Weaving a Northern Forest Ethic
The earth beneath our feet grounds us, its contours orient us, its waterways guide us. The land is foundational for us all, but the ways we move through and interact with it, and with others on it, are unique to each person. Our upbringing, our culture, our gender, race, personality, experiences, and relationships all contribute to the ways we engage with the land. We may make decisions about how to treat the land, how to manage a forest, or approach a hunt. We may decide where to live, how we want to raise a family, which profession to enter. We may feel that we belong, or that we don’t. Through processing these complex linkages between land, culture, history, family, and responsibility, we each develop and shape a personal land ethic.
Forester and ecologist Aldo Leopold defined this term more than 70 years ago in his book, A Sand County Almanac, writing that a land ethic “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.” His ideas have important parallels to many other perspectives on land, including those of indigenous cultures. Today, we recognize that there are as many ways to be a citizen of the land community as there are citizens, and there are similarly multitudinous land ethics. By exploring the different ways people of various backgrounds consider and interact with the land, we strengthen what Leopold called the “thinking community.”
In the following pages, you will read how nine people of various ages, backgrounds, locations, and professions relate to land. Each person’s story is rich and fully their own. As a group, their stories weave common threads into larger themes. Their words reveal deep anchors to particular places, relationships extending across generations, thoughtful approaches to tricky management questions, reflections on landownership and history, and profound love and respect for the northern forest.
Les Benedict
Les Benedict is the assistant director for the Environmental Division for the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe in Akwesasne, New York. He has studied black ash and its decline since 1990, a decade before emerald ash borer was found in North America. Les collaborates frequently with tribal, state, federal, and nonprofit partners and has authored and coauthored many resources for ash management, including the foundational “Handbook for Black Ash: Preservation, reforestation/regeneration” (2000).
I grew up here, on the reservation. We subsisted on the land and had a small farm. Hunting has always been a part of my life. The sense of being connected and learning from your father, sharing with your brothers. We worked hard and we played hard, and there’s a deep appreciation for what it takes – and what it took our ancestors – to survive. My grandfather and father and his brothers had a lot more to endure to make things less burdensome on us. They expressed how important it was to maintain a balance with the natural world. Humans are not dominant, but cohabitants of the planet, sharing the environment, responsible for ensuring that animals, plants, resources aren’t misused or abused. These are there for us as long as we take care of them.
I’ve always been fascinated with different types of ecosystems and organisms and how they’re all connected. In 1990, I started focusing on black ash and educating myself about forestry. I learned through the log pounders, log harvesters, about its relationship to other plants and how that affected its quality. I paid attention to what foresters were telling me and made those connections between the silviculture, the cultural aspects, and the biological-ecological aspects of the tree. I think everyone took it for granted that black ash would be there forever.
The automotive and aluminum industry that used to be here, all of that is gone. The land, the people were exploited for gain. We need to look within ourselves and ask, “What can I do?” I can’t subsist on the land, on fish anymore. All those things that people did years ago, there’s really not enough to go around. You have to adapt like we always have. The whole world has to adapt to live with less.
A reservation, it’s the last stronghold. My dad always said, “I might not have anything else but at least I have my land, where you can try to grow things, you can still hunt a little bit; nobody’s going to take that away from you.” If you lived off the reservation, you’d always be under threat of losing your land if you don’t pay the taxes. I don’t think humans were meant to live like that. To me that’s something that came over from Europe, paying the king to continue to live, a feudal system. It’s a messed-up system.
Jill Kilborn
Jill Kilborn is a wildlife biologist with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. In addition to managing state lands in New Hampshire, she owns and manages 40 acres of forestland in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom with her husband Dan and children Jackson and Elsie. On this parcel, she practices many of the techniques and approaches she has learned through 20 years interacting with foresters, hunters, and trappers in her professional life.
I feel very fortunate to work where I grew up. Part of my job is managing a big chunk of land in Pittsburg, New Hampshire. My great-grandfather worked in the woods, likely on that same property, 100 years ago. He traveled from Canada in the wintertime to work as a lumberjack. On family vacations when I was a child, we spent a lot of time on Umbagog Lake, hanging out on our boat. There was a bald eagle nest there, and when I first started working for Fish and Game, years later, I was responsible for monitoring that nest. I love that I get to work in a place where I have such strong childhood connections.
When I was a kid, my dad, grandfather, brother, and I would go pheasant hunting. I have such fond memories of this because my grandfather was still able to come with us, even late in his life. Pheasants stick to open places, so people who can’t crash through a really tight bird cover, or get out in tough terrain, can still walk around to hunt in an open field. Now, as a biologist, I cringe a bit at the thought because pheasants aren’t native to North America. Although my experience hunting pheasants was really formative, today I feel it’s a responsibility for people hunting and fishing to be aware and educated, to understand the biology of the species. I try to instill this in my kids as they grow and become hunters themselves.
I love interacting with a dog, with other people while bird hunting. I have a group of guys who I get to hunt with; each year we spend three or four days at bird camp. The camp culture is something I really enjoy. When I first had my kids, I was breastfeeding, and my son Jackson spent the night with us. I think it was a first for all of the guys, to have a baby at bird camp.
There is that additional hurdle for women, and especially women with families. My family is actively on the landscape. Cutting trees, working our land together, and establishing that connection with my kids has been so awesome for me. Before we had kids, I was out there with Dan every weekend, and since then I haven’t been able to participate at the same level. Last fall, I took off deer hunting by myself, and it was the first time in more than 10 years that I truly didn’t feel any guilt for being out.
Russ Ford
Russ Ford lives in Berkshire, Vermont. For the past 27 years, he has worked as a ski patroller at Jay Peak, and he serves on the boards of the Green Mountain Club and the Upper Missisquoi and Trout Rivers Wild & Scenic River Committee, as well as on his local development review board.
In childhood, a lot of our family time was on a river, my grandfather’s fish camp, hiking, paddling, gardening. That’s continued through my life and in how I’ve tried to raise my children. My grandfather owned a cabin on the Cowpasture River in the Allegheny Mountains. There was at one point a proposal to dam the river. My parents explained that if you want to get people to fight to protect a place, the public has to know that place. If people make the river part of their lives – fishing, tubing, rafting, paddling on a Sunday afternoon, picnics – they’ll choose to protect it.
The brook on our place runs down to the Missisquoi River, which is part of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. Thirty years ago, when I began exploring the river by canoe, there was very little in the way of developed portages around falls and dams, and the towns didn’t have recreational access. Now, Enosburgh has a river walk park and a canoe- and kayak-lending library, and there are well-marked places to put in. That’s a wonderful change, to make the river part of the lives of people in the watershed.
I think of my grandfather, who 100 years ago, as a young man, had wonderful canoe trips across the Fulton Chain of Lakes and elsewhere in the Adirondacks, some of which are now part of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail.
The New York Department of Environmental Conservation has had to close a lot of shoreline campsites because 100 years of people camping there, building fires, and cutting firewood turned these into bare, eroded spaces that are not good for the lake, for critters that need the lake, or as campsites. People need the outdoors more than ever, and we need to make sure people are educated, able to practice Leave No Trace ethics, and to protect themselves in the backcountry.
In 1994, I bought 180 acres, a failed small dairy farm, a casualty of Vermont’s dairy consolidation. I reestablished fencing and started bringing back pasture and hay land, raising beef cattle. Sugaring in Franklin County is going through growth and consolidation at a much more rapid rate than dairying ever did. In my town, the major driver of changes in forest landownership is purchases of land for sugaring. There used to be probably six small sugaring operations on the ridge above my house, and now there are only two larger ones. What is this going to mean for these forests? I think there are going to be challenges, but we don’t know yet what they will be.
Melody Walker
Melody Walker, a member of the Elnu Abenaki Tribe, is an educator, activist, and artist. She has taught at Champlain College, Johnson State College (now Northern Vermont University), and Northern Virginia Community College, and given numerous guest lectures and programs to students in K–12 and collegiate levels as well as general audiences. She has done research on Abenaki spirituality and practices a variety of traditional arts. She lives in Barre, Vermont.
Land is a relative. When we were hoping for [my daughter] Molly, I gardened. I planted some of our Abenaki rose corn seeds. I prayed to corn mother, who is a direct line and connection into mother earth, who is a direct relation to creation itself. You really can’t talk about land without talking about how everything connects. In our worldview, land is alive, land is a person, all things that are part of creation are people. My idea of land extends beyond personhood, to who is your family? Who is your community? How do you honor those relatives? In a world where all things are people, the whole way you move in that world is very soft. It’s inclusive. You have something to learn from all other things.
When I step into my homeland, I feel safe, I feel protected. What makes sense is not necessarily owning the land, but restoring our ancestral connection, and having access to places to pray, forage, and harvest. This flies in the face of private land ownership. At some point I’ll probably be arrested because if there’s a sacred site, I’m going there. You don’t get to own it. Something is only sacred because of your continuous relationship. If our spiritual world is connected to place, and we don’t have access to that place, then there is no freedom of religion. Land is our identity. We are not separate from creation, therefore we cannot be separate from the earth itself.
People have forgotten their ancestral relationship and because of that, they do not know that they have this whole world of friends right in front of them. Human beings have the responsibility of taking care of it. Every morning, my daughter and I sing the calling-in song and we welcome the sun. We are Wabanaki people, and we are the people of the dawn, and we’re supposed to welcome the sun.
John Holyoke
John Holyoke has been writing for newspapers since he was in sixth grade. He has written for the Bangor Daily News (Maine) for 27 years, 15 as the outdoors editor. He grew up in Brewer, Maine, where he still lives today. He is an avid hunter and fly fisherman who can often be found at the family camp in Otis, Maine.
I grew up 120 yards from here. It was all the family back-forty when I was growing up, and my mom often told us, “Go outside and play, I don’t want to see you until suppertime.” We were free range. At our family camp, there was a little brook that went into the woods. We knew the brook had to start somewhere, so it was this mythical quest we went on every summer: we’d fish less and walk more. We never did get to the place where it started, but I learned that adventures could be whatever we wanted them to be.
My link to the land has other people in it, whether my brothers and sisters and cousins back then or the group of people who I spend time with today, on a moose hunt or a bird hunt. The woods are a place where we can leave the rest of the world behind. In 18 years, I never got a deer. I had a chance one year. This doe walked in front of me from 20 yards away. She stopped broadside, and I picked up my gun and I looked through the scope and I put it back down and said, “Yep, I could have.” I was having so much fun being in the woods with people and I knew if I pulled the trigger, my season would be over. Being in the woods was much more important.
The spring turkey hunt for tom turkeys, it’s such an honor to be able to do it. They gobble at you, you’re calling, you’re talking to the animal, and they talk back to you and that’s pretty thrilling. Same for a moose. You’re calling and you hear a moose grunt back at you, and you know this is a male moose and it’s nearby. It makes your hair stand up on the back of your head.
In Maine, on large swaths of commercial forestland, the general policy is come along, go into the woods, and enjoy. Most of them don’t have gates. When we go to camp to bird hunt or moose hunt, we don’t own any land there, yet there are hundreds of thousands of acres that we feel perfectly comfortable hunting. We go into this accepting that being able to access someone else’s land is a privilege, not a right, and being committed to treating that land better than you would treat your own. We can’t take things for granted.
Lydia Clemmons
Lydia Clemmons is the president and executive director of the Clemmons Family Farm, Inc. in Charlotte, Vermont. She has a PhD in anthropology and spent 35 years working in rural communities in Africa before returning to Vermont to found and run the organization, whose mission is to preserve the farm as a model for saving other African American–owned land and cultural heritage assets in the United States; empower Vermont’s Black artists and culture-bearers; and build a loving multicultural community.
Growing up on the farm, we didn’t realize how unique and precious an experience this was and what a bold and revolutionary step my parents had taken. They really wanted to have a farm despite generations of Black people moving away. It was a subsistence farm; we grew everything.
The forest was a magical place. We’d go there as a family for fun, we’d go when we were angry, when we were happy. It was a refuge. My grandmother would take us when we were tiny to walk in the forest. She taught my brother and me the skill of observation. We would sit for hours on a rock or a log or the bank of the river that flows through the forest to look at a tree, look at a plant, look at a bug. She was teaching us mindfulness. We were aware of every creak of a tree limb, every hoot of an owl. It was a joy to see and explore this life.
Growing up in an all-white community, as the only Black children in school – I remember tiptoeing around, no matter how nice people were. What a lifesaver to return mentally, and spiritually, to a place we owned and belonged. I remember what it felt like when my siblings and I got off the bus and stepped back onto the farm. Our body language changed. I want young Black children to feel that. To walk on a property owned by people who look like you, who share history, is huge. Black people, hearing the story of my parents, often start crying. It is very emotional and deep, this grief of lost land.
My parents purchased the farm in 1962 and we have kept it intact. We never sold a single acre. The farm has always been 148 acres since the land was stolen from the Abenaki people.
When you ask what responsibility we have to the land, you have to recognize what a privilege it is to even ask that question. Because many Black people don’t own land, we often feel out of place, we’re told we don’t belong here. Our town trails committee wants to have a trail cut through or near our forest. We’re in a back-and-forth dialogue; they’re listening but it’s hard for them to understand that, with the rise in hate crimes against Black people, this trail represents a real threat to our land and to the personal safety of our family and our visitors. We have to consider the context of race in land stewardship. I’m thinking about it every minute of every day. If I were white, I wouldn’t have to think about that.
Sumana Serchan
Sumana Serchan is a stewardship manager with the Vermont Land Trust and lives in Nashua, New Hampshire. She grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal. She graduated from the University of Vermont and the Yale School of the Environment.
New England’s stone walls stir my childhood memories. My cousins, siblings, and I played hide-and-seek among stone walls at my grandparents’ farm in Nepal. Hiding behind the walls, jumping over them to escape each other, shaped me and instilled the love for outdoors. I witnessed my grandfather’s care for his land and animals.
I was 19 when I came here. The mountains helped me get adjusted to Vermont. I could relate it to Kathmandu because I grew up in a valley, too, surrounded by hills. Seeing the Adirondacks, seeing the Green Mountains, just knowing they are present, gave me assurances that I belong here.
There is a high contrast between the green Vermont and the really urban Kathmandu. In Nepal, especially in the cities, land prices are higher than any other investment. There’s nothing that gives people incentive to conserve their land. There are people there who see the connection to land, but might feel compelled to sell for financial reasons.
I am a minority in Vermont, which is a very white state. Standing out on the land as not belonging is the biggest challenge. When I go to people’s land for work, I’ve raised eyebrows, and I’ve been racially profiled by the border patrol, just for being there.
While I was a graduate student, I worked in neighborhoods in New Haven, Connecticut, where abandoned lots, boarded windows, and shattered glass were common. The community came together to transform vacant lots into greenspaces that served as oases. Children dug earthworms, elders came to take respite from the summer heat. For a lot of families, this was the only green space they could go to. Folks saw the land as a spot they could go to and be safe when connected to nature.
There’s something to understanding the cultural history of the land and the transformation that land has gone through. And then working to restore that land, not to its original form, but to something that can sustain life. We have land around the house where we live now. This land has been abused a lot, so for me it’s being really thoughtful about it, to restore its ecological health. It’s going to be a gradual process, my own learning journey. That’s my mission.
Tom Thomson
Tom Thomson purchased his first 125-acre woodlot at age 11 with his two brothers, 13 and 15, for $235. He and his wife Sheila still manage that woodlot as part of the Thomson Family Tree Farm: 2,800 acres of land on the side of Mt. Cube in New Hampshire. He collaborates with forestry professionals around the world through the Quebec Labrador Foundation and welcomes the public to visit, walk the land, and enjoy the beauty of the waterfalls, pond, bog, and forest on a working tree farm.
I was blessed to have parents who taught us to be good stewards of the land. There’s a responsibility for me, as a forest landowner, to be engaged. Our son, Stacey, carries on that tradition. When he was 6 years old, we would go look at logging operations together. As he grew older, he wanted to cut and sell firewood, so I started working with him, and by his senior year in high school, he was delivering 100 cords of firewood. Working together in the woods, it bonded us together. I look at him as my best friend. Now I have two grandchildren who are working in the woods with us. I wish every young person had the chance to grow up on a tree farm.
We’re seeing a huge push on properties, particularly homes, in our area. People from cities are throwing their hands up and saying, “I’m getting out of here,” and moving to more rural places. On the other side, where I’m coming from as a forest landowner, there are virtually no low-grade wood markets in New Hampshire. When you harvest timber on a sustainable tree farm, 60 percent of everything you cut falls into the low-grade category: pulp, chips, or firewood. I’m fearful that forest landowners may just say now is the time to sell, and we could see a big spike in fragmentation.
We open and share our land with the general public. I only ask that they treat that land as if it were their own. And 99 percent of people do, but we’ve had some severe vandalism over the years. People need to know that the majority of forestland is owned by private individuals. Most of us are willing to open and share it. But it’s a privilege and that privilege can be taken away.
It’s important to get people into the woods. It’s a great classroom. I’ve had schoolkids, teachers, UNH forestry students, political folks from state directors and commissioners, state senators to governors, and U.S. senators tour the property. I want them to know that people are doing the right thing out in the woods. On one tour, a teacher said clear-cutting is totally wrong, so I showed them some of the patch cuts that we’ve done. Because we have some of the best soils and climate in the world for natural regeneration, there were millions of little trees competing against each other by the next summer. The forest is renewed. Clear-cutting or liquidation for a shopping mall is something clearly different. She thanked me for the explanation, thanked me for what we were doing out in our forest.
Ethan Tapper
Ethan Tapper works for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks & Recreation as the Chittenden County forester, where he manages town forests, supports private landowners, and provides diverse education and outreach to the residents of Vermont’s most populous county. His popular virtual events and mailing list have expanded his reach during the Covid-19 pandemic. Ethan also manages his own woodlot, and its deer population, in Bolton, Vermont.
When I was 19, I did a 6-month winter expedition on the Catamount Trail. That was an incredibly transformative experience. I learned, number one, that I love people, and number two, that the woods are an amazing place to really forge relationships with people. I go out with people and we walk on their land for an hour and then we’re friends. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about it – it makes people feel a certain way. It’s magic.
People often see forest management as either completely good or completely bad. But we have a responsibility to try to forge a responsible and positive relationship with our ecosystems. Navigating that interstitial space between “good” and “bad” requires more energy and thought. In my mind, just the act of thinking about your land ethic – the relationship you want to have with our forests – makes you have a better land ethic. Getting people to show up for a conversation about this, even if they’re mad, is better than them staying at home.
When people support forest management in their community because it supports other things that they care about – even when it makes them uncomfortable – I think that’s radical. We all have to make tough decisions about what we consume and what we want our effect to be on the planet. It’s not whether or not we want to have an impact, it’s what do we want that impact to be? Do we want it to be stuff that makes us uncomfortable, but is part of a greater good? Or do we want to get whatever we want at the expense of others and ecosystems somewhere else in the world?
I have found a lot of kinship between the way I think about cutting trees and the way I think about hunting deer. Harvesting that tree, harvesting that deer, both of those things feel really intense. They can drive me to tears and also make me feel proud. Both are examples of that radical step, saying, “I know where this came from, and I’m going to own that.” I make hard decisions in favor of making forests more complex, producing local renewable resources, addressing deer overpopulation. You can cut a tree or harvest a deer from a place of love and a broader compassion for ecosystems.
Allaire Diamond is an ecologist with the Vermont Land Trust. She connects to the land as a writer, athlete, reader, gardener, artist, mother, and woman. “At work, I move through natural spaces in order to observe, ask and answer questions, and make decisions,” she says. “I rarely visit a place without being surprised by something, even after years of working in the woods. This curiosity extends to personal explorations, as I ponder challenging conversations, parenting conundrums, and upcoming plans. Land isn’t where I go to escape, but rather to more fully plug in.”