The Vermont of my existence has always fit its license-plate description as our neighboring Green Mountain State – a wild place characterized by tall, mix-forested landscapes, deep, craggy ravines, rollicking streams, clear lakes, upland cedar swamps, bottomland bogs, black flies, spruce gum, and dairy farms rimmed with flame-orange fall sugarbush stands.

In my boyhood, it was the state where my friends’ fathers kept tidy, woodstove-heated hunting and fishing camps. There they harvested trophy whitetail bucks and black bears, hounded coons and cats, wing-shot woodcock, partridge, ducks, and geese, landed lunker trout and largemouth bass, and, in later years, called in wild turkeys reborn by aggressive restoration programs predating our own.

Vermont has, to me, been a forested wonderland and sportsmen’s paradise, not to mention the land of the raunchiest, rough-and-tumble country fairs known to man. As a wide-eyed teen working summer surveying jobs and walking the rowdy midways, I bore witness to the last of the so-called North Country “Fay-uhs,” spoken in that old Vermont Yankee twang. But we won’t go there. Too racy. Not for public consumption – even though it’s history that was very real and near.

Vermont as a wilderness sanctuary, heaven-sent for thriving fish and wildlife populations, was what I had always seen. But little did I know what little I knew. Truth be told, the Vermont forests I adored were young, concealing decades of gross overharvest by the lumber and paper industries.

I would not have dreamed that Vermont forests at the time of my parents’ births, just before 1930, were clear-cut, placing the entire state ecosystem in peril and at a crossroads. That I learned by reading retired Vermont Superior Court judge and historian Robert A. Mello’s new book, When the Trees Came Back: The Great Battle to Save Vermont’s Forests, which chronicles statewide clear-cutting and wildfires that had by the Great Depression pushed Vermont to the brink of ecological disaster.

Yes, it’s a fact that the hillsides were bare, the brooks were dry, important fish and wildlife populations were endangered, and a once-verdant state was on the fast track to barren wasteland resulting from industrial overharvesting and strong political support for the status quo. Forest destruction was profitable, and thus justifiable, environment be damned.

By the Civil War, 60% of Vermont’s forests had been leveled, and it would only get worse. By 1930, the Vermont landscape was even more denuded, with only 25% of the state still forested. Touring the highways today, it’s difficult to imagine what a traveler would have seen back then. The captains of the lumber and paper industries had left their mark, a pathetic scene with severe environmental consequences.

With forests cleared, lumber litter piled high, and forest fires a constant fair-weather threat, the trout streams and mountain springs went dry, the thin upland soil was swept clean by heavy rains, and the once-plentiful wildlife was only a memory.

And that doesn’t even address the damage done to large Connecticut River tributaries by workmen who removed natural riverbed obstacles, such as boulders, rapids, and low waterfalls, to clear the way for damaging, floating log drives to New England’s largest river.

An interesting recent visit by my sister-in-law from Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom provided insight into the current lumber practices near her Essex County mountain home in East Haven. In discussing When the Trees Came Back, which identifies Essex County pine and hemlock forests as an important source of pulp wood, she told me that most of the vast forest surrounding her little Sixties settlement is still owned and systematically logged by paper companies. In fact, she said, her property and that of her neighbors was purchased from a paper company.

Mello’s book caught my attention a few months ago because I thought it may provide insight into what had happened simultaneously to our western Massachusetts forests. We, too, had lost 75% of our forest cover by the 1880s, but I think most of it was cleared by farmers opening new cropland and pasture, not lumber and paper barons feeding the industrial pig, though I assume there was some of that here as well. Our own paper mills in places like Turners Falls and Holyoke would have also been on the lookout for lumber to feed their pulp mills.

A local case of forestry loss impacting a town’s 19th-century population loss was that of Conway. By the mid-19th century, much of that hilltown’s upland forest had been removed and there was nothing left to hold thin topsoil in place during heavy rains and spring runoff. Low agricultural yields then led to a mass exodus of farm families to the greener pastures of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, where they hoped to improve their self-sustaining family-farm prospects while cashing in on cheap land incentives.

As a hunter touring the Conway woodlands, I often found abandoned farmhouse sites by stumbling across hidden cellar holes accompanied by an apple tree or two, lilac bushes, and maybe even a stone-clad well hidden under deep forest canopy. Such cellar holes are common in our hilltown forests. Curious about the story behind them, I searched for answers and learned of that 19th-century exodus to better Midwestern land.

This is not to suggest there was not expansive lumber and paper-mill logging in western Massachusetts forests; just that it was conducted on a lesser scale than in Vermont. The closest author Mello creeps to Franklin County is his look at the Deerfield River Company, the Deerfield Valley Railroad, and the Deerfield Lumber Company – all of which were involved in large-scale clearcutting by paper and lumber industries in the Wilmington, Vermont neighborhood extending south toward Heath, Rowe, Monroe, and Charlemont.

An important lesson to take from Mello’s tale of Vermont forest destruction fueled by industrial greed is the political battle between the conservation and industrial camps. Boiled down, it parallels our current climate-change debate in many ways. As the conservation advocates preach immediate policy change, opposing politicians, scientists, and profiteers with deep connections to industry weave oppositional disinformation and wads of cash into the debate.

In Vermont, the forestry-management argument endured for some 80 years. Conservation advocates favored an innovative, environmentally-friendly approach, but on the other hand, the pro-industry camp favored timber farming and widescale industrial logging.

The pro-industry folks held that clear-cutting and regeneration were good for forest ecosystems. Plus, they were determined to protect private landowners’ rights. Government regulation of logging on private property was wrong, they said, if not unconstitutional, and certainly un-American.

Public opinion was shaped by upstanding industrial families who were important community members, held political office, and owned newspapers. So, the impasse endured for decades as forests fell and landscape destruction continued. That should sound familiar. We’re living it today, as the fossil-fuel industry twists facts to drive its message in the global-warming debate.

When the Trees Came Back is a good read for anyone interested in regional history and perspectives about conservation, forest, fish and wildlife management, and environmental protection.

It shows that in environmental debates, perseverance pays.