Managing Penn's Woods for old-growth forest tourism and deer

Cook Forest State Park was established in 1927 to preserve part of Pennsylvania's original forest. Using the concept of moral landscapes, this paper examines the park's creation resulting from one of the earliest wilderness preservation campaigns. Cook Forest's moral landscape has been shaped by differing values over production and consumption, deer hunting and non-consumptive tourism, and the role of humans in nature. This paper will examine the challenges of managing for rare eastern old-growth forests, which are the park's primary draw, and for white-tailed deer, which are ubiquitous but key to Pennsylvania's deer hunting tradition. This paper discusses how altering the moral landscapes is critical to reshaping attitudes of what ‘normal’ forests and deer populations are as the park expands hunting acreage, considers alternative silvicultural practices, and moves to emphasize secondary old-growth in addition to the much visited primary old-growth that will be dying out over the next 100 years.