I am writing to respond to James Smith’s guest column in Monday’s Sentinel & Enterprise criticizing my wife’s and my recent donation to the city of Fitchburg to create a 205-acre Forest Reserve on city-owned forest land adjacent to our home.

Mr. Smith stated that it was made to preclude forest harvesting “under the guise of helping the environment.” Our Forest Reserve initiative is intended to raise awareness of the significant value that forests play in helping to mitigate the adverse impacts of worsening climate change. We also seek to elevate carbon sequestration as a more prominent goal of forest managers of public lands such as those owned by the city, along with the goals they already honor of protecting water quality, maintaining forest health, benefitting wildlife and fostering outdoor recreation.

Forests and forest soils are important in part because they store 12 to 20 percent of the Northeast’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Mr. Smith argues that our initiative ignores the carbon stored in forest products such as building materials and furniture, but according to research published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, even with consideration of carbon sequestered in harvested wood products, unlogged northern hardwood forests absorb 39 percent to 118 percent more carbon in trees and vegetation than any of the active forest management options evaluated, i.e., those that involved logging.

In their 2007 report “Climate Change, Carbon, and the Forests of the Northeast,” the ForestGuild recommended the establishment and maintenance of “forest reserves for carbon sequestration, genetic diversity, and habitat refuges in the face of climate change.” Recent research has shown that older trees actually sequester more carbon than the younger trees that replace them after a timber harvest.

Although the city’s 1,870 acres of Northern Watershed lands are already under a Mass. Fish and Wildlife Conservation Restriction, they can still be logged. The portion we have protected is biodiverse, has multiple age classes and multiple cover types, and is well-suited to serve as a habitat refuge in an area where adjacent lands are currently being heavily logged. Recent harvests on city-owned land have removed on average about 50 percent of the standing biomass, which is not low-impact forestry. It is done with large, commercial-scale logging equipment that reduces biodiversity and scarifies the forest soil. This in turn releases carbon stored in the soil and changes the hydrology, something I, as an environmental soil scientist, have observed has occurred on adjacent parcels post-logging. Reducing a typical harvest to a much smaller proportion of the standing biomass through lower-impact, more selective harvesting would generate nearly as much income for landowners.

Large-scale commercial logging in the area has also introduced invasive species and creates roads attractive to ATV use, which is a prohibited activity under the Mass. Fish and Wildlife Conservation Restriction.

Other conventionally managed forest lands in Massachusetts and the Northeast are and will continue to be sources of forest products, so the argument that we are negatively impacting tropical ecosystems is fallacious.

It is also absurd to liken our donation to private attempts to interfere with and halt public housing, new schools, parks, etc., as Mr. Smith claims. I am an avid volunteer in our community and actively work to help foster, not hinder, such programs.

Ralph S. Baker, Ph.D., lives in Fitchburg.