A few months ago, I went with ecoRI News reporter Frank Carini and hiker Andy Grover through the 942-acre former Boy Scout property in Burrillville, R.I., that was purchased by the state in 2024.

The property was bought by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management for $1,610,000 through grant funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

The purchase is the largest land acquisition by the state since 2014.

DEM director Terry Gray made a statement reported by ecoRI News in 2024, “Conserving such a large parcel of connected forestland is a huge win for preserving Rhode Island’s natural resources and increasing public access to the outdoors.”

I was eager to walk the property because I heard it contained a massive eastern hemlock forest, which is an uncommon forest type in Rhode Island. Eastern hemlock trees can live to be over 400 years old, dating them back to Colonial times.

When I walked the property with Frank and Andy, I entered a nightmare.

Most of the forest in the property was intensively logged, including many clear-cuts.

Stumps of massive trees were everywhere.

Most of the Eastern hemlock, gone.

The ground was littered with flammable wood slash from the logged trees and invasive underbrush taking advantage of the removed tree canopy.

What should have been a cool, shaded forest, was a dry, open field.

We saw wood piles of what used to be healthy trees as well.

I haven’t been so affected by a deforestation like this since seeing the destruction of the largest old-growth forest in Warwick, at the Kent County YMCA, which was logged in 2018 through a grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).

Back home, I looked at the historic aerial maps of the 942-acre property and discovered this logging took place between 2020 and 2021.

Before 2020, the forest was filled with living trees in a thriving core forest.

Now, the landscape is littered with holes from the destructive logging.

I also discovered the whole property is in a Natural Heritage Area.

Natural Heritage Areas are habitats where rare and endangered species live that were identified by the Rhode Island Natural Heritage Program, which used to identify, monitor, and protect biodiversity for the state until 2007, when DEM discontinued the program.

It is bad enough a large old-growth forest was logged, but in a 942-acre Natural Heritage Area?

Those species that depended on the old forest habitat will have nowhere to go and some probably died from the bulldozers and logging trucks that were used to cut and smash the trees, crush native plants, and damage the soil.

There was outrage from environmentalists when 200 acres of forest in a Natural Heritage Area were threatened by the planned Burrillville power plant.

However, with the loss of most of the natural forest in the former Boy Scout property which is also a Natural Heritage Area in Burrillville, there is silence.

I asked DEM for information about the logging project. Since it was done when the property was still privately owned, they didn’t have much, but they did give me the forest management plan submitted in 2020.

If the state still had a Natural Heritage Program, somebody might have seen that the management plan was for an old-growth core forest in a Natural Heritage Area, preventing this ecological catastrophe. However, DEM approved the plan, and it went forward.

This year, a 100-year-old forest in the Great Swamp Management Area, which is publicly owned and also in a Natural Heritage Area, is being clear-cut.

Natural Heritage Areas on both private and public land have no protection and no one in state government is keeping an eye out for them.

Rhode Island desperately needs a Natural Heritage Program again, so we don’t lose any more of these unique habitats where rare and endangered species live.

We need Natural Area Preserves per the Natural Areas Protection Act of 1993 to legally protect these rare ecosystems.

There are Natural Heritage Areas, old-growth forests, and core forests left in Rhode Island that can still be saved.

In the past few weeks, two unmapped old-growth forests in a Natural Heritage Area were discovered by the Rhode Island Old Growth Tree Society in the Great Swamp filled with 150+ year old trees, including towering white pines and ancient tupelo with a beautiful understory of old mountain laurel.

Let’s save these two old-growth forests and all the other rare ecosystems throughout the state by designating them as legally protected Natural Area Preserves, so Rhode Islanders for generations to come can enjoy our state’s natural beauty and scientists can study, marvel at, and help us protect these miracles of nature.

Nathan Cornell is president of the Rhode Island Old Growth Tree Society.