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(“high-grading” is what the loggers call it) has left the forests of the Northeast filled with smaller and weaker trees. It’s as if we were some species of wolf that, instead of culling the sick and the feeble, only went for prey in its prime. The alternative is to decide, as Middlebury College did, that what you used to think of as flaws could be reimagined as
character
. “That tree has been standing there two hundred years, taking whatever nature can fling at it,” says Brynn. “That’s not a problem, that’s an asset.” If you walked through Bicentennial Hall, you’d immediately see what he was talking about, for the walls are filled with little streaks and swirls and flickers that please the eye like the dance of flames in a fireplace. Before long you’re beginning to think in other ways that used to be heresy—like, why does my floor have to be all one type of wood, a big expanse of unbroken oak? Why can’t it be like the forest that surrounds us, which is roughly equal parts birch and beech and maple? VFF supplied the timber for the home we built in Ripton a few years ago: local wood, local mill, local carpenters. It looks beautiful to the eye, and to the mind’s eye, too, because I can walk you to the forest it came from and show you that it’s still intact. Show you the broad-based dips.
    If you can make the economics work, then there’s a chance the people who won the woodlot won’t sell it for subdivisions. Brynn and I reach the edge of the forestand peer off into a new clearcut with a nice orange No Trespassing sign. “This was a beautiful forest. But the owner has cashed out, and he’s going to put in houses. And the people who buy them—well, they’ll be here a couple of years and then we’ll come up to do a new cut so this guy can net enough money to keep his forest intact, and those new owners will be outraged we’re cutting trees.”
    “It’s never going to be a huge wildland here,” Brynn says as we come to the edge of this small forest. “It’s always going to be more of a patchwork quilt. But there are so many people who could develop a positive experience with their piece of the quilt. See this stump? A beautiful white pine, shot straight up, not a pimple on it. Then it got blister rust, right about the same time that the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum came looking for clear white pine for the mast of a replica pilot gig they were building. The schoolkids who were doing the work came out here, one cold day in December, to harvest it. They weren’t the luckiest kids—a lot of them wouldn’t look you in the eye. But by the time they’d finished building that boat, well, each of them was able to stand up and give a little talk to the three hundred people who came to see the launch. That’s the real harvest of this place.”
    B RISTOL MARKS THE divide between forest and field—between cutting trees and growing corn—in this part ofVermont. Upland, to the east, Addison County tends toward woods broken by occasional opening. West, as the valley levels out toward the lake, more and more of the land is open field, interspersed with woodlots. Brynn and I came out in one of those fields around noontime, a vast expanse of cow corn already higher than our heads. We set off down parallel rows, two feet apart but invisible to each other, and David began talking about how agriculture presents many of the same paradoxes as forestry in this area. There’s the same pressure to produce food and timber as cheap commodities, because most customers buy on price. But cheapness always carries a cost. In the forest, it’s clearcuts and eroding roads. It’s not so different for farmers.
    This field, for instance, belongs to one of the county’s biggest dairies—they bought the land, ironically, after they made a bundle selling off a parcel near Burlington that became Vermont’s first big-box development. On the one hand, they are reasonably conscientious farmers, not spreading their ocean