Western Great Lakes forests Western Great Lakes forests The Western Great Lakes forests is a terrestrial ecoregion as defined by the World Wildlife Fund. It is within the Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forests ecozone of North America, in the United States' states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Manitoba. The Western Great Lakes forests, in large part, lie in the northwestern Great Lakes Basin near the shores of Lake Huron, Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, including the entire Upper peninsula of Michigan and large parts of Northern Wisconsin, around Lake Superior into much of northern Minnesota and a
History of the lumber industry in the United States system. As old-growth forest disappeared rapidly, the United States' timber resources ceased to appear limitless. Canadian lumberman James Little remarked in 1876 that the rate at which the Great Lakes forests were being logged was "not only burning the candle at both ends, but cutting it in two, and setting the match to the four ends to enable them to double the process of exhaustion." To deal with the increasingly limited availability of timber resources, the Division of Forestry was established in 1885, and in 1891 the Forest Reserve Act passed, setting aside large tracts of forest as federal land.