As the Chittenden County Forester, Ethan Tapper works with landowners in Vermont’s most populous county. For Tapper, this work is as much about engaging the community as it is about managing the forests. His outreach efforts include regular woods walks, a monthly column published in several local newspapers, and more than 30 webinars and videos on his YouTube channel. He recently received the Vermont Coverts James Bruce Engle Award as a person who “exemplifies and demonstrates strategies to further the mission of sound forest management and wildlife stewardship in Vermont.” When he’s not working, Tapper might well be hunting, tending to his own piece of forested property, or performing with his punk band, The Bubs.
Until I was in young adulthood, I didn’t identify working in the woods as something I wanted to do. I wasn’t driven in that way, really, until I started to do some of the other wilderness guiding and stuff like that. I went to UVM for a year, then signed up for a trip with Kroka Expeditions. It was a six-month long trip, where we skied 300 miles up the Catamount Trail, and built a canoe to paddle back down. That’s sort of what got me into being a woods person.
After that, I was a wilderness guide for Kroka, worked with a horse logger in Fryeburg, Maine, and lived off the grid on a primitive homestead. Eventually, I had to go back to school or lose my UVM Green and Gold scholarship. I decided that if I was going to school, I was going to study something that let me work in the woods. I don’t think I knew what forestry actually was at the time, I just knew that had the word “forest” in it. And it happened to be a really good fit.
I often think of Vermont’s land ownership model as a kind of “grand experiment.” The state is 75 percent forested, and 80 percent of those forests are privately-owned. This means that private landowners are responsible for taking care of the forests that support our lives and our quality of life, and provide massive public benefits – things like clean air, clean water, wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration and storage, habitat for the pollinators of our food crops, and much more. It is incredibly important to give those landowners the tools to manage their land responsibly and thoughtfully.
Being a County Forester means a lot of different things. Anyone in Vermont with a piece of forestland can call us up, and we’ll come take a walk with them and talk to them about their forest and how to manage it well. We also review and approve forest management plans for parcels in the Use Value Appraisal – or “Current Use” – program. We provide education to landowners of forests of all different sizes. We help towns manage their municipal forests. And we work to improve the health of forests and the quality of forest management in our counties.
This job is so incredible. It’s so amazing to make a living working and being in the woods. I love talking and connecting and building relationships with people, from loggers to landowners, mill owners, and conservation organizations. I also feel blessed to have the opportunity to protect the forests and the ecosystems that I care about while protecting and enriching the lives and the quality of life of the people and the communities that I care about.
Forests provide amazing recreational, tourism and economic opportunities – most people can understand that. But forests and other ecosystems also provide the means for humans to live on this planet – period – providing air and water and much, much more. As much as we distance ourselves from it, we remain biological organisms that are completely dependent on healthy ecosystems. Forests also frame our lives, making Vermont beautiful and improving our quality of life. I think that if people we able to understand the true value of forests, especially their value beyond the economics, we would do a better job protecting them.
Chittenden County is one of 14 counties in Vermont, but we have a quarter of the people in the state. Perhaps the biggest challenge forests face in this county is fragmentation and loss – the development pressure is massive. This is a threat to our forests, but it is also an opportunity. In addition to being Vermont’s most populous county – by far – Chittenden County is also its most diverse in many ways. Lots of people who live here are not traditional parts of our “forest management coalition,” the typical proponents of forestry and logging.
The amount and the diversity of people here afford us an incredible opportunity to build a bigger and better culture of responsible forest management, and to “broaden the coalition” – helping new people learn about what responsible forest management is, and getting them excited about forest management. I often say that most people love forest management, they just don’t know it yet. Chittenden County is a perfect place to help explain to those people why forests are so important and why forest management protects so many things that are important to us.
Forestry and logging can be done in ways that are regenerative, not just extractive, that can make our forests more complex, diverse and help them recover from historic mismanagement. When you take that into account, the local, renewable resources that forests grow – wood – is even more incredible. Creating, using and buying local renewables is more than good – it’s radical. It helps us keep all the good parts of resource production in our communities – supporting our neighbors and our working landscape, enriching the culture and character of our communities, and providing local economic opportunity. When we don’t use local, renewable resources, we often use non-local, non-renewable resources, resources with much greater downsides whose impact is displaced elsewhere in the country or the world.
One of my favorite parts of this work is working with municipal forests. I’ve been able to work with some amazing towns, managing some amazing pieces of forest land. I’ve also been able to incorporate an outreach process designed to appeal to both the traditional and non-traditional proponents of forest management, the people who grew up in logging families and the people who have never been on a logging job in their life, and everything in between. On a recent forest management project at the Hinesburg Town Forest, we held 19 public events attended by over 500 people. These events focused on many different aspects of the work, from recreation to wildlife habitat to forest carbon and climate change. We also held cultural events, a storytelling night, and a Hinesburg Town Forest history night.
A lot of what I end up talking about at these events is what might be called ecological forestry or ecological forest management, which is basically the idea that we take cues from the ways that forests manage themselves to help us understand how to manage them well. So, instead of just deciding how forests are supposed to be, based on how we want them to be, we look at how forests grow and develop, and we manage them based on that.
I also do a lot of work trying to encourage old growth characteristics, or “late successional attributes” in the forests – so making our relatively young forests more like old growth forests. A lot of these things that we’re doing – like increasing diversity and complexity, leaving big trees, leaving tons of deadwood on the ground – it has benefits for all different things: climate resilience, wildlife habitat, carbon storage. It’s important for people to understand that, if we’re managing the forest in this really cool way, then the resources that we’re producing while we’re doing it are also really good. With all this work on town forests, I think we’ve started to move the needle on getting folks excited about forest management, gotten new people involved, and improved the understanding of what good forest management looks like.
I started hunting with my dad as a kid and then gave it up until I started seeing the impact of deer browse on our forests and our native biodiversity. I started hunting again seven or eight years ago, and this year I hunted with a crossbow for the first time. My understanding of hunting has evolved over time. If you look at states to the south of us, deer overpopulation is a major threat to their forests and other ecosystems – in many cases one of the most severe and costly threats that they face. In addition to forest fragmentation, decreasing winter severity and increasing land “posting,” one of the reasons for this is the loss of their native predators. I’ve come to understand that we are the predator of this animal, and if we want to avoid massive ecological problems, we need to seriously and diligently work to lower deer populations. Like in forest management – where once you accept that cutting trees can be done well you can appreciate how amazing local wood is – once you think of hunting as an ecological imperative, you can also appreciate what a responsible way it is to get amazing meat.
In Vermont, our ability to regulate our deer population is challenged by declining hunter numbers. We have 50 percent of the hunters that we had in 1970, and by 2030 we expect to have 50 percent of the number we have today. When I talk about broadening the coalition, getting new people excited about forest management, there are also a lot of parallels to hunting. The traditional pro-hunting advocacy groups tend to emphasize the cultural right to hunt: I hunt, and I’ve always hunted, and I have the right to hunt, et cetera. And I think that for people in my generation and people who are not part of that sort of traditional hunting coalition, what’s more impactful is to talk about the ecological approach, the fact that we’re solving an ecological problem, the fact that this is a way to get meat that lacks the environmental “baggage” of most of the meat that we consume. Hunting is also an amazing way to connect with the woods, wildlife, and with our communities. Those to me are much more powerful messages. Just sort of hammering on those old talking points is not always effective, at least not in my county, my little corner of the world.
I often draw a connection between the way I think about deer and the way I think about trees. With both deer and trees, the fact that I harvest them doesn’t mean that I don’t love them or care about them deeply. Many of the things we need to do to help make our forests and other ecosystems healthier – killing deer, harvesting trees, killing invasive plants with herbicide – aren’t easy, and I would argue that they shouldn’t be. But being responsible mangers requires us to be brave and do what we need to do to protect our forests for everyone.
My biggest passion is working on a piece of land I own in Bolton that I call Bear Island. That’s the place where I get to actually do a lot of this management on my own. I cut wood and skid it with a tractor and a winch and do invasive species treatment. I’m also starting to plant fruit trees and have a little homestead there. It’s a piece of land that had been managed very poorly for a long time, and now it’s my hundred-year restoration project to try to make it healthy again.
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