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border in Massachusetts, but swears he was conceived in Montpelier, Vermont’s capital; his wife, Louise, is a sixth-generation Bristolite. He studied forestry in school, and now serves as the Addison County forester—but he’s never been swallowed up by the industry status quo. He founded a group called Vermont Family Forests (VFF) in his spare time, and many of the best ideas in this slice of Vermont sprang full grown from his brain. Or sprang half-baked—he has plenty of colleagues, who help make real his multitude of visions.
    So it’s always a pleasure to walk with him in the woods. There’s guaranteed to be a mix of down-to-earth and pie-in—well, pie hovering in midair, not yet quite in reach but getting closer. When he ventures onto a woodlot, oddly, trees seem to be the last thing he notices.Instead, it’s the condition of the logging roads: have they been built away from steep slopes, for instance, and with enough waterbars to keep soil from eroding? “I get emotionally involved with broad-based dips,” he says this morning as we stroll. “There’s a formula to getting them right. You divide 1,000 by the grade, and that’s where you need them—so this is a 7-percent grade, you need a dip every 140 feet. Yes! Right here! We’re going to get a deluge this afternoon, and there will be water on this surface, but there won’t be any erosion.”
    Once the thrill of road maintenance subsides, however, it’s clear he can see the forest, too. We haven’t been walking five minutes when he drops his voice, motions me off the trail, and leads me to a little grove. “These are two of my favorite white oaks on earth,” he says, patting a pair of lovely straight trees. “I get goose bumps when I come over here, and I’m getting them now.”
    VFF enrolls woodlot owners who agree to follow the program’s strict ecological standards—not just about sound road building, but leaving lots of dead trees as standing snags for wildlife, staying far away from streams, and a hundred other details. The guidelines fill a thick manual, but of course there’s a rub: building all those waterbars and broad-based dips takes longer than cutting an eroding track straight to the trees you want to harvest. It takes longer to be responsible, in logging as in every other thing on the Earth. And time is money, so in some sense bad logging is efficient.
    Brynn’s basic task, then, is not just figuring out how many trees you need to leave standing for birds’ nests—it’s figuring out how to increase the return to landowners and loggers so that they can afford to be responsible. “We find bare-bones logging around here costs $150 per thousand board feet, and doing it the right way costs $220 to $260 per thousand board feet. So we had to come up with some way to pay for that difference.” VFF has played with many schemes to make up that gap; most of them come down, in the end, to eliminating some of the middlemen and to branding the wood as local and sustainable so that people will pay a slight premium. “Right now the Vermont timber industry is worth more than a billion dollars, but stumpage—the money paid to the guy who owns the woodlot—is only 3 percent of that. It’s exactly the same as growing potatoes for McDonald’s. You’re completely at the mercy of the mill.”
    But localizing the timber supply is just half the battle. The other half is convincing consumers that what they want in their homes is the same thing that the forest wants to yield. A few years ago, for instance, Middlebury College decided to erect a vast new science building, Bicentennial Hall. The architects specified, as architects usually do, that the interior wood be “Grade 1”—by the standards of the Architectural Woodwork Institute, that means it should be uniform in color and grain, with few “flaws.” That kind of wood, though, comes only frombig trees with few knot-forming side branches, and removing those trees from the forest