Hope for Our Forests

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[SANFORD SMITH] Hi, Sanford Smith here with Penn State Extension.

Today, I've come to the Green Mountain State, Vermont, and I'm interviewing Ethan Tapper.

Ethan is a writer and a forester who has really made some waves in the forestry community.

He's really an expert at communicating forestry, and communicating the situations and the dilemmas and the challenges that landowners and others have in relation to forestry.

Ethan, I wanted to talk to you today about a few different things, and the first thing is, there are some scenarios that landowners sort of adopt, in regards to their property, as well as other management agencies even adopt, and one of those scenarios is, we should just keep managing the forests the way they have been managed, eh, exploiting them, so to speak, for lumber or other products, and letting the forest heal itself and just take care of itself.

What do you think about that scenario?

[ETHAN TAPPER] I think that, you know, that idea of that we should just sort of let nature take its course, and that everything will be fine, is something that really when you start to dig deep into our ecosystems and you start to see really, like, where they're at and how they've been treated in the past and all of these different things that, you know, these legacies of the past that they're dealing with, from shortsighted forest management, in many cases, clearing, having been converted to agricultural land, sometimes for centuries, and then, you know, now being in this moment when they're faced with so many threats and [SANFORD SMITH] Mm-hmm.

[ETHAN TAPPER] That we could enumerate, you know, introduced invasive plants, animals, insects, pests and pathogens, deer overpopulation, forest fragmentation, deforestation, all these different things, you start to realize that actually, to leave a forest [SANFORD SMITH] Yeah.

[ETHAN TAPPER] Is not always an act of kindness, that in many cases, our ecosystems actually need some help to deal with all of these different things and to move into a better future.

And in, in many cases, what I would say is that I had this moment myself of I was working as a wilderness guide and I was living in ecosystems, living in the woods, and when I went to forestry school, I had this very jarring moment where I went from really thinking that all we had to do to take care of forests was just to leave them alone, take our hands off them, and everything would be fine, and the thing that we call nature would take care of everything.

[SANFORD SMITH] Yeah.

[ETHAN TAPPER] And once I started to really learn about where our forests are at, and the challenges that they face, suddenly, I realized that that would not always be an act of compassion.

[SANFORD SMITH] Yeah.

Right.

You, you sometimes equate this need to care for the land as stewardship to human relationship, right, and the, the trauma that people have been through in their lives and how they need help, sometimes, or even the struggles we have with others.

It can be that way with a forest.

There's all sorts of kinda interesting analogies you've made in your videos, which, you're quite well known for.

Instagram-type short videos, those are on YouTube, I think, as well, aren't they?

[ETHAN TAPPER] Mm-hmm.

[SANFORD SMITH] Yeah.

And then, also, your writing, and you've written, for various trade magazines.

You've, you're a speaker, and you've written a book called How to Love a Forest.

[ETHAN TAPPER] Mm-hmm.

[SANFORD SMITH] And that book has, has changed the way people communicate, really, about forests in some ways and, and has really resonated with people.

The stewardship that's practiced through active management is really what you're promoting, though some people still, maybe they've had no activity that they know of on their land for a while, they still think that Mother Nature knows best and, "I just can leave it alone and that's good enough and that's gonna fix things." How do you respond to people like that?

[ETHAN TAPPER] I would say that nothing is true all the time.

So there are times when, you know, a forest may need very little help.

It may be in really good shape, it may be well-positioned to become an old growth forest and to have all these amazing habitats and qualities, but I would say that forests like that are in the minority.

And one thing that I've really realized is that you don't see that mindset and that attitude from people who have actually, like, spent their lives working in forests and have studied them and worked with them for decades because when you really go deep into relationship with ecosystems, you start to see that this thing that we call nature is so much more complex.

It's all of these species, it's all of these complex relationships between them, its soils, its waters, it's all of these things.

And sometimes I feel like to call all of that just nature and to imagine that it is totally self-sufficient and totally able to take care of itself, let alone, you know, the fact that all of the things that have happened to it and all the things that it's struggled with, is sort of like throwing a blanket over a city, right?

[SANFORD SMITH] Yeah.

[ETHAN TAPPER] Where you just, you, you describe this whole thing by this all-encompassing word without realizing that that thing is actually incredibly complex.

[SANFORD SMITH] Mm-hmm.

[ETHAN TAPPER] All of these different species, all of these different relationships, you know, of millions or billions of organisms that may be in a handful of soil.

[SANFORD SMITH] Yeah.

[ETHAN TAPPER] And I think that really, you know, it's beautiful to call all of that nature and to think about it in the way that we think about nature, but what, what's even more beautiful is to really, you know, throw back that blanket and to really see what's going on in that city.

[SANFORD SMITH] Yeah.

[ETHAN TAPPER] And, and when we do that, what we see is that this is actually...

Ecosystems are deeply beautiful and also deeply in need of help.

[SANFORD SMITH] Thank you, folks, for joining us today.

Thank you, Ethan, for joining me, and we're gonna do a few more videos together, so stay tuned.