The old roads, many of them cut through the forest by settlers in the 18th century, are public, with occasional high centers and water-filled dips that make them unsuited for anything but high-clearance vehicles.
Nothing remains of the old-growth forest that settlers found here, but there are balsam fir, sugar maple and red maple trees, along with red and black spruce, alder and others.
Timber companies have played their part; a Korean one has been accused not only of cutting into precious hardwood forests around and in the Bosawas reserve on the Caribbean coast, but of opening trails into the forest for settlers like the ex-Contras.
Children go to free daycare, and afterwards they can visit the cows, run around the playgrounds sprinkled throughout the village, or traipse through the forest that settlers planted here.
Clearance of the indigenous forest by European settlers for pastoral production began in the 1880s and by the 1920s all but the highest and most rugged hill country had been cleared.
Some well-known historical events, such as major volcanic eruptions, the clearing of North American forests by early settlers as revealed by pollen concentrations, the first extensive use of certain heavy metals by industry, and nuclear explosions, provide reference points in the sediment record.
As new roads penetrate the forests, colonisation follows and settlers extract more timber and introduce cattle and crops.
Ms. Stang worked for three decades to preserve the rain forest and defend poor settlers' land rights.
Like J. M. Coetzee's stylistically astute but politically dubious "Disgrace," "Gone to the Forest" admits only white settlers to the inner circle of the inner life.
Alberobello, literally "beautiful tree," was once a forest, and the first settlers were debtors, petty criminals and other fugitives from the feudal order who hid away in "silvam arboris belli," the woods.
