Native people did not use fire to shape New England’s landscape
Old-growth forests prevailed in New England for thousands of years. David Foster, CC BY-ND By Wyatt Oswald, Emerson College; David R. Foster, Harvard University, and Elizabeth Chilton, Binghamton University, State University of New York An interpretive sign stands at the edge of the Montague Plains Wildlife Management Area, a 1,500-acre state conservation property in central Massachusetts. It explains the site’s open land vegetation has been shaped by “millennia of fire” – and that the recent exclusion of fire has led…