry and getting out to people who are actually practicing on the ground and helping them do what they do with the best practices and sustainability.

Why is forestry important?

Clean air, clean water, and habitat and environment. And something that’s almost equally as important is its beauty. I mean, we as Vermonters and everybody get a piece of mind from being able to look out there and being able to see our forests. It’s part of our place and who we are. But ecologically speaking, it’s cleaning our air, producing oxygen, filtering our waters. Irene would have been a lot worse for Vermonters if we didn't have the forests soaking up a lot of that water. Within over the course of a year, forests can consume a tremendous amount of water, so, they can lower the ground water table, depending where you are and the condition, by multiple dozens of feet. If it’s not raining you can watch the level of the water table drop over the year. Trees consume a tremendous amount of water, and so when we have these big climate events like Irene, they prevent the flooding and damage from being a lot worse. And, of course, all the lovely things that live there and our economy too. 1.4 billion in the economic output in the state of Vermont is what our forests are contributing. There’s a huge economic importance too.

What’s your favorite part of your job?

The favorite part of my job is, well, it’s two parts. One is getting to work with people who are as excited about forests as I am. I love being in the forests, they’re very important to me, so being with other people- the landowners, the people in the state I work with who are just as passionate about that, that’s always great. But I think even a little better is to connect with people who just bought land and don’t have a relationship with forests yet and then being able to see what they have and getting them excited about it, getting them passionate about the land they all own.

It sounds like you don’t work with students that much, but you work with a lot of other people. What’s the most important concept or idea that you try to convey to people to try to get them to understand forestry and its importance? Or your favorite thing about the forests, or something like that?

Oh, that’s a good question. I think that one of the most important things that I try to convey is that what you do and how you do it really matters. A lot of people think “well, forests are renewable resources if we cut them they’ll grow back.” And that’s absolutely true but you can add to their health and resiliency or you can decrease the health and resiliency by the choices you make. And because forests are living on a different timescale than we do, you really only have one chance and you can better it or screw it up- really quickly- in that one chance. So, you know, really encouraging people to think about the importance of the decisions they make and how important it is to make informed decisions. And then, I guess another piece is there are a lot of mistaken beliefs that people have about forests and trees and sometimes they contribute to the making of pretty poor decisions and trying to get those out of the way so that people really understand when they’re making a decision.

What is the relationship between foresters and loggers? More specifically, what is their relationship like here in Vermont?

Well, like all relationships between individuals, it varies. Sometimes it’s very good and sometimes, depending on the personalities, there’s a lot of conflict. But in the big picture, foresters and loggers are team members. They work together. Foresters have a really good understanding of the biology and the ecology of the forest system and thinking about regenerating it. And loggers are really skilled about making it happen. They’re the people who are out there operating the equipment, and if they’re really skilled at their jobs they can make the forester’s vision or plan or the landowner’s vision come to life and if they’re not working very skillfully they can totally set that plan back hundreds of years. So, when you have two professionals, and they’re both professionals, when you have people who are working at their very best, working as a team, it’s the best things you can imagine for the land and the land owner. And in either case if either party is not living up to their professional best, there can be foresters who fall short on that too- not just loggers, somebody or something is going to lose- the land or the landowners is gonna come up a little short. But those individuals and those careers who are the true professionals recognize the value. The forester couldn't do his job or her job without the logger. They need somebody to go out there and do the work. Now the logger could do their job without the forester, on the other hand, if the logger is caring about doing the very best they can and caring about a sustainable forest, a forest they can come back to and log again, instead of a cut and run, then they need the forester to help them spend the time thinking through that. The logger when he, and I say he because most of them are he, gets out there, in one sense the forester makes the logger’s job easy, because he makes the decisions about which trees to cut. And if they’re marked and ready to go the logger can just go in and do his job and it saves the logger time. So, yeah, in the best world they make a really great team. And certainly we would not have forestry in Vermont without the loggers- somebody’s got to spend the time cutting the trees.

What is the relationship between forestry/forests and water quality?

Forests act as both a sponge, soaking up water, and a filter. So in the sponge capacity they help prevent runoff and too much water flowing off the surface. When you get too much water flowing off the surface it’s picking up soils and creating erosion and sedimentation when all those soils settle out in the streams and the lake. So they prevent that in their sponge capacity. They also have a filtering capacity, like plants, they’re taking up nutrients and absorbing things from that water, which, even if it’s a nutrient versus a pollutant, too much of a good thing is not so good, right? So, that’s how they contribute to the water quality.

For example, there’s a lot of nutrients associated with agriculture when the farmers take the manure and spread it back on the land. And it’s good to put those nutrients back in the soil, on the other hand if you get more nutrients then the soil can absorb at any one time and then you get runoff, those nutrients are going into the lake and then you have some severe problems with too much phosphorus and nitrogen in the lake and that’s bad for the lake health. So, one of the way to improve lake health and to prevent those nutrients running of the land from agriculture is to keep a buffer strip along water ways, along the streams. So when you do forestry practices you don’t want to cut all the trees right up to the stream. You know if you’re a farmer farming a field, it’s a good idea to not cut all of the trees and get, you know, an extra acre or too. It’s to leave those trees along stream banks and lake edges and wherever you’re along a waterway so the trees absorb the extra nutrients and you don’t contribute to nutrient pollution.

How do bad logging and forestry practices adversely affect the forest and the environment as a whole?

Just like anything, things can be done well or not well. Bad practices can harm water quality, they can lead to erosion and sedimentation. If you’re cutting trees right up to wrong (?) rural areas, places like stream banks and things. If you’re running your big heavy equipment over through streams, you’re destroying the stream beds and causing problems there. You can impact your water quality, you can impact the health of the forest, the diversity, the genetic quality. You can impact, of course, you know trees don’t get to move if they don’t like what they have, right? They’re stuck. So, depending what you’re doing and running that equipment around and running your bulldozers. That top layer of soil is where a lot of your nutrients are, you could be destroying that whole top layer of nutrients and so the next generation of trees is starving. So it can really set back, you know, nature is very resilient but the recovery time can be centuries. It’s a long, long time. That’s kind of thinking about the forest but then you think about the forest as a habitat. The other piece of it is, depending on what you’re doing and where you’re doing it, you have to think about the place you’re operating in. Let’s say this room is where we’re going to do our work, but you also have to think about what’s in the rooms next door. So, if I’m doing practices and the rooms next door are actually full of invasive species, and I’ doing practices that open this up, I’m not even going to get a forest back. I’m going to get a bunch of invasive species back. They’re invasive because they’re super competitive compared to our native plants. So, yeah, the impacts can be huge and the time span for how long these impacts can last is centuries. So, you know, if you’re going to be out there and you’re going to be working and if you care, you have to be careful and you have to think about what is the outcome. And that is the science of forestry. We can do X, Y, and Z, what we know about the biology but we’re always thinking what is the outcome of this in ten years? Twenty-five years? You know, foresters think seventy-five years down the road. And that’s one thing, besides the base knowledge, forestry difficult to explain to people who don’t have that knowledge and who haven’t been trained to think seventy-five years down the road and know “okay, this is what it looks like today but I know in twenty-five years, if the environment is healthy, this is what’s going to happen in fifty years, this is what we’re going to have. So to a forester an action that looks really radical and messy and pretty devastating on the ground to the average person, the forester kind of looks beyond that because they know what it’s going to look like seventy-five years down. The average person, of course, they haven’t been trained to see that. Kind of like in graphic design, you’re trained to see the whole picture and white space and dark space and the relation. And the average person, when I look at something it’s there but I don’t, it just doesn't register.

It just looks like a pile of dirt, like, what am I going to do with that?

Right. So you can see the potential. And I don’t know why I got off on that tangent but yeah. That’s why the difference is when, it makes it hard for a forester to communicate why what looks horrible, when you first look at it, isn't necessarily as devastating as you might think just by just based on looking at.

Forests contribute a huge amount to the agriculture of Vermont. How would good forestry practices contribute to the agriculture? How does the forest help our economy here?

So, it helps our economies in a couple big ways. One, is one that is not kind of traditionally thought of as the forest economy which is recreation. People come to Vermont because of our forests.

Leaf peepers.

Leaf peepers. If we didn't have leaves and a healthy forest then people wouldn't come. And that’s actually one of the biggest components of how our forests contribute to our economy, because they’re beautiful. People love to come see them. Then there’s the actual traditional forest products. There’s the wood products that we get out of the timber. Most of what we have here are called northern hardwoods and they go into two products, well, okay three products. So they go into hardwood furniture, boards which can, depending on the quality, be part of framing up or fence posts or fine furniture. They can go into some paper products. Don’t quote me on this because I don’t exactly remember, I don’t think we have a paper mill in Vermont anymore but we might have one.

I looked into it and I don’t think there are any. There used to be one that a lot of product went to in New Hampshire but it closed.

There is at least one paper mill over in New York though so some of our timber, the lower quality timber, goes for paper. And then we do have a pretty strong wood heating economy here in Vermont and so things like, thirty percent of the wood harvest in Vermont actually goes into firewood. We have a lot of people who firewood is their main source of heat for their homes. Plus the pellet, the Burlington electric is a wood fired plant. So we do have some big massive uses but most of it actually goes into home heating and some smaller municipal uses. A number of schools in Vermont are heated by wood. So communities trying to cut their expenses and it is a renewable, if you harvest it at a sustainable rate, it is a renewable energy source- unlike natural gas and unlike oil. So we do want to support that part of our economy.

What is your opinion on licensing foresters and loggers in Vermont? How would that impact their job?

So this is a really sticky one. It’s a tough one. I would say overall I’m for licensing foresters but it depends, the devil is in the details. It depends how the law is implemented, how it’s written. The reason I’m for it is because it helps the consumer, the landowner selling their timber, to understand, it helps makes it clear, one, who is a forester and who isn't. Because some people, we call it a deceptive practice, go around saying they’re a forester and people think “oh, I’m hiring an expert-somebody who knows.” And they’re not. So that helps prevent that kind of fraud on the one hand. And it separates out people who have taken the effort to know what they’re doing. Not saying all foresters are good guys, there are some that I wouldn't let on my land. But it helps create that distinction in a consumer’s mind. On the other hand, if you create a law and say you have to be licensed, well whose going to monitor it. What’s the point if there’s no penalty for violating the ethics of your license? So is it just going to be a law sitting there? So I think overall it’s a good thing. It helps distinguish in the line of the consumer what it is that a professional can offer and why it would be valuable to have one. Licensing loggers, again it’s are you going to enforce what’s there? And the other piece of it is how do you grandfather in people? So there are some people who aren't foresters, and they’re not calling themselves forester, but they’re really darn good at what they do and how do you grandfather these people in if being a forester requires a four year degree? Where is the roll for these kind of people? But the loggers, I haven’t thought a lot about licensing loggers. I feel definitely in favor of logger education. I guess on the logger side I would tend to lean more in educating the consumers rather than licensing loggers. You know, the bad actors are not going to stay in business if people don’t hire them and so having an informed consumer might be the better way to go on that. And also, logging is really hard work on a really thin profit margin. It’s extremely dangerous, people die every year working in the woods. It’s extremely expensive to get into the business. The modern equipment- you’re looking at half a million dollars investment. You know, one of these big pieces of equipment that make the job safer for you can be three hundred thousand dollars. So when you get into it, how many trees do you have to cut to make a payment on a three hundred thousand dollar piece of equipment? And the periods of time that you can operate in the woods based on state regulations for not impacting soil and water quality. You want to be operating when it’s dry, and when it’s either dry on the ground is frozen.

What are the regulations for Vermont? What is the time?

It’s not a set time period. There’s no like December but its more about the conditions, what are the conditions out there? And so, you know, it could be in the middle of summer, but if we have a wet, rainy summer, then those are less days that the loggers are going to be able to spend in the woods. If you’re not in the woods working, you’re not making money- you’re not paying your equipment. So when they have the opportunity to work, they should be in the woods working. So, depending how the licensing is, it’s going to cost them money and it’s probably going to cost them time to keep it up at some point and they’re already under a lot of pressure. I don’t know we need to add two more straws to the camel’s back, yet. There might be better ways to approach it. I should say, from the forestry’s licensing perspective, it’s not because it has anything to do with the bad practices of the foresters, it’s more about consumer education.

What is your opinion on the “current use” tax incentive program? Is it working to help preserve the health of the forests?

Absolutely. It is an excellent program. It is preventing forest land from being converted into houses. The taxes here are very high in Vermont, so, you know, it’s helping to ease that economic pressure to convert to other uses or subdivide- either way prevents a problem to forest health. You get a house on, you’re pretty much stuck with houses forever. But even if houses aren’t built, the land is cut up into smaller parcels, then we’re fragmenting habitat. Every time you parcelize, there’s very likely a road to be put in because if I have my parcel I want to be able to get to it. You put in a road, a road is an avenue for invasives as well as humans, and plus it then becomes harder for certain wildlife o start moving across those roads. So anything that keeps the landscape in tact is better for the forest health overall. And that law is very effective at that. I personally think the penalties for getting out, you know if you put land in then take it out, I think that, personally, the penalties for getting out could bed stiffer.

I was going to ask you that. My next question is how do you feel about the push to make opting out of the program harsher? Is there a need for it? Would it be justified? Do you think it would work to keep more people in the program?

Yeah, I don’t know the facts and figures about how many people are dropping out, but it’s certainly, if what I have been hearing is true about some parties taking advantage of the program to basically park land in it with the intent of taking it out, paying the penalty, and developing, the penalty is so low. The difference between what they’re going to make developing it, penalty-shmenalty. I've lived in other states which have very similar programs and the penalties in those states are much higher than Vermont’s. So, comparatively, Vermont’s penalties are not that much to other states. So, you know, if a landowner is truly putting it in for the tax break and does not intend to take it out to develop it then what the problem with a higher penalty? So, yeah, I think the penalties could be raised. I’m sure there could be arguments, and probably some good ones against it, but that’s how I feel.

Understandably so.

I do have a biased towards the forests. Yeah, no it’s an excellent, excellent program though. It definitely keeping land in forests that way. The other excellent component of it is that it does require a forest management plan. We have research that looks at the difference between water qualities on different lands. And not only does it require, so they compared lands with forest management plans, hopefully I’m going to get this right, but the different between just an average person having a management plan and somebody in the use value program having a management plan is people in the use values, their plans have to be approved and there’s an inspection about what actually happened on the land. People plans in the program, the water quality and the practices contributing to that good water quality are better on their land than otherwise. We have the evidence. It’s doing good things all around.

Fabulous. That’s all the questions I have. But if you have anything that’s very important about forestry and logging like please tell me.

No. I guess the only thing I would add is that, unfortunately, a few bad logger really create a bad impression for the entire profession. And there are some really, really great loggers out there doing their best and making a little less money than they could by taking the time to do a really good job. I guess even though you’re not putting this out in the bigger public, if you were, one of the things I would do to encourage landowner is, one, have a contract with whoever you log with, but remember, if you’re comparing prices offered to you by different loggers, if you’re always going with the highest one, why can that guy offer more? Maybe the other guy is offering a little less because he’s offering to do a better job for you in the long run. So, you know, forgo a dollar today for future value and care for your land in the future. I can’t think of anything else. But yeah, most Vermonters care about their forestland.