Ethan Tapper on the Shape of Forest Stewardship

[ETHAN TAPPER] My name's Ethan Tapper, and I'm a forester and an author, content creator from Vermont.

And we are here at my land, which I call Bear Island.

Bear Island is 175-acre forest that I bought in 2017.

It is an amazing forest, and it's also a forest that when I came here, my impression was that it was the most degraded forest I'd ever seen.

It seemed like it had every problem that a forest could have.

It had been high-graded, and I remember thinking the first time I came here that there were no healthy trees.

It was really struggling in a bunch of different ways.

And so now, what my job has been on this land with every bit of time and resources and energy that I have is to try and make this forest healthy again.

And it really speaks to something that's very important to me, which is this concept of stewardship, that we can be stewards of this biosphere, of these ecosystems, that we can do things that can help them to both be a greater resource for us and be a beautiful place to live and for our children and our grandchildren to live, and also to help them be themselves, to help them recover from the wounds of the past and to move into a better future.

So, you know, I like to tell people that the shape of stewardship, what that has meant on this forest has been maybe a little bit different than what you would expect.

So it hasn't been enough to just leave this forest alone and let it just recover from all that stuff.

I've had to take some pretty dramatic action.

You know, I've had to cut thousands of trees, and I've had to kill dozens of deer, and I've had to control about a 30-acre infestation of non-native invasive plants, especially Japanese barberry, and herbicide was one of my most powerful tools in doing that.

And none of those things, you know, cutting trees, killing deer, using herbicide are things that I think most people would expect would be part of how we heal and care for and function as stewards of these ecosystems.

And yet now I really see all of those actions as some of the most powerful expressions of compassion for this forest, and what's really allowed it to over just seven years to become this incredibly hopeful and abundant place.

'cause one of the things that has really surprised me and has been so amazing is witnessing this forest that when I got here seemed like, you know, it was a forest that was completely hopeless, become this forest that is incredibly abundant.

And it has become that way not because I left it alone and let nature take its course, but because I took these actions, I was willing to make these compromises and these sacrifices to make this forest healthy again.

You know, and I didn't do it alone.

I did it with help from the local conservation organizations in this area, I did it with help from NRCS funding through the EQIP program in particular, and also CSP, the Conservation Stewardship Program.

I did it with help from my local Audubon chapter, and with help from a lot of people in this area, from loggers and excavation contractors and truckers and sugar makers and birders, all of these other people that form our conservation community.

You know, and now, this is a place that is not just a place that is important, that provides unique habitats on this landscape, that provides unique opportunities for our birds, but it's also a place that provides unique opportunities for people, right?

It's a place that demonstrates what's possible if we're willing to take these actions to heal our ecosystems and to really engage in this process of stewardship, to show that actually our forests can become so much more abundant and so much more rich with life if we're willing to care for them.

(birds chirping)