Today, although only approximately one million people live throughout the region, another 70 million are within one day's drive. Timber resources and recreation are the foundation for most of the regional economy, both of which require healthy ecosystems.
The land is primarily privately owned, in contrast to forested areas in the western United States. Approximately 84% of the Northern Forest is in private ownership: 8.8 million acres held by individuals and 13 million acres in large tracts owned by commercial enterprises, such as the pulp and paper industry. Public lands in the region include Baxter State Park, the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, White Mountain National Forest, Lake Umbagog National Wildlife Refuge, Green Mountain National Forest, and New York's Adirondack Park. It is also here that the Appalachian Trail has its northern end.
Large-scale clearing of the Northern Forest began with European colonization of North America. Logging and clearing began on the coast of New England and proceeded inland along the banks of the region's major rivers. By the 1800s wood products were the major export from New England. This logging and the accompanying utilization of cleared land for agriculture denuded much of coastal and southern New England. The demand for timber saw expansion of the areas harvested into the northern reaches of New England by the mid-1800s. By the late 1800s most of the uncut forest in the region had been stripped of the "large" trees that supported the timber industry. The timber industry moved to the south and west. Moreover, beginning in the 1800s, American agriculture moved from New England to the more fertile Midwest.
At the end of the 1990s, much of New England that had been logged and cleared for farming "recovered" as second growth forest. Industry adapted to the smaller-sized timber resources now available. Ultimately, the pulp and paper industry became the major commercial user of the second growth forest in the north. From the 1930s to the 1960s forestry practices and limited demand for raw materials helped the Northern Forest to regenerate. However, beginning in the 1970s, a growing demand for paper products and technological advances in harvesting techniques, resulted in a much faster rate of forest removal.
By the mid-1980s large landowners in the region began to view their forest lands not only in terms of the value of tree growth, but also for real estate value, in order to maximize their financial returns. Several companies began advertising the remote forest lands for vacation and second home development to the New York City and southern New England markets.
Concern over this trend in changing land use caused a variety of environmental and forestry-related organizations to focus upon mechanisms to both protect this vast region and to ensure the continued productivity of its forests.
Beginning in the late 1980s concern over the status of the Northern Forest became one of the major environmental issues in the northeast. In reaction to the dramatic changes in land ownership patterns in this northern region, Congress charged the USDA Forest Service with conducting a "Northern Forest Lands Study" that culminated in a 1990 report. The governor's of the affected states also began a "Governors' Task Force on Northern Forest Lands."
In 1990 the governors of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, in conjunction with the federal government, formed a more extensive program to study the status of the Northern Forest and propose strategies to protect and preserve the region and the resource through the maintenance of "traditional patterns of land ownership and use." This Northern Forest Lands Council study included broad outreach to the public in the region, support of studies on the area's biological resources, conservation strategies, patterns of property taxation, and significance of forest-based and recreational economies. In 1994 the council released its final report "Finding Common Ground: Conserving the Northern Forest."
Recommendations prepared by the Northern Forest Lands Council were categorized into four areas:
Currently two bills have been introduced into the U.S. Congress to help implement the recommendations of the Northern Forest Lands Council. Senate Bill 546 and H.R. 971, separate versions of the "Northern Forest Stewardship Act" represent both the beginning of potential federal support for protection of this resource and acknowledgment of its significance at a national level.
A growing area of environmental controversy is that of the degree to which federal, state, or local environmental agencies should be able to determine how people (both individuals and as corporations) can use their own (i.e., "private") land. Recently political groups dubbed, the "wise use" movement, have mounted strong opposition to various regulatory agencies' policies that effect both private property and federal lands (mostly in the western U.S.) that are used for private purposes (e.g., cattle grazing, logging).
In the Northern Forest much controversy has surrounded the practice of "clear cutting" in which large tracts of land are more-or-less completely logged. An alternative management practice is "selective cutting" in which only certain tree species or trees of a certain age-class are harvested.
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