The forest that grew back while nobody was looking

By Earth to Sea News · July 2026

New England lost most of its trees. Then nature was simply left alone.

Two centuries ago, the hills of New England were nearly bare. European settlers had cleared land so thoroughly that Massachusetts, by some estimates, lost about 90 per cent of its forest. Then, in the mid 1800s, the farmers moved on to new fields inland, and something quietly extraordinary began. Nobody planted the forest back. Nobody needed to. Seed by seed and season by season, the trees returned on their own, and today Massachusetts is around 60 per cent forested, its hills rolling green all the way to the horizon.

Scientist Bill Moomaw of the Woodwell Climate Research Center calls it the greatest forest recovery in the history of the world, and says it all happened because of what he calls benign neglect. There is a gentle lesson in that for all of us. Nature does not always need grand plans and heavy machinery to heal. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do for a landscape is to step back and let it remember what it was. New England's forests remembered, and they are magnificent.