WILDLANDS, WOODLANDS, FARMLANDS & COMMUNITIES • January 12, 2026
In September of 2025, more than 200 people gathered at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf campus for the Northeastern Old Growth Conference to celebrate old-growth forests. The conference theme, “Wildlands and Old-Growth Forests: A Vision for the Future,” set the stage for the gathering co-hosted by Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. It was a celebration of old-growth forests and a call to protect them, enhance them, and encourage places for them to develop and thrive in the future. In this issue, we feature some of the high points of the conference, and we offer further exploration of old growth insights by a few of the speakers, as well as some other voices. ~ The Editors of From the Ground Up