Letter: We Can All Be Local Heroes for Our Forests

(This letter first appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on 4/20/2026)

To the editor: We can stand in a grocery checkout next to apparently ordinary people who have contributed heroically to human knowledge.

For example: William Moomaw, Tufts University emeritus professor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, prompts us to think more deeply about "proforestation."

We can all, likewise, walk down our Bellows Pipe trail and not grasp the outsized role of the Notch Forest in making our Berkshire lives possible. We might know some of the forest’s many vital roles and yet be unaware that it is also helping manage the regional water cycle and making regional weather.

A new hero is Anastasia Makarieva, Russian atmospheric physicist and theoretical physicist. She convincingly depicts the forest centered “biotic pump” — for me, a mind-altering discovery. Forests — especially larger contiguous and intact forests — create regular and predictable local and regional low-pressure zones, which help pull in additional rain from far away. Forests are, in this now celebrated thesis, acting as a giant living water pump, harnessing the energy of sunlight and the water vapor created from forest transpiration. Turning water vapor into rain, they create a giant low-pressure suction pump. This low pressure invites rain from hundreds, even thousands of miles away.

The contiguous forests in Western Massachusetts depend upon this imported rain, as does all life in Berkshire County. Cutting even modest amounts of our forests disproportionally weakens the strength of this biotic pump action, causing the forests and surrounding areas to begin to dry. Deforestation can thus ultimately lead to inland droughts and arid conditions far beyond where trees are cut. There are ample examples of such human-induced aridification worldwide.

It is appropriate to conclude that the nearly 100-year-old Notch Forest and surrounding forests are an essential lifeline for our future regional water supply. In this context, it behooves Berkshire citizens to employ the precautionary principle. As Anastasia concludes, it is essential we protect and preserve intact large areas of intricate functioning forests as “our common heritage” because “forests regulate the global climate and provide distributed fresh water to what otherwise could be arid land.”

We would be wise to embrace Moomaw’s proforestation recommendations as a catalyst to preserving Western Massachusetts' life-enhancing forests.

Please consider joining Save Notch Forest in advocating for permanent preservation. Please consider signing the petition at savenotchforest.com.

Walter Cudnohufsky, Ashfield