VERSHIRE — Donna Goldberg stopped in her tracks to gaze skyward at a single 100-foot white pine that towered over smaller hardwood trees on a forested embankment.

“It’s a beauty,” she said, estimating the pine’s age at about 80 years old.

Trees such as this one were what inspired Goldberg eight years ago to buy the 190-acre parcel that stretches from Vershire’s Eagle Hollow Road to neighboring Corinth.

The property’s former owner “didn’t log it heavily,” she said. “In 200 years, this forest will be magnificent.”

As you can see, Goldberg, who has lived in Vershire for more than 30 years, thinks long term.

Largely through a private land conservation foundation that she established in 2013, the 67-year-old Goldberg has quietly become the Orange County town’s largest property owner. Through more than a half-dozen purchases over the years, she now controls nearly 3,300 acres of mostly forestland, Vershire property records show.

Last year, Goldberg expanded her land holdings into bordering West Fairlee, purchasing 264 acres in the Old Buffalo Forest for $395,000 from an out-of-state owner, according to the town’s property records.

But unlike many Vermont property owners with sizable forestland holdings, Goldberg is not looking to profit through harvesting timber.

Quite the opposite.

The boundaries of her properties in the two towns are lined with 9x12-inch metal signs that describe the lands as a “wildlife refuge where the forests and marshes will remain wild and undisturbed by humans for all time.”

To that end, Goldberg established her private foundation — Sandbhreagh Wildlands Sanctuary and Trust — to oversee the lands in perpetuity. In its most recent Internal Revenue Service filing available to the public on the agency’s website, the foundation reported $3.5 million in assets.

The filing doesn’t include the West Fairlee purchase and another in Vershire that was finalized just this week. Goldberg, who is known to pay top dollar, acquired a 435-acre parcel, which includes a pond and camp, off Beaver Meadow Road for $975,000, Vershire records indicate. The town has the property assessed at $460,600 — less than half of what Goldberg paid.

“Trees are what hold the planet together,” Goldberg said in an interview. “When I put a piece into the (sanctuary), I know that in a couple of hundred years that people living here will get the gift of seeing it and walking through these forests.”

Goldberg is part of a growing movement in the Northeast and other regions of the country that espouses adopting “passive” forest management strategies.

The goal is to increase the inventory of so-called “old-growth” forests featuring trees that have been around for centuries. Which makes logging in these forests, where trees such as sugar maple, red oak and hemlock can live for 300 or 400 years, a no-no.

The passive management approach “involves letting nature take its course and waiting for forest development and natural disturbances to create old-growth characteristics without any direct human intervention,” states a 2022 report initiated by the Vermont Land Trust.

Forests made up of older, larger trees mitigate climate change by absorbing immense amounts of global-warming emissions, passive management proponents argue.

The report, “Restoring Old-Growth Characteristics of New England’s and New York’s Forests,” speaks to the climate science behind the movement:

“In the context of climate change, it is widely recognized that although they do not sequester carbon as quickly as younger forests, old-growth forests store the greatest amount of carbon.”

University of Vermont professor Anthony D’Amato, director of the forest program at the state’s flagship school, and Paul Catanzaro, a professor in the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wrote the 34-page report which is an update of their earlier research.

Old-growth forests are rare in New England and New York, occurring in less than 0.1% of the region, the professors found.

It wasn’t always this way.

On its website, Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock tells the story of how Vermont was once a “sheep state.”

In the early 1800s, Vermont farmers — many of them new to the state — began importing Merino sheep from Spain, which in turn created a thriving woolen mill industry.

Needing pastures to graze their sheep, farmers clear cut acres upon acres of ancient trees and sold the lumber.

By 1870, Vermont had more than a half-million sheep.

But the boom lasted less than a century.

Sheep farming in Vermont and other New England states moved to the Midwest, where there was already plenty of open pastures.

The last 150 years have “witnessed an incredible rebound of our (New England and New York) forests,” D’Amato and Catanzaro wrote. “However, even though our forests have grown back there are few remaining examples of old-growth forests.”

Without calling ahead on a sunny afternoon in September, I stopped by Goldberg’s homestead. She happened to be standing in her front doorway.

As a precaution against COVID-19, she politely asked me to keep my distance. For the same reason, she doesn’t like to shake hands.

During our half-hour conversation, I learned that Goldberg grew up in suburban Chicago before she headed off to the University of New Hampshire. She went on to earn a master’s degree in environmental science at Antioch University New England.

After finishing her studies, she did an internship at Vermont Institute of Natural Science, or VINS, when the nonprofit was based in Woodstock.

Goldberg stuck around New England, eventually settling in Vershire in the early 1990s. Later, she received a large inheritance from an uncle who encouraged her to “do what you want with it,” she told me.

Goldberg bankrolled Sandbhreagh, giving the sanctuary a Gaelic touch by combining the names of her first two Black Labrador Retrievers.

The sanctuary’s signature metal signs feature color photographs of a yellow-spotted salamander and the trunk of an old-growth maple.

Hunting, trapping and fishing are prohibited, the signs read. Goldberg acknowledges that it probably doesn’t make her popular in some local circles. But she hasn’t cut off total access to the land. “Please walk lightly,” the signs state. “Harm nothing. Leave only footprints.”

And, oh, by the way, “No harvesting of trees or plants.”

In 2021 alone, Goldberg contributed nearly $2.8 million to the cause, Sandbhreagh’s federal tax filing shows. Much of the money came from the sale of shares in Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s conglomerate. “I wanted to divest money out of oil,” she said.

While the bulk of the foundation’s land holdings (roughly 2,000 acres) are in Vershire, it also has a 700-acre parcel in Topsham along with its smaller pieces in West Fairlee and Corinth. By my math, the foundation’s total land holdings in Orange County comes more than 3,000 acres.

Goldberg owns an additional 1,256-acre parcel in Vershire where she lives and farms, but isn’t part of the foundation. As part of her estate planning, Goldberg will eventually turn the property over to the foundation.

Goldberg, who doesn’t have children, is listed in IRS filings as the foundation’s only trustee and receives no compensation for putting in an average of 15 hours a week of work.

After her death, the foundation will be overseen by new trustees that she appoints. Goldberg has also taken legal steps to make sure the lands remain “ancient woodlands for evermore.” It was a reason that she set up her own foundation instead of giving the lands to an already established nonprofit.

Orange County Forester David Paganelli has hiked Goldberg’s lands and advised her on forest management practices.

“I think what she’s doing is unique,” Paganelli told me. “She’s purchasing land to protect it. She’s an honorable person who is passionate about what she’s doing. She’s for real.”

Even before she joined the movement to mitigate climate change through old-growth forests, Goldberg had a keen interest in preserving wildlife habitats.

Early on, she reached out to Sue Morse, a Vermont ecologist and wildlife tracker. Goldberg invited Morse, who started Keeping Track, a nonprofit that teaches people about wildlife, to meet with her and other Vershire residents.

A lasting friendship was formed. Morse now advises Goldberg on properties to buy and features to look for. Trees such as giant hemlock that have died and fallen into the forest are “carpeted with mosses, lichens, tree seedlings and other plants,” Morse wrote in The Vermont Almanac in 2021. Left alone, the logs provide “opportunities for biodiversity” for centuries before they “decompose into a moldering pile of rich soil,” she added.

Morse, who is a deer hunter, told me that Goldberg shows “vision and is committed to creating opportunities” to improve wildlife habitat.

Take beavers.

Before Goldberg bought the property off Eagle Hollow Road in 2016, trapping was allowed to combat beavers that had built a large dam near the parcel’s access road.

After taking ownership, “I stopped the trapping,” she said.

Town officials were worried, however, that if the growing family of beavers was allowed to continue going about its business, it could lead to costly flooding of the dirt road.

But Goldberg was intent on saving the beavers. She hired a beaver “expert” to install underwater piping and a flow device that prevents the beaver pond from reaching flood levels. In the process of keeping the dam intact, Goldberg lost the access road to her property.

“I decided to let the beavers have the driveway,” she said. “They’re happy and the town is happy.”

Goldberg recently took a Valley News photographer and myself on a two-hour hike in a section of the Eagle Ledge parcel.

After crossing the beaver dam, we reached a clearing featuring wild apple trees. Goldberg pointed to ledges on a nearby hill for which the property is named and where peregrine falcons are known to nest.

Peregrines are considered the fastest bird in the world, diving while hunting at speeds over 200 mph, according to the nonprofit The Nature Conservancy’s website. By the 1960s, peregrines were wiped out in the eastern U.S., largely due to the widespread use of the insecticide DDT. It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that peregrines returned to Eagle Ledges.

As we headed uphill on an old logging trail, a massive sugar maple on the steep bank below caught Goldberg’s eye. Ignoring her balky knee, she scrambled down the bank, wrapping her arms — or at least trying to — around the tree.

“A crazy tree hugger? That’s me,” she said.

From the maple’s girth, she estimated that it could be around 200 years old. “There will be more of these here someday,” she said.

In 2022, the Vermont Legislature and Gov. Phil Scott gave a major boost to the effort to to expand the state’s stock of old-growth forests.

Act 146 created a new category called “Reserve Forestland” in Vermont’s longtime current use program. It allows a limited number of property owners enrolled in the forestland portion of current use to continue reaping substantial tax benefits without having a management plan that requires logging.

Since current use became law more than 40 years ago, enrolled property owners have been taxed on the undeveloped value of their land, not the market value.

In Goldberg’s case, it cuts her annual property tax bill roughly in half. She’s still paying almost $39,000 in property taxes this year on her extensive land holdings, house and buildings, town records show.

Since Act 146 went into effect nearly 1½ years ago, 25 property owners, including three in Windsor County and another in Orange County, have gone into the reserve category.

Goldberg is working with her private forester to finalize plans to enter the sanctuary’s 1,423-acre Eagle Ledge parcel into the program next year. When she does, it will make her the state’s largest participant by far. (The 25 landowners already in the program have enrolled less than 2,700 acres combined.)

One of the challenges is to help the public understand that the reserve forestland category is “not an abomination of the current use program,” said Oliver Pierson, the state’s director of forestry.

Participants are still required to update their forest management plan every 10 years. Also, to qualify under Act 146, land must be fairly steep, which can be difficult to log to begin with.

Landowners enrolled in the reserve program also have to address erosion problems as they crop up, along with taking steps to identify and eradicate invasive plant species.

Keith Thompson, private lands program manager for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, said that axing logging from some landowners’ management plans through Act 146 doesn’t mean the state has created a “do nothing” category in the current use law.

Loggers have a different take.

“The do-nothing (description) is probably accurate,” Jed Lipsky said.

Lipsky, 77, started logging when he was 18 years old. When I called his cellphone this week, he was on his log loader in Morrisville, Vt.

In November 2022 — after the reserve forestland bill was passed near the end of the previous session — Lipsky was elected to the Legislature as an Independent from Stowe. He’s also on the governing board of the Northeast Loggers Association, a regional trade group.

The move to limit logging through legislation such as Act 146 is “very discouraging for the working forest community,” said Lipsky, who easily won reelection earlier this month. “If loggers aren’t able to cut timber, they become obsolete.”

Goldberg recognizes that her approach can’t be universal. “Logging is not going away,” she said. “We need working forests.”

Her Sandbhreagh sanctuary is an experiment of sorts that could take hundreds of years before the results are in.

No one today will be around to see whether the effort to bring back old-growth forests was successful or if it made a difference in mitigating climate change.

Goldberg is OK with that.

“Every time I buy a new parcel for the sanctuary, I feel good,” she said. “You just have to do what you can in your own little part of the world.”

One Orange County forest at a time.

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.