Ethan Tapper, author of How to Love a Forest. (Photo: Benji Soll)
Our forests are beautiful, but they’re under threat from development, invasive species, climate change, and more. Is all human involvement in forests destructive? If we just leave them alone, won’t nature restore them to health?
Something Wild host Dave Anderson talks with Ethan Tapper, a Vermont forester and author of "How to Love a Forest."
Here's a transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for clarity:
Ethan Tapper: What I was trying to express in the book is that I feel like there's an idea that the only way that we can really care for forests or other ecosystems is to leave them alone, and that we mess them up.
And so it must be that the way we show compassion for them is to just be hands off, we're stepping away. But sometimes the most profound acts of compassion are actually to take action. And sometimes these forests, you know, are not going to be okay if we don't help them out.
Dave Anderson: So all of that stuff that's work has taught me some things, but all the stuff that's home, family, sugar house, boil sap, cut timber, has taught me a lot more.
Ethan Tapper: I also am a tree farmer and a tree farm inspector. And I work on my own forest, Bear Island, which I talk a lot about in the book, which when I got to it, was like the most degraded forest I'd ever been in.
Dave Anderson: Degraded how?
Ethan Tapper: There were no healthy trees there at all. There was also evidence of deer overpopulation. A 30 acre pure infestation of Japanese barberry, a non-native invasive plant. Rutted, eroding skid trails. I mean, it just had every problem that a forest could have.
And I sort of had to ask myself, you know, if I was just going to leave it alone and hope that nature took its course and solve all those problems, which I don't believe that it would. Or if I was going to do everything in my power to try and make it healthy again.
Dave Anderson: Do you like that word stewardship?
Ethan Tapper: Yes, I identify as a forest steward. I wish that people knew that we can manage these forests in a way that's completely compassionate and that our impact on them is not a negative thing. You know, there are things that we can do to help them. There are things that we have to do to help them survive this moment. And not all of them are as easy as planting a tree. Sometimes you have to cut trees to jump start those processes and to create the habitats that we have to and to make our forests resilient.
Dave Anderson: So empowering people to experience the forest in a personal way locally and help to take care of it and understand it's not a hands off, but it's a privilege. And to roll up your sleeves and get involved.
Ethan Tapper: And we don't have to wait for someone who's in a white lab coat somewhere to come along and invent a miracle cure that's going to solve all the problems that our ecosystems face. We can do most of these things with existing resources and existing technology. With the tools that we already have. We just have to be willing to use them. You know, we just have to be willing to walk up to that tree and start up that chainsaw and cut it down, because we know that this is how we actually move this forest, this entire ecosystem, to a better place.
Dave Anderson: And the good news is, we live in one of the best wood-growing regions in the entire country, and some say arguably in the world.
Ethan Tapper: Yes, in publicizing this book, it's been really, really neat to see who it resonates with. How to Love a Forest is it's really a land ethic book, and it's really about what does it actually mean to love a forest in this moment in time, and the idea that to love a forest doesn't just mean to leave it alone. There are things that we have to do, some even really bittersweet things, as bittersweet as cutting a tree.
And those can be these profound acts of compassion for these ecosystems and things that actually we’ve got to do. And one of the ideas I have in the book is that we can, and I believe, must, ourselves, become a keystone species, a species that can actually provide habitat for so many others by doing this important work and not by taking our hands off of forests, but by managing them.
You can follow Ethan Tapper on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok, or check out his website at EthanTapper.com.
Something Wild is a joint production of the Forest Society, NH Audubon and NHPR.