Can we try to be honest with ourselves? Most scientists say we currently live in the middle of growing climate and biodiversity calamities.

Massachusetts has an excellent opportunity to help mitigate these existential threats by ending the senseless carbon-emitting and damaging logging of its state-owned public forests. Doing so would help enhance and protect biodiversity, increase carbon sequestration and storage, improve air and water quality, wildlife habitat, flood control, recreation opportunities, scenic natural beauty, spiritual refuge and tourism, and even save taxpayer funds, among other benefits.

But if our wealthy and allegedly progressive “commonwealth,” under an allegedly progressive governorship, in allegedly environmentally conscious New England cannot even pick this very low-hanging fruit in the best interests of 99.9% of its citizens, in order to appease a well-connected 0.1% with a financial stake in continued logging, the likelihood that homo not-always-so sapiens will do anything of substance to “save” the planet is about 0%.

If we continue with more meaningless blah, blah (another source of human-caused CO2) about “doing something,” while just greenwashing doing nothing (or making things worse) in order to maintain our delusion of endless infinite exponential growth on a finite planet, the next generation will rage at our cowardly selfishness and they would be 100% right to do so.

We do, however, currently have an excellent opportunity to demonstrate that in addition to much shortsightedness and ignorance, humans can also be caring, thoughtful and act with consideration of future generations by passing these current forest protection bills, which would provide a desperately needed ray of hope that we might yet step away from our seemingly insatiable desire to have our planet and eat it, too.

H.4150 would give Department of Conservation and Recreation state public forests and watersheds (14% of all Massachusetts forests) better protection from being chopped down, chipped and shipped to Quebec and other far-flung places for the benefit of a handful of private interests at the expense of the other 99.9% of us. Some examples of why this bill is needed can be found online at www.maforests.org/.

H.904 would provide better protection for 30% of Division of Fish and Wildlife state public forests (2% of all Massachusetts forests) from the current aggressive clear-cutting and chainsaw “treatments” masquerading as concern for nature. The 30% figure is grossly inadequate but would hopefully restore some public accountability to DFW managers who treat these scarce public lands like a private woodlot for timber and biomass interests. Some examples of why this bill is also needed can be found here: www.maforests.org/DFW.pdf.

Vested interests in logging our public lands, unfortunately including some careerist-driven “wrong kind of green” groups, will falsely claim that logging and clear-cutting of public forests is done to “help” nature. Once you stop laughing, or crying, some obvious reasons why such claims are nonsense can be found here: www.maforests.org/Timberspeak.pdf.

Details about these public forest protection bills can be found here: www.savemassforests.com/.

Genuinely protecting our public forests now would help demonstrate that humans might yet learn to live within the limits of this beautiful planet and provide hope to the next generation that they may still have a chance to inherit a livable world from considerate ancestors.

Chris Matera of Massachusetts Forest Watch lives in Northampton.