The reforestation of the eastern United States is widely seen as one of the greatest environmental success stories of this nation. And nowhere has the positive change been more dramatic than in New England.

Over about 100 years, forest cover re-established itself on about nine million acres of land. New England is now the nation’s most forested region, with trees now covering some 33 million acres of a total land area of 42 million acres. The environmental writer Bill McKibben described it as “an explosion of green.”