Saving the‘Telephone Gap’ area in the Green Mountains
UPDATE (July 6, 2025): A new story about the Telephone Gap project from Vermont's Own WCAX-TV can be viewed: Highly controversial logging plan moves on to implementation.
The Telephone Gap project will commercially log nearly half of the existing old-growth in the Green Mountain National Forest, including cutting down 1,800 acres of a rare Inventoried Roadless Area, jeopardizing clean water and putting communities in Vermont at greater flood risk.
This misguided U.S. Forest Service project has repeatedly been flagged as one of the most egregious logging projects in the entire country by a national coalition of environmental organizations that includes the Sierra Club, Protect Ancient Forests, Environment America, EarthJustice, Standing Trees and the Center for Biological Diversity.
The former deputy chief of the U.S. Forest Service recently wrote an op-ed explaining why protecting mature and old-growth forests in New England is so critical right now. You can read his article here.
Since 2021, there has been an energized grassroots movement — supported by Indigenous leaders, key members of Congress, the scientific community, the White House, and over one million citizens who submitted comments to the Forest Service — to safeguard the remaining mature and old-growth forests on U.S. public lands.
Renowned climate and forest scientists — including Jim Hansen, Michael Mann, and Dominick DellaSala — call on the White House to immediately halt the destruction of mature and old-growth forests in a letter, read here.
‘Telephone Gap’ landscape in the Green Mountain National Forest (photograph by John Geery)
Protect Ancient Forests co-sponsored a rally (along with Standing Trees, 350 Vermont, Third Act Vermont, and others) to call for an end to the Telephone Gap logging project and the permanent protection of this irreplaceable ancient forest ecosystem on our federal public lands.
Photograph of ‘Telephone Gap’ area — provided by Zack Porter of Standing Trees.