Ah, sweet wilderness: a distinguished nature writer considers the proposal to create a network of Core Ecological Reserves across northern New England--and CLF's role in that ambitious undertaking.

• Author: Pistorius, Alan
• Position: Conservation Law Foundation of New England

The sun is just struggling over the Green Mountain ridgeline south of towering Mount Abraham as I drive up York Hill Road to the Bristol Cliffs Wilderness Area. The modest sign at the back of the tiny parking lot, which features a vague and schematic map, warns me that Bristol Cliffs has no trails, that I will need to rely on a map and compass, and that, if I get lost, I should "stay calm [and] follow a stream downhill and you eventually will find your way out."

I'm obviously the first hiker in today, and at a small piece of water I put up four Canada geese, which struggle, wings whining, to gain enough altitude to clear the surrounding trees. I bushwhack over to a lovely little wetland--alder- and spirea-ringed, goldenrod and asters in bloom--to enjoy the silence. A couple of purple finches fly over, bluejays jay-jay from every direction (they'll stick around this Fall as long as the beaked hazelnuts hold out), and a red-eyed vireo forages in a stressed red maple already showing color.

No one would mistake this for old-growth forest, but there are some fine trees in here. There is an old paper birch I can barely reach around, and a red maple I can't. And I find a relic sugar maple presiding over the remains of a cellar hole that may have supported an active household during the Civil War. A massive lower limb lies moss-covered and punky where it fell long ago, but the center of the tree remains vigorous over a battered trunk measuring 12 feet around.

Whatever else these woods may be, they are the antithesis of the thinned, undergrowth-free parkland forest the Bush administration is now calling for, ostensibly in response to this summer's forest fires. Like other pieces of real wilderness, Bristol Cliffs is anything but neat and orderly. Trees assume every posture from vertical to horizontal, and every imaginable degree of morbidity is abundantly displayed. Down deadwood is everywhere, while the twisted, shattered, contorted old snags show much evidence of weather abuse, bug bite, and woodpecker drill. This forest is, in short, no place for street shoes, and that's just fine with Vermont's Chris Kilian, director of the Conservation Law Foundation's Natural Resources Project, and Nancy Girard, director of CLF's New Hampshire Advocacy Center.

Rescuing a Legacy of Green

Kilian and Girard are the lead attorneys for an ongoing CLF project that seeks to establish an array of what Kilian calls "Core Ecological Reserves" in the heart of the 26-million-acre Northern Forest, which extends from New York's Adirondack Mountains to the northern Maine coast. After a century of regrowth--thanks largely to abandoned farmland--the East's premier forest has once again begun a slow decline, losing acreage to every imaginable kind of development. At the same time, the forest is losing its integrity, even its structure (as balsam fir replaces spruce and red maple replaces other hardwoods), due both to heavy lumbering and to fragmentation. Even in northern Maine, which outlanders tend to think...