by Ethan Tapper
Broadleaf Books, 2024
Spending time in the woods can prompt reflection, especially when one has decisions to make. For forester and writer Ethan Tapper, who also pens the Forest Insights column for this magazine, stewarding his own forestland near Burlington, Vermont, has proved a bountiful source of ponderings.
In How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World, Tapper describes how management of his specific piece of land has prompted him to think deeply about big issues – for example, the interplay between life, death, health, and disease, and the ways that individual decisions can impact broader communities. He encourages readers to consider how actions such as cutting trees or killing a deer, which may seem repellent in certain cultural contexts, can benefit forests and reconnect broken landscapes.
How to Love a Forest is at heart a personal reflection. Tapper describes his journey to forestry, propelled by his realization that people’s active engagement with the land can have positive ecological effects. He writes in a storytelling, conversational style and focuses on scenes that will resonate with many readers, such as stalking and shooting a deer, marveling at a “wolf tree,” and visiting the aftermath of a windstorm. The dissonance inherent in many of these scenes is what sparks his musings, and the book offers an invitation to sit in that dissonance and explore its implications. For example, a windstorm’s aftermath can be chaotic and disturbing, with favorite trees snapped and uprooted and a comforting forest backdrop altered, yet Tapper sees hope and potential in this natural, infrequent disturbance.
Although Tapper acknowledges that human actions have degraded forests in many ways, he is understanding of the contexts of settlers who wrought large-scale deforestation, farmers who converted forests to pastures, and modern-day neighbors who value personal enjoyment – views, solitude, parklike settings – over ecologically healthy forests that may be dense, messy, or inaccessible. He urges readers to notice their own assumptions about forests, consider what the forest itself needs to be healthy, and make choices based on the latter whenever possible.
Tapper’s solutions to many forest ills are action-oriented. He plans timber harvests that will promote forest complexity as well as yield wood products; prunes fruit trees; treats invasive plants; plants acorns; and builds a pond. What he, and this book, do not do, is offer specific guidance on “how to love a forest,” but readers of Tapper’s column may enjoy this longer form, including his philosophical, meandering reflections. The book will likely inspire many to walk a little more slowly the next time they are in the woods, appreciating the deep complexity that has been there all along.