A divided Select Board on Monday decided the town should join the Mohawk Trail Woodlands Partnership.
The Berkshire Eagle  reports after listening to two of the town's leading environmental authorities make arguments for and against joining, the board voted 4-1 to join a growing list of municipalities that have joined on to the bi-county initiative.
Henry Art, an emeritus professor of environmental studies at Williams College and a member of the advisory board that created the partnership, joined Berkshire Regional Planning Commission Executive Director Thomas Matuszko in advocating that the town join the partnership.
William Moomaw, an emeritus professor of international environmental policy at Tufts and founder of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy, expressed concern that the partnership was "heavily slanted toward turning all of our forests into working woodland forests."
Moomaw, who was out of the country at a climate change conference the first time the Select Board took up the question, argued that the MTWP will be dominated by the U.S. Forest Service and the timber industry at the expense of preserving old-growth forests and larger trees that are needed to sequester carbon in the fight against climate change.

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