- Good evening and welcome to a presentation by forester, musician, and award-winning author, Ethan Tapper.
- I am Lee Huss. I am president of the Indiana Forest Woodland Owners Association. For 37 years, I was
- honored to be the urban forester in Bloomington. During that time, I worked with passionate citizens,
- planners, support staff, politicians,
- civil engineers to create a forestry program that places trees as critical infrastructure in the design
- of a livable city. That same passion for trees in the natural landscape is evident within the members
- of the sponsor organizations of tonight's program. They are the Indiana Nature Conservancy in Indiana,
- Sam Schein Foundation, Let the Sunshine in Indiana, Indiana Society of American Foresters,
- the Indian Associations of Consulting Foresters, and IFWO. Also at this time, I'd like to recognize
- that State Forester Jack Seifert and Hoosier National Forest Supervisor Mike Chavez are in the audience.
- Following Ethan's presentation, Chris Nigger with the Nature Conservancy of Indiana will moderate a
- discussion with a panel of local conservation experts. At the conclusion, Ethan will be available to
- sign your books in the adjacent meeting room.
- Several years ago, while on a fishing trip in Minnesota, former Indiana State Forester Bernie Fisher
- presented me a copy of Northern Woodlands Magazine. This publication written by and for Northeastern
- private woodland owners and nature enthusiasts is where I was first introduced by the writings of Ethan
- Tapper. One article in particular that resonated with me and is also discussed in his book spoke of
- the ecological benefits of wolf trees.
- Being the owner of such a tree, a 200-year-old broken-limbed white oak growing near an historic survey
- cornerstone, it sadly represented the crown jewel on my previously high-graded forest property. Then
- after reading Zethen's book, I was surprised to learn how it reminded me of my ninth-grade science teacher's
- introduction to the class of Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac. Like Leopold's seminary work about
- nature and the life of his Wisconsin cabin,
- Ethan's book is an account of his observations, thoughts, decisions, and ultimate efforts to use the
- tools of a professional forester and naturalist to regain his bare island forest, focusing not only
- on timber, but the long-term health, stability, and beauty of the entire natural community. It's good
- to know the land ethic is alive and well. Ladies and gentlemen, Ethan Tapper.
- Let's go down. Goodness. What do you want to talk about? I have been in Indiana all of 36 hours. And
- the first question that I asked was, and so I've just told this to a couple of people and their reaction
- has been really funny. So I want to ask you. The first question that I asked is, can I sample your local
- delicacies? So in Vermont, we have like maple syrup and apples and cheese and stuff.
- Do you know what they told me was Indiana's local delicacy? A pork tenderloin sandwich. Pounded flat
- and fried hard. And it's supposed to be this big, right? And the bun is like this big? I think I got
- it. I had one. It was really good. So my name's Ethan, and I'm mostly a forester from Vermont, and now
- a few other things. I'm privileged to be the author of this
- book that means a lot to me called How to Love a Forest. And since then, entering into this world of
- digital storytelling, which is my attempt at a less gross way to say being an influencer, which is deeply
- strange. But ultimately, I would say that my life is sort of divided into this work of caring for ecosystems
- in Vermont, my own land, which I call Bear Island, and also the land of my clients. So I'm a consulting
- forester. I run my own company.
- And I have a lot of private landowners with forests of all different shapes and sizes that I help care
- for them there for us as well. And then this work of communication, which is telling this story through
- writing and through social media and through speaking of how we care for these precious ecosystems.
- And I have to tell you that I did not plan to write a book.
- I did not plan to be up here in front of all of you. This is all something that sort of took me by surprise.
- And I do like to tell the story of how it happened because it's something that happened on accident
- in a way that has taught me a lot about how some really small things can become really big things. So
- when I started writing How to Love a Forest, I did not know how to write a book. I had never done anything
- like that before. And yet, there was some stuff that I wanted to talk about.
- And I figured out that there was this really special time of the day, the first hour that I was awake.
- And what I was doing with that first hour was I was being really efficient on my computer and doing
- administrative work and just firing off emails. And I said, what if I just took this hour all to myself?
- And I wrote. And so I started to not to write a book, but just to write for an hour. The first hour
- that I'm awake, which for me is from 5 to 6 AM.
- And it became this really beautiful practice, this wonderful way to start the day, where every day I'd
- just be drinking my coffee as the world was waking up and just writing from an hour. Tapping away at
- the laptop, 6 o'clock comes around, I close the laptop and go work in the woods. It was this practice
- that by itself, these daily gestures, this hour of writing, by itself is completely meaningless. And
- then what it really felt like I was doing was,
- taking a little stone and stepping off my back porch and throwing it back there. A gesture that's completely
- meaningless and insignificant. And then you do it again and again and again, day after day.
- And one day, you look back there and you're like, that pile of stones is getting pretty big. I did this
- practice for six years. And then I signed this contract with a publisher. And I was like, this book's
- going to be out by the end of the week. And they said, your publication dates in two years.
- So I worked on it for another couple of years, and that brought us to September of last year. Now, at
- the same time that this book was taking shape one little gesture at a time, I was also engaged in a
- very similar parallel process, which is that I had become the owner of this forest that I named Bear
- Island. Now, in 2017, when I bought Bear Island, it was the most degraded forest I had ever seen, a
- forest that had every problem that a forest could have.
- And to me, it was really this symbol of everything that was wrong with the world. And I didn't know
- how to bring this ecosystem back from collapse. It was too big to wrap my hands around. So what I could
- do was just offer it one day at a time, one hour at a time, to give to it the time and the resources
- and the energy that I had. And at the same time that I was watching this book that's called How to Love
- a Forest Take Shape, I was watching this forest of mine heal.
- and seeing all of these different things, places that I once saw as being so hopeless become these incredibly
- hopeful places. And really, that forest going from being a symbol of everything that was wrong with
- the world in my eyes to being a symbol of what's possible and a symbol of hope. So the story that I
- really want to tell you all, what I want to talk about today and then talk about on this panel, is about
- this thing called stewardship.
- Have we heard of this word, stewardship? It's an awesome word. And I think sometimes I get so focused
- and so in my little silo of thinking about forests and talking about forests and talking to other people
- that think about it and talk about forests all the time that I forget that maybe this isn't a word that
- we all use. It's a wonderful word. And the reason that it's so wonderful is that
- It's a word that encompasses this broad and endless and expansive process of caring. We can be stewards
- of each other. We can be stewards of our communities. We can be stewards of our families. And we can
- be stewards of our ecosystems. And it doesn't mean that we control them. And it doesn't mean that we
- dominate them. It means that we care for them, whatever that means. And there's another thing that I
- think is really special about this term, which is that
- sort of baked into it is this idea of a temporariness, right? That we are holding all of these things
- in this world, these lives, these ecosystems, these communities on behalf of future generations. We're
- holding them just for this one brief and precious moment in time. And I think that a lot of times we
- get so focused in what we're doing right now that we forget that our job is to hand a world that is
- more abundant
- and more full of life, and more full of opportunity to our children. And there's this amazing thing
- about caring for forests, which is that you get a little bit of an attitude with other people, because
- you're like, oh, other people are doing all this thing, these other things, but I'm actually caring
- for these ecosystems that make it possible for us to live here. Do we know this? Sometimes I'll do like,
- in one of these talks, I'll be like, do you want to hear a forest fact?
- And then my forest fact is like, do you know that forests literally make it possible for us to exist
- on this planet and we can't live without them? Do you know that? There's a lot of things in this world
- that are optional, that we get to choose to support or not support, that we get to choose to care for
- or not care for. And ecosystems are not one of those things. Ecosystems are something that make our
- lives functional in an objective way. They create this climate that we inhabit.
- and regulate it for us. They clean our air. They clean our water. They provide the pollinators of our
- food crops and so many other things that it would be impossible to enumerate them now. And they also
- do this other thing, which is often forgotten as we think about how do we protect these forests that
- make our lives possible, which is that they make our lives beautiful. They make our lives worth living.
- They give us things like birds and trees, forests that we get to walk through.
- And an underappreciated part of that beauty that I really see in the future is going to be a bigger
- part of the incredible privilege that it is to be in this world with these forests is the beauty of
- getting to be a steward of these forests, that we get to go into these ecosystems which are so precious
- and so vital and so important in their own right, intrinsically valuable, that have the right to exist.
- and that also are in this moment are very wounded and struggling. And we get to help them move into
- a better future. And we get to help future generations see forests that are more full of life than we
- could possibly imagine. What a privilege. So when I talk about how to love a forest, I say a bunch of
- different things about it. But one thing I say about it is that it's a love story. Because it's a story
- about how we actually discover
- what it means to love a forest in this moment, and how, like any great love story, the route that we
- use to get there might not be one that you'd expect. So I'm going to do a couple readings from the book,
- if that's OK with you. Here's the audience participation part. Is that OK with you? OK. When I say,
- read, you say, um,
- Okay, so this is from the introduction of the book, which sort of describes what made me want to write
- it in the first place. Once it seemed that there were only two paths to follow. A status quo that saw
- forests and other ecosystems as commodities, and an opposing force that sought to protect ecosystems
- from ourselves, to leave them alone.
- As forests everywhere struggle under the weight of the many threats and the stressors of the modern
- world, as they suffer the legacies of the past and confront a future that promises challenges like never
- before, I have realized that neither of these two paths is enough. I have realized that the world needs
- action intertwined with compassion, relationship imbued with responsibility, death infused with life.
- I have gone my own way, fostering a divergent vision
- a reimagining of what it means to love a forest, engaging in the radical act of trading simplicity for
- complexity, trading a tidy vision for one that is true. My journey toward these realizations has been
- long and lonely and sinuous.
- In my little house at the foot of the mountain, my bookshelf is crowded with books about trees and plants
- and animals, birds and bears and fungi, the relationship between people and ecosystems and the threats
- both face. Never have I found a book that has articulated what a forest truly is, not just its botany
- and its biology, the contours of its many pieces and its parts, but how this entire living community
- moves and behaves and changes.
- Never have I found a book that described what it means to care for a forest like Bear Island, an ecosystem
- that has been changed and degraded and depleted and left to suffer alone. Never have I found a book
- that described the pain and the joy and the anxiety of trying to love and protect an ecosystem, of guiding
- it toward wholeness at this strange and crucial moment in time.
- No book has prepared me for the many complex and bittersweet choices that I would someday make at Bear
- Island, or for the fact that these actions would be celebrations, the substance of a truly radical and
- responsible relationship with the forest. In this book, I draw these disparate threads together, exploring
- what it means to love a forest in this changed and changing world. In a world that is both human and
- wild, both wounded and vibrant,
- both suppressed and emergent. This is a vision both for how we manage forests and take care of ecosystems
- and how we manage ourselves, how we take care of each other. So I want to return to this last idea because
- it's another one that's really important to me. Because even as we have these ideas about this thing
- that we call nature and how we should take care of it, I think that's something that's fundamentally
- missing from the discourse of how we talk about it,
- Is all of us here in this room right now? the objective fact that we actually like really can't take
- care of Ecosystems without acknowledging that we are a part of them. What did I find? We can't without
- acknowledging that we are a part of them that we affect them and that our lives will always affect
- And also without acknowledging that in addition to wanting to have these ecosystems that are abundant
- and full of life and healthy and vibrant, we also want to have human communities that are abundant and
- full of life and vibrant. We want to live here. And sometimes we act like these questions of how do
- we live here as humans?
- And how do we sustain this thing that we call nature are two different questions. And really, they're
- deeply connected. And so it's really important that as we're asking these questions about how we care
- for ecosystems, that we're understanding that we're a part of them too, and that we're making solutions
- that acknowledge that fact. So with that in mind, I want to go back and read one little thing that I
- skipped over.
- going to go flying again, I could tell. And this little mini reading starts with a vocabulary word.
- Do you like vocabulary? Yeah. I was, yesterday, speaking at the Crown Hill Cemetery. Have you been there?
- There's an amazing linden, it's a little leaf linden, not an American basswood, that's growing there.
- That is an incredible tree. You've got to go and see it. And it broke and bent over like this, and then
- it healed itself and righted itself. It's amazing. The fruiting structure of a basswood or linden tree
- is called a cluster of nutlets subtended by a leafy bract. So now you know that one.
- Another one that I'm fond of is the structure that attaches a fur needle to the twig, which is called
- a suborbicular leaf cushion. You can use that in a conversation. Here's a vocab word for you. Forests
- are socio-ecological systems. Our lives are forever stitched into the green flesh of the biosphere.
- The separation of the human world from the wild world is an illusion.
- We cannot care for ecosystems without recognizing that we will always rely on them and we will always
- tax them. That human life will always be precious and worth nourishing and will always come at a cost.
- We cannot choose if we will impact ecosystems, if we will impact peoples across the globe, if we will
- impact the lives of future generations. We can only choose what that impact will be.
- What a responsibility, and what an opportunity. So I want to shift gears a little bit, and I want to
- tell a little bit about my story, because I think it tracks with the bigger story that I want to tell
- you all. So I grew up in this little town in southeastern Vermont called Saxton's River. Have any of
- you heard of Saxton's River, Vermont?
- Really? This is unprecedented. I have asked that question, so I've done since Hadalua Forest came out,
- which is 360 days ago. I have asked that question to audiences, I think 150 times. And this is the third
- time that no one has known about it, which is weird because Saxons River, Vermont is this teeny little
- town of 300 people.
- And it's surrounded by the forest. It's the perfect place, really, if you were going to start a story
- about someone who just always loved the woods and always knew they were going to work in the woods.
- And that wasn't my experience at all. Growing up in Saxons River, Vermont, I was surrounded by forests.
- And I had no idea that I wanted anything to do with them whatsoever.
- And it's funny because now when I read these stories about these great nature writers and ecologists
- and biologists, they are always like, I was always the nature kid. I was always down in the dirt looking
- at bugs, and I was tracking deer, and I was always out in the woods, and I always knew that this is
- what I wanted to do. And that wasn't my experience at all. What I remember feeling most strongly in
- those days was that I wanted to get out of there really bad. And I remember telling someone,
- My junior year of high school, I said, I don't know where I'm going to go to college, but I know where
- I'm not going to go. And that's the University of Vermont. Because everybody goes there, and it's like
- this huge cop out. The first month of my senior year of high school, I got a letter from the University
- of Vermont that told me that I got this scholarship called the Green and Gold Scholarship, which is
- a full scholarship. And I was like, because I'm going to the University of Vermont?
- Unfortunately, I had absolutely no values, no integrity. I said, okay. But even once I got there,
- I still, I wasn't like magically knew what I wanted to do. I was like bumbling around taking these random
- classes. But it just happened that the first big love of my life, my high school girlfriend, as I was
- doing my second semester, she was on this wilderness expedition with this program for five months.
- When she came back, she had had this huge, life-changing experience. And I had not. I'd just been hanging
- out in my dorm room doing whatever 19-year-olds do. And we weren't connecting, and it was freaking me
- out because I thought we were going to break up. And so like any perfectly reasonable, rational 19-year-old,
- I said, well, you know what I'm going to do. I'm going on a wilderness expedition. And the next one
- with that program left in two weeks
- And it was a six-month expedition where we skied north for three months. And then we built a canoe and
- canoed back down. Now, in retrospect, I did this for no reason. The relationship did not work out. But
- after that, all I wanted to do was be in the woods. And I ended up working as a wilderness guide. I
- lived in this uninsulated yurt with a fur bow floor in the woods of Maine for a year, worked with draft
- animals, did a little bit of draft horse logging.
- And then I got a letter from the University of Vermont that told me that I had to come back or I was
- going to lose my scholarship. And I remember sitting on the bow floor of my yurt holding a paper list
- of all the majors at the University of Vermont and scrolling down, saw forestry, and I swear that I
- did not know what it was. I just saw the word forest and I was like, let's try that. And it ended up
- being this really amazing fit. So I had this experience.
- In this moment, as I started going to forestry school, where I came to that experience of going to forestry
- school thinking that I already knew everything about forests and about what our relationship with them
- should be, I had been living in the woods for years in a very close way.
- I thought that I understood these ecosystems completely, and I understood the perfect relationship that
- we should have with them, which was this very leave no trace, hands off attitude. I had, when I went
- to forestry school, this really jarring experience, which is that as I actually started to deepen my
- relationship with ecosystems and deepen my understanding of forests, I learned that these forests that
- I had thought were so perfect and so pristine
- and so utopian were actually deeply imperiled. That they were struggling with these profound legacies
- of the past, dealing with an incredible volume of threats and stressors in the present, the combination
- of things that we refer to as global change, and moving into a future that promised more challenges
- than ever before. And suddenly, I was like walking through this forest and it felt like something had
- been taken from me. Because suddenly,
- Yes, I still saw that these forests were beautiful, and I still saw that they were so incredible, and
- they made me feel so much. But I also couldn't believe anymore that they were these perfect, pristine,
- utopian places that we could just say, just take our hands off them, and everything's going to be fine.
- And it was a crisis for me in many ways, because what I had to do in that moment was to figure out
- What to do with that? Did I stop loving forests because suddenly they weren't what I thought they were?
- Or did I see where that love would take me? Did I ask myself, OK, so these forests are struggling. What
- do we do about it? There's two things that I think are really special about forestry in particular.
- One of these is that I think as I started to go to forestry school,
- you take all these different classes, you know, and you take soil science, and you take geology, and
- you take biology, and you study ornithology, and you study botany, and dendrology, and hydrology, and
- all of these different aspects of ecosystems, and as you're taking these individual classes, time and
- time again, I saw that all of these things were connected within forests, that actually you can't pull
- apart all of these pieces,
- and create an ecosystem, that you actually have to bring them all together, that you can't have any
- one of these aspects of ecology without having all of them. And fundamentally, forestry is an attempt
- not to manage one single aspect of forest, but to manage all of that stuff at once. The forest itself,
- this incredibly dynamic and interconnected ecosystem. And I think that fundamentally is a better way
- to think about caring for ecosystems in that holistic way.
- And the second thing that I think is really special about forestry is that at its heart, it's a discipline
- of action. So imbued in us is this idea that we do not have to be bystanders in these ecosystems. That
- we can go into them, and we can see what's going on, and then we can do something about it. As I learned
- more and more and more, I became more and more and more of an advocate
- for taking action, seeing what tools that we have to affect positive changes in these ecosystems. There's
- this concept, I don't know, maybe this is a Vermont thing, I don't know. Are you aware of the concept
- of a natural community? The concept of a natural community, it's a really cool idea in a bunch of different
- ways. Traditionally, as foresters, we would describe forests by what's called their cover type.
- So a cover type is like a word or a description of a forest based on the trees that are there right
- now. So you go into a forest, and there's a bunch of white pine trees, and you're like a white pine
- forest. You go into a forest, and there's a bunch of northern hardwood trees. It's a northern hardwood
- forest. You go into a forest with a bunch of hemlock trees and hardwood trees. It's a hemlock hardwood
- forest, right? Super, super simple. And it's really a very superficial way of looking at forests.
- Now, a definition that I like a lot more is this definition of what we call a natural community. And
- there's three reasons why I really like natural communities as a better definition of our ecosystems.
- One is that it is so much more expansive. So a definition for what a natural community is that I'm taking
- from this book called Wetland, Woodland, Wildland, which is a book about the natural communities of
- Vermont, is a natural community is quote, and I'll tell you this twice.
- So if it goes over your head, I'm going to tell you again. A natural community is, quote, an interacting
- assemblage of organisms, their physical environment, and the natural processes that affect them. Time
- number two. An interacting assemblage of organisms, their physical environment, and the natural processes
- that affect them. So what I like about this definition is it's so much more expansive.
- So a forest is not just these trees that are here in this moment. A forest is all of the living pieces
- and parts of this ecosystem. It's these trees, these plants, these animals, the birds, the bears, the
- butterflies, the fungi, all of these living pieces and parts. And it doesn't end there. It is also this
- physical environment, things like soils and waters, components of the forest that we traditionally think
- of as abiotic or non-living things, like geology, where in the world that forest is.
- And it is also inclusive even of natural processes, the way that the forest changes over time. So forests,
- if you didn't know, have fooled us all. They have fooled us into thinking that they are these ecosystems
- that are defined by being stable, by staying the same, when in fact they're these ecosystems that are
- defined by the way that they change. These natural processes, even things like the foundational and beautiful
- process of tree mortality, which is, by the way, as normal, as natural, as ancient, and arguably as
- essential to forest ecology as living trees are as integral a part of them as the trees themselves.
- So taking this definition, the thing that we call a forest is not just these trees. It is all of the
- living parts of this ecosystem, all of these non-living
- abiotic parts of this ecosystem, all of these natural processes. And what I like about this is not just
- having this as a thought exercise. When we change what we call the forest, it changes what it means
- to take care of the forest. It is not our job to take care of these trees that are here in this moment.
- It's our job to take care of this entire volume of life. The best analogy that I can give you is that,
- The way that I see a forest is it's like a coral reef. So the trees are like the coral. They're this
- living structure that defines this ecosystem around which this community is built. But none of us,
- of course, would ever say a forest or a coral reef, I should say, is a bunch of coral in the water.
- We would define it by this dense and diverse web of life that's woven around that living structure.
- And that's what forests are like to me. So that's the first part of natural communities that I like.
- That's more expansive.
- The second part is that it has quality. So there's an idea that you can have a natural community that
- is a better or worse representation of that natural community. A white pine forest is not a white pine
- forest. There are so many variables that can determine what kind of a forest it is and its ability to
- sort of express how these different ecosystems have been on our landscape for thousands of years. And
- the third part of this natural community definition that I really like is
- that it has an element of potentiality. So what we're doing with these natural communities is we don't
- say, oh, here's a bunch of white pine trees in the forest. This is a white pine forest. We're looking
- beyond this moment. And we're asking ourselves, what has this place been in the past? What could it
- be in the future, all other things aside, that may derail its journey toward its future self?
- So deer overpopulation and introduce plant species, introduce pests and pathogens and climate change
- and all of these other things. We'll put those over here and say sort of like, what has this forest
- been and where is it going? And so this is an incredibly profound gesture because it allows us to look
- at these forests as they are today and to realize that actually a lot of our forests are far more and
- far different than they appear. That a forest that we might see here in Indiana
- that's a bunch of, I don't know, Virginia pines, might actually be a savanna, right? It might actually
- be this place where it has been providing this incredibly rich and beautiful habitat for thousands of
- different species of organisms for thousands of years. And it is only in this state for this moment
- in time. And what I love about this is that it helps us think about these ecosystems, which, again,
- are not just these trees.
- But this entire volume of life, in a way that we're saying, how do we help this forest not become what
- we want it to be, but to become itself? So as we compare these sort of elements of this natural community
- to the thing that I mentioned at the beginning, this idea of a cover type. There's a bunch of pine trees
- here. This is a pine forest. Versus this incredibly dynamic natural community, which is all these living
- things, these non-living things,
- natural processes, this thing that has quality, and this thing that also has an identity, which is not
- linked to where it is right at this moment in time. It feels like when we talk about natural communities,
- we're talking about a forest face. I'm sorry, when we talk about cover types, we're talking about a
- forest face. And when we talk about natural communities, we're describing like it's soul. That's what
- it really is. And I mention all of this because there's this amazing thing that happens with ecosystem
- stewardship.
- which is that if we take the time and we ask the questions and we engage with the people who have done
- this work, we have the opportunity to deepen our understanding of these ecosystems and to deepen our
- ability to care for them. An understanding of what it means to be a good steward of an ecosystem in
- this moment. It's not something that any of us are born with.
- It's not something that is easy to understand. It may be something that's powerfully counterintuitive,
- as I often describe in How to Love a Forest. It may be something that is even heartbreaking, or jarring,
- or confusing. How could it be that we could be cutting a tree, a beautiful tree that we love, and it
- could be part of how we care for a beautiful ecosystem that we love? It doesn't make any sense, and
- yet it can be a way that we help these ecosystems heal.
- So I just have 12 more minutes, 10 more minutes. And so I want to tell you a story, and then I want
- to do one last reading. I'm not going to finish in time, and I'm just going to do it anyway. There's
- nothing you can do about it, because I'm up here. So I want to tell you the story of my land, which
- is called Bear Island, as a means to talk about this a little bit more deeply. So when I first heard
- about this land,
- that now I know as Bear Island. I had this idea that I was helping all these other people as a consulting
- forester and then as a service forester, public forester, helping all these other people care for their
- forests. And I was like, someday I would like to have a forest of my own to be the steward of. And my
- friend was like, did you see that big piece of land for sale? 175 acres. And I looked on this realtors
- website, and it said 175 acres for sale, almost as an afterthought.
- What they really wanted to focus on with this ad was this view of this mountain called Camel's Hump.
- Where I live, a view of Camel's Hump is like the currency of wherever you live. It's like, you've got
- to have it. It's all that matters. Everybody wants a view of Camel's Hump. And so the ad was almost
- like, don't worry about that 175 acres. Just build your mansion right here, and you can look at Camel's
- Hump. It was pretty cheap. And I was like, what's wrong with it?
- And I went to go take a look. So the first thing that I saw when I rolled up onto this piece of land
- was that I went up on the access road, and it had been properly stabilized, and there was a ravine cutting
- right down the center. I had to straddle it with the wheels of my truck. I finally got up to this clearing,
- this log landing, which is where that picture of Campbell's Hub had been taken from, and it was covered
- in trash. Bags of household trash, hydraulic hoses and cables and buckets and tires.
- and busted pieces of equipment half buried in the ground, and going out from it in every direction,
- this network of skidder trails, logging trails, with these three foot deep ruts just bleeding murky
- water down the mountain. It was not a great way to start. And I said, you know what? I'm here. I'll
- go take a walk. And so I started to walk the main trail, and it was incredibly steep. I was getting
- covered in sweat, covered in ticks.
- As I was walking, I was getting like a funny feeling. Something was wrong. And I couldn't figure out
- what it was. And after about an hour, I was thinking about it, thinking about it, thinking about it.
- And I realized that what was bothering me was that there were no healthy trees in this forest.
- Which is weird, because I've never seen a forest before that doesn't have any healthy trees. And I started
- looking around. I was like, no healthy trees, no healthy trees, no healthy trees. Couldn't find them.
- So what I now know happened is that the previous landowner
- had just told these loggers, go cut every tree on the mountain that's bigger than 10 inches in diameter,
- which is pretty small. And they had done it. This is a practice that we call diameter limit cutting.
- Really what it was was this unethical practice we refer to as high grading, which is where you go into
- the forest, and you cut all of the most valuable high grade trees, and you leave the least valuable
- low grade trees behind.
- What it was was basically the inverse of what any responsible forest steward or forester or logger would
- ever do. You're managing the forest very efficiently to be less healthy. And I think there's an argument
- to be made that it would have been a greater kindness to this forest if they had just cut all the trees.
- Because then at least there would have been enough light and enough space to regenerate a new generation
- of trees that would have had a chance to be healthy. But as it was, it was just kind of stuck.
- So I kept on walking, and I saw that even in places where there was enough light and there was enough
- space that was created to regenerate some trees, that all of those young trees were getting browsed
- to death by whitetail deer. There was deer overpopulation here, as there is almost across this entire
- continent, which is a major threat to our biodiversity. I slid down over these cliffs that bisect the
- land from west to east and right into a 30-acre infestation of an introduced plant called Japanese barberry.
- Have you heard of it?
- waist high, pure, 30 acres, no native plants. And I pushed through that patch of barberry and got back
- to my truck and I said, forget this place. I am out of here. I will find a forest somewhere else that's
- easier to love. And I left. And sure enough, I didn't want to think about it, but I would check on it
- from time to time and it was still up on that website, still up on that website. And I started to ask myself,
- if this forest was actually hopeless, or if there was something that I could do to help. And two months
- later, I convinced myself to go back. And when I went back, it was summer. And I started finding all
- this cool stuff. So I started finding that there were these plants that I love, like sweet fern, and
- low bush blueberry, and pink kori dallas, and red columbine. Started finding that there were actually
- some healthy trees there after all that were just so hidden by all these masses of unhealthy trees that
- I hadn't seen them.
- And that there were these rock outcrops covered in reindeer moss with these sweeping views of the Winooski
- River Valley. And I was standing on one of those rock outcrops when I said to myself, I'm going to try
- and buy this place. Didn't know how to do that. Never did anything like that before. And so I called
- up my old boss, Mike, who sold forest land real estate. And I said, Mike, there's this piece of land,
- and I want to make an offer. And how do I do this? How do I make an offer? How much should I offer?
- And he said, well, let me ask you a few questions.
- Is there any timber on it? And I said, no. And he said, any real estate potential? No. Is the access
- good? No. Could it be a sugar bush? No. And he just kept on asking me these questions, kept on answering
- no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And eventually he said, well, Ethan, this place sounds terrible. Just offer
- them like nothing.
- And don't be afraid of hurting their feelings. And that's how I became the owner of this piece of land.
- And I'll tell you what, it's one thing to believe that all we've got to do to take care of these ecosystems,
- to take care of this thing we call nature, is to leave it alone. And it's quite another thing when you're
- standing on that log landing that is suddenly no one's responsibility but yours. In a forest with no
- healthy trees, 30 acre,
- area that's doomed to be infested by Japanese barberry and nothing else forever, a deer overpopulation,
- a climate crisis, a biodiversity crisis, a mass extinction, watching thousands of years of soil roll
- down the mountain through those skitterruts. And I had to ask myself in that moment if it would be a
- greater kindness to leave that forest alone and hope for the best, or to do absolutely everything in
- my power to try and make it healthy again. Now you may not know this,
- But we are all standing on that log landing right now. And we have this fundamental choice, which is
- to recognize where we are in these ecosystems that we are the stewards of, whether we like it or not,
- and this responsibility that we have to care for them as best we can with the tools that we have. We
- can choose to do that, or we can choose to do nothing. And in my case,
- I chose to take action. And in this effort, I have to tell you that I have two superpowers. Superpower
- number one is ADHD, which used correctly can be extremely powerful. And superpower number two is that
- I am not a purist. And so I could ask myself, radically, what tools do we have
- to help fix these problems and help put this ecosystem on a better path for a better future. I wish
- that I could tell you that all that I had to do was just fill my pockets with wildflower seeds and just
- go across the mountain, scattering them like this. I would have done that. I would have loved that.
- But that's not what this forest needed from me. And instead, what my stewardship looked like was cutting
- thousands of trees
- finding every healthy tree that remained, and giving it a little bit more room to grow by cutting less
- healthy trees that were competing with it. And in areas where there were no healthy trees at all, cutting
- areas of trees to regenerate a new generation that had a chance to be healthy. I had to teach myself
- to run an excavator so that I could restore those old eroding skid trails and build new, more resilient
- trails. Teach myself to be a deer hunter so I could lower that population of white-tailed deer that
- is such an existential threat to our biodiversity.
- There is a particular parody in one element of this restoration that I want to tell you about, which
- is that I know that 30 years ago, these loggers came to my forest and they used these tools. They used
- these skitters, these pieces of logging equipment, particularly these cable skitters, because they have
- a cable winch on the back, made by this company, Timber Jack, in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and these
- chainsaws.
- And they created all of these problems that I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to fix. And
- as I heal this forest, two of my most powerful tools are my 1981 timberjack cable skitter, whose name
- is Red, and my chainsaw. There are so many things like this that if we are not purists, yes can be used
- to harm and degrade ecosystems and used in a different way can help them heal.
- And there's another thing that's like that, which is us. There is no doubt that we are the greatest
- threat to ecosystems. There is no doubt that we have caused all of the problems that they face. And
- I believe that there is no doubt that we are their best hope for a better future, that we have an opportunity
- to actually become keystone species in these ecosystems, to be a force for good. And so I want to do,
- I don't really have time. How much time do I got?
- I'm going to do a five-minute reading. So I'm not going to say anything else about it, but thanks for
- listening. And if you have questions, I have a panel with myself and some people who are much smarter
- than me in a moment. But I want to do a reading from the end of the book about what an incredible opportunity
- I think that this moment that we're in is.
- It's a longer reading, so sorry about that. The storm clouds stamp their feet. They are corralled along
- the shifting path of the big river, thundering between the walls of the valley. The clouds move west,
- driven like cattle toward the mountains. As empty as it often feels, there is something beautiful about
- a life lived in the aftermath. Here, in the junkyard of the Anthropocene,
- We hold the fate of the world, all of its ecosystems, all of its peoples in our hands. In this moment,
- we cannot allow this biosphere, our home, to sink further into dysfunction and disarray, or we can make
- the radical and bittersweet decisions necessary to choose a different path. Inside of this catalyzing
- moment, we have the opportunity to reimagine our relationship to ecosystems
- and our relationship to each other to redefine what we are and what is precious to us. As empty as they
- often feel, there is something beautiful about a landscape of forests that are just a fraction of their
- true potential. The forests of our lives are still only at the beginning of their journeys. They may
- yet become diverse and complex, rich with legacies, ancient again.
- With our help, these forests may rediscover a capacity for life beyond imagining, an abundance that
- this world has not known for generations. I pick up another acorn, another product of thousands of years
- of adaptation and change, another precious thing chained to the legacies of the past and hurtling toward
- an uncertain future. Perhaps it is doomed. Perhaps it contains endless possibilities.
- Humidity cloaks the land, drawing tiny round beads of sweat from my skin. For a moment, the mountain
- is cast in golden light. It smells sharp and strong. As I touch another acorn, a raindrop strikes the
- back of my hand, rolling between the small bones of my fingers. Suddenly, droplets are stippling the
- soil like falling stars, throwing up little clouds of dust.
- I have nowhere to be, and so I kneel, watching the water run around the stumps and the upturned leaves,
- drawing spider webs on the earth. Someday I will tell my children that the caves in the talus above
- are a womb, the origin of all the black bears on the mountain, and that the springs in the Big Bowl
- are the source of all of its waters. Someday I will walk these trails with my children and teach them
- to reimagine forests
- as communities of complexity and depth and expansiveness, communities that are fated to change, to celebrate
- both the miracle of life and the miracle of death. Someday I will kneel beside these stumps, a young
- forest blooming around me, and teach my children the imperfect truth of what it means to love a forest.
- Someday, I will teach my children that this world is not ours to hold, but that we hold it anyway. That
- each of us is a steward for one brief and precious moment in time. In our short lives, we must learn
- to pair power and freedom with humility to embody relationship and responsibility, even when it breaks
- our hearts. Someday, I will teach my children that despite everything, we are destined to thrive.
- that we are destined to live in a world that is beautiful. In the years to come, the traces of this
- moment will fade. This empty patch cut will have become a diverse young forest, the stump softening
- and mixing with those of the oaks cut decades ago. I will walk through this young forest and remember
- this autumn day when my hands were young. I will remember that each tall, perfect oak was once an acorn
- between my fingertips.
- that this forest is a child of responsibility, something that we could only have embodied together.
- No one but me will ever truly know the pieces of myself that I've left on this mountain, the labor of
- love that being the steward of this land has been. I will know, and that is enough. We owe too much
- to the future to be imprisoned by the past. As the storm passes over me, I am grateful to be anything at all,
- Grateful to be alive at a time when there is so much worth saving. I want to live in the world that
- will arise from this moment. The world built by people who are brave and humble and resilient, who make
- countless bittersweet compromises, who live their lives with the dream of a better world burning in
- their chests. I want to live in a world that will be created by people planting acorns in the rain.
- Sometimes this life feels like autumn.
- the exhausted end of a boundless summer. Today, I choose to live in a world in which spring is just
- breaking, a world that is just awakening, just beginning to discover what it truly is. I look toward
- the broken ridge of the mountain and feel a powerful nostalgia, not for the past, but for the future.
- High above the storm, the light is swelling, calling everything upward,
- toward a world that is just beginning. Thank you. So we're now going to invite the other panelists to
- the stage to answer your questions. Thank you.
- You really are. That's great. I can confirm when I speak English. And also write pretty well in it.
- Oh, that's great. My grandfather-in-law grew up in Bellows Falls. Oh, really? Right in your neck of
- the woods. Mm-hmm. Anybody need some water? Oh, that'd be great. If there were extra waters,
- I'd blow it up. There is water.
- So first of all, thank you, Ethan, for the time you gave us and the messages you shared. My name is
- Chris Naggers. I am the director of oral conservation for the Indian chapter of the Nature Conservancy.
- But I'm up here tonight to moderate the panel discussion with a bunch of people that I admire and respect
- very much. So for this portion, we invite members of the audience with questions to make their way
- along the stage left to the mic stand up here, ask your question for the panel and see what they have
- to say after you've had your question answered, make your way out there and on to the back of your seat.
- So, are we ready? Yeah. Thanks. Apparently the audience participation part didn't progress at all.
- Would you like to introduce ourselves first? Who we are? Yes or no? Alan asked me to moderate this panel.
- I immediately said yes. I have a day later one. I don't exactly know how to do this. But I'm going to
- stand away from your mics. Smart. And if we could go from, no, Ed, you don't want to go first? I can,
- I guess. Well, too bad. You're going first? OK.
- I'm Edward Oldman. I'm here on behalf of the Indiana Chapter of Society of American Foresters. I'm the
- chair of the Indiana Chapter of Society of American Foresters. Similar to Chris, I was voluntold to
- be on the panel. And I was like, yeah, sure, no problem. And then about the minute after I hit send
- on that email, I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. So that is me.
- I'm Bryan Stone, and I'm here representing Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. I serve as the Indiana chapter
- chair for that organization. I also serve as the outreach coordinator for the Turn in a Poacher program
- with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. For my day job, I'm probably the odd one out here
- and don't know what I'm doing. I'm an English professor at Indiana State University. I have an interest
- in researching the early conservation movement and the role that literature and art played in shaping that.
- I'm Dan Borat. I am with the Indiana Wildlife Federation, and we are a statewide advocacy group that
- promotes all things wildlife, and forests play a big role in wildlife. Thank you. I'm Alan Purcell.
- I work for the Sam Schein Foundation, and I realize it doesn't tell you anything. Sam Schein was a wealthy
- industrialist who loved conservation.
- And during his lifetime, protecting thousands of acres and left an endowment that was very substantial
- and wanted to see his wishes carried on. And so the foundation I work for only gives money and support
- to conservation organizations. Thank you all very much. Hopefully with that, we have some more questions
- finally. So again, make your way down to the mic stand next to Liz here.
- Would you like me to get started? We got someone coming. So of all the species that have been lost in
- this place over the past several centuries, in your opinion, which was the greatest agent of change
- that is no longer in our forest ecosystems? What a great question.
- Can I answer for moss different than Indiana? Two of them that I read about in the book that I am very
- interested in, one of which is the beaver, which is an amazing species. Shout out to, if you want to
- feel like, read a book about how beavers are just going to save the world and solve all of our problems,
- read the book Eager by Ben Goldfarb.
- There's another book that I'm reading right now actually that's an interesting sort of cultural history
- of beavers and beaver trapping, which is called Beaverland. It's by a fellow Vermont author. In Vermont,
- we have this incredible history where we think that we had these valleys that were incredibly shaped
- by beavers for thousands of years. We think that we had about 300 beaver dams per square mile in our
- valleys, which a square mile is 640 acres.
- Beaver dam every two acres. And beavers were an influence on our landscape hydrologically. They provide
- their what we call keystone species. They provide habitat for all of these other species. They build
- soils. They store carbon. They provide flood resilience and all of these other things, water quality
- improvements. And there's really cool species. Obviously, we have beavers here again, largely due to
- these restoration efforts and reintroduction efforts.
- But probably not at the level that they were present historically. The other one that I talk about in
- the book is the passenger pigeon, which I know we know we had here. I think there's some debate about
- exactly their role on the landscape, but historical accounts point to them existing on our landscape
- in these mega flocks of billions of birds. And John James Audubon points to them, he talks about in his
- in his writings about riding through this beautiful forest of big oaks and stuff. And then the next
- time he came after the passenger pigeons had made choice of this place, there were trees that were two
- foot in diameter, broken off. The understory was smothered in inches of their guano. And they were just
- their sheer mass of a passenger pigeon mega flock landing in an area, nesting in an area.
- could cause a tremendous amount of change on the landscape. That's the other one I think about. There's
- actually an account of passenger pigeons. This is one I thought of, too. There's an account of passenger
- pigeons by an early traveler on the Buffalo Trace between the Falls of the Ohio and Sins. And he records
- this very thing. He says there was an area that he crossed approximately 50 acres in size that the timber
- had been utterly destroyed by the passenger pigeons.
- that they, by their sheer mass, had broken trees in half, and that the pigeon dung, as he put it, was
- 12 to 18 inches deep. So that is difficult to imagine. But these were stand-replacing events. They were
- taking stands of timber and destroying them not by just breaking the tree down, but they put so much
- ammonia and nitrate on the ground that it essentially killed any other plant.
- that was there, and the whole system had to start over. It's amazing. When you really start to talk
- about forests, you start to really understand the role of tree mortality and disturbance in these ecosystems
- as not something that would visit them and is this huge tragedy, but something like even what is being
- described with these passenger pigeons. You're like, wow, what habitat would that have created? What
- opportunities would that have created?
- And time and time again, we see that tree mortality, natural disturbances in these ecosystems are actually
- like these incredibly important and life-giving parts of what it means to be a forest and what it means
- to be an ecosystem on this landscape and places that have created habitat for thousands of different
- species of organisms. And I would jump in on that, too, just thinking of agent of change kind of in
- a different way.
- the passenger pigeon was extinct. There was public outcry about it, and a lot of people were upset.
- So you read the newspaper accounts. Was it Martha, the last passenger pigeon that died in captivity?
- And the effect that that had on the American public really woke them up to what was going on and to
- the fact that there needed to be changes made.
- And they helped build Chicago. One reason passenger pigeons were decimated to the degree they were in
- Indiana was we needed to feed the people in Chicago, and they were the cheapest source of protein the
- world's ever seen. But they were, I mean, the two best answers, in my opinion, have been said, beavers
- and passenger pigeons. I mean, icon transformational species that literally shape landscapes.
- Mr. Ethan talked about the forest being a developing ecosystem and dynamic and changing over time. We
- have a lot of change going on now, both with animals and with plants. There are armadillos in Missouri
- now, there are iguanas in Florida, and there are plants that are now in this part of the country that
- never used to be because of climate change. How do we know what's
- supposed to be joining our force and what we have to get rid of. That I'm going to jump in and start
- off on this one. I feel like that is a loaded question that has
- Challenged foresters and ecologists for four years and it's something that it you know We were talking
- about diving into old texts and stuff, you know We have literature going back to original surveys when
- we were first settling You know central hardwoods that we look into and it gives you an idea but it's
- a very different forest and what we walk in today and there's also a lot of change as you talk about,
- you know, you mentioned armadillos and
- Missouri, but we got armadillos in Indiana, you know, so they're showing up here, too. And I think one
- of those is trying to draw that line on what was there and what was in the past and what's there today
- and the encroachment, but also acknowledging what encroachment can be balanced through natural processes
- and what encroachment isn't natural or native. You know, obviously we can rule out the invasive plants
- and things like that. But, you know, with
- ecological changes and stuff. We're seeing warmer climate plants are moving further north. We're seeing
- cooler climate plants moving out of our ecosystems and being able to acknowledge that change is happening,
- but taking accounts of what was naturally here, what was naturally in the surrounding native landscapes
- years ago, 100 years ago. And as we move that out and try and
- encourage those native communities to still be here while still treating and removing the non-native
- encroachment? I think that we often think about that. So we use these terms like there are species that
- are native, there are species that are non-native, there are species that are invasive. I think it is
- important to understand that when we say that we really want these native species,
- And we don't want these non-native species or these non-native invasive species. It's not a value judgment.
- So what we're recognizing with these native species is that these are the species that have been here
- for thousands of years. And so when we say, oh, it's a native species, it's probably OK. Or, oh, it's
- a non-native species, maybe it's not OK. What we're really saying is that we know that these ecosystems
- are like these really complex and intricate cultures of all of these
- different organisms that have these co-evolved relationships with each other. They've been engaged in
- this process for millennia. And these species that were not part of this process, what we call the non-native
- species, don't have that complex web of relationships. And so that does two things. One thing that it
- does is it doesn't provide habitat for all of those other native species that have complex relationships
- with the native species.
- In some ways, when we have these non-native plants in our garden, there's this whole movement to plant
- native. And that's about not planting species that are invasive and can become problematic, but also
- just about providing more good opportunities for our native species. We have these pollinators. We have
- these insects. We have these other organisms that have very complex relationships with plants. And let's
- give them some more habitat, rather than putting these non-native plants that they don't have a relationship
- with on the landscape. And then the other part of it
- is not putting in species that are what we call invasive, which is a subjective assessment. We have
- a lot of non-native plants that are not invasive. They are not problematic for our biodiversity. They
- are not displacing native species. And so while it could be better if they were a native species, they
- could be providing more habitat. They're also not problematic.
- And then we have just a few, really, by comparison, of these plants that are sort of like a wolf in
- the hen house, where they're just, our species have no ability to compete with them. They never would
- have had to evolve an ability to compete with them because they haven't been exposed to them in their
- entire evolutionary history. And so in these ecosystems, something that we can do to help them out is
- to remove these invasive plants that are fundamentally
- haven't been here, we're just introduced by people, and displace our native species that are so important
- for so many different things, and also just have the right to be here, as they have been for thousands
- of years. Yeah, I think everything they've said is absolutely right. I think one other interesting thing
- to think about is, as we discussed, beavers and passenger pigeons are transformational species on the
- landscape. They're no longer here, right?
- Things have changed in our landscape. Disruptions have changed. Something I think you see, and I may
- be the least qualified person on the stage to talk about this because I'm not a forester, but we live
- in a world now where some of our longer lived, more important tree species, excuse me,
- aren't thriving because they're being outcompeted in succession, right? So you can think about where
- we are right here. You go outside, if you were to clear cut everything, you know it's not gonna be the
- first thing to come and dominate our oaks. Oaks are vital for wildlife, which is the angle I'm coming
- at with. You're gonna be outcompeted by sassafras, sycamores, so on and so forth, right? So we also
- have to manage our native species, which are good to give these other species the opportunity to thrive because
- in the world we have given them by exterminating passenger pigeons and almost exterminating things like
- beavers, that dynamic of change has been disrupted. So we have to act as disruptors, as you were saying,
- to manage our landscapes. We have to fill the role that we have destroyed, in essence.
- I'm so sorry. Can I just add one other thing? Because the other element to your question, of course,
- is asking this question about assisted migration. So the assisted migration is where we're recognizing
- that our climate is changing faster than our species ranges can shift. So we're talking about these
- species, as they came back following glacial retreat, we're talking about, historically, they might
- have moved one to two miles per century.
- And now they're having these climates that are moving orders of magnitude more quickly. And so this
- other question that we're asking is like, how do we help forests, you know, expand the ranges of some
- of these tree species such that we can have trees that are well suited to this climate as it changes
- really quickly? That process of deciding which species to do that with and how to move them and how
- far to move them is something that really smart researchers
- are figuring it out. For the most part, we're not like plucking tree species from Florida and planting
- them in Indiana. Mostly what we're doing is this process that we call assisted range expansion, which
- is where we're taking species that are already here but at the northern end of their range and through
- management and also to a certain extent probably through planting to help them expand their range further
- north so they can respond to those changes.
- My question was before mine because it leads into mine. I am a very new non-scientist owner of a small
- parcel of forest. Thank you. My question has to do with triage. It's a young forest just out in Brown
- County here close.
- it can be really overwhelming to look out and see the burning bush and see the multiflora rose and see
- the honeysuckle. And then that's just the first layer, right? Because then you start worrying about
- exactly what you just mentioned about the types of trees that are here and what trees, I mean, and it's
- two of us and neither of us know what we're doing. So, you know, my question really is just where do
- we put our energies first?
- It's overwhelming, right? But I guess the first thing is don't get overwhelmed, right? It is a process.
- You're going to have successes and failures and everything rolled into one. But focus on the things
- that are doable.
- Right? Um, burning bush is really easy to pull out. That is maybe the one good thing about it is so
- shallowly rooted, but get rid of the things to the degree you can that you know are the most prolific
- at reproducing. Right? Because if you don't get rid of them, they're just going to continue to go. Um,
- and don't be afraid. I think you mentioned not being a purist. I think this may elicit some negative
- responses, but I'm pretty comfortable with it. Don't be afraid of herbicide. It's,
- It's necessary, right? It is necessary in a invaded environment to have real success. So use all the
- tools available to you and focus on those things that are the most aggressive. I'm going to approach
- this from an analogy on a completely different plane. I got a one-year-old at home. She's turning one tomorrow.
- And there's plenty of opportunities for my wife and I to sit there and be like, this is a lot of work.
- And plenty of opportunities for us to be like, was this a good decision? Do we want another one? Where
- are we at in this stress level world? But also, all it takes is for that one moment where she hears
- a little song on a commercial and starts dancing, or says a word or something to make your stress disappear.
- And I think that taking time to not be so focused on the work that's necessary on the property, taking
- that walk through the property and finding those mosses or, you know, when springtime comes, you know,
- go out there with a wildflower book and find those wildflowers and stuff and
- take time to find those little wins in places. And as you continue to do this work, whether it's invasives,
- whether it's timber stand improvement, whatever the tasks at hand are going to be, and you're going
- to see those little wins compound more and more and those appreciations. And maybe it's journaling them
- down and writing them and using them as the backing that you need to help continue the positive work.
- But it's easy to look at the mountain ahead of us that we have to climb.
- But we don't stop and turn around and be like, wow, look at the view that we've already crossed. And
- I see that so often in forestry. You've got two acres of straight invasives in front of you or whatever,
- stilt grass. And it's like, I could bale this and sell it for horse feed or turn around and be like,
- oh, look, there's this one little wildflower here that's really pretty. So taking the chance to acknowledge the wins.
- I think that a lot of us, so when I was, especially when I worked for the state of Vermont, part of
- this conservation community that was the state agencies and these non-profits and our big struggle was
- always like, how do we get the people to come to our events and to read our resources and to watch our
- stuff and to engage with us?
- sign up for our email list, volunteer with us. And so what I often tell people when they're asking for
- like, how do I get this help? I would tell you that those organizations have been waiting to hear from
- you. And a lot of them are just in this room, right over here, and they have resources for you, and
- they have mentorship for you, and they have walks for you, and they have
- ways to pair you up with different experts and avail yourself of those opportunities. We're just so
- blessed to have these land trusts and these conservation organizations and landowner organizations that
- provide so many amazing things. So I would say that that's, avail yourself of that as well.
- I guess my question is more about advocacy. And I think that a lot of our forests, especially in this
- region, are endangered by very well-meaning people who love the forest and want to care for it and don't
- know how. And I guess how do we get the message of people in the forestry community or people who are
- really into this that loving a forest is more than leaving it alone?
- I think that this is a, it comes in a lot on our public lands here. I think a lot of the people who
- work on our public lands are constantly beleaguered by people who think they're doing the right thing,
- as well as we have a lot of landowners in the area who maybe have two to five acres, maybe 10 acres
- at a large scale, who are very afraid to touch it. They don't know what they're doing. The idea of going
- in there with a chainsaw sounds terrifying to them.
- expand this message beyond this room to people who need to hear it? It's a great question. So one thing
- I would say is that I think what you know one thing that is very important for us to understand is that
- our job as people who care about forests is not to like figure out the one way to take care of them
- correctly.
- and then to just apply it everywhere. That actually, there's a diversity, in addition to wanting to
- cultivate a diversity of different tree species, and a diversity of different sizes and ages of trees,
- and a diversity of different types of forests across the landscape, and ages of forests across the landscape,
- as a means to cultivate forest resilience, like resilience in a changing climate. This is what we call
- risk spreading. It allows us to not just create habitat for lots of different critters,
- that utilize these different things, different tree species, different structural conditions, different
- forest ages and types and expressions, but also to do risk spreading, not to put all our eggs in one
- basket so that we're not vulnerable to an uncertain future, right? And another type of diversity that
- is often overlooked is a diversity of different approaches, right? The fact that we actually wanna do
- a lot of different things. And so one thing that's interesting is
- I feel like a lot of times, in a lot of different communities, certainly in the conservation community,
- we can be like this parable that I'm now going to butcher about the blind men describing what an elephant
- is. Do you remember this one? Where there's the one blind man, and he's touching the elephant's leg,
- and he's like, an elephant's like a tree trunk. And another one's touching its tusk, and it's like,
- oh, an elephant is like a rope. There are a lot of people out there who
- have figured out that there's something good about managing forests and there's something good about
- not managing forests, and they're both right. But both of those are just describing one piece of what
- we need to do, right? So it's not even that we need to necessarily all of us, like, change our minds
- about these things. We just need to zoom out and go a little deeper and understand what we're really
- trying to do here, which is to fundamentally
- create a landscape that is functional and vibrant and that also supports us in our communities as well.
- For me, that's the most powerful message to share. To also understand that, by the way, doing nothing
- is also a choice, and it's one that we should make very carefully because it's also a choice that can
- degrade ecosystems. We are not absolved of responsibility simply because we don't
- pick up a chainsaw, right? We are responsible for them in this moment right now, whether we like it
- or not. And that carries with it, whether we choose to take that responsibility and utilize it very
- actively or very passively. And I think, I mean, it speaks to like the complexity of the situation too,
- right? And how there is no one size fits all approach. And have folks heard what's happened with the
- roadless rule?
- In the last week, the rescinding of the roadless rule to allow building of roads through, so for example,
- to give the green light to the Ambler Road Project in Alaska, that's going to cut through critical Caribou
- migration corridor for energy development. We know that our national forests are intended as multi-use.
- And so speaking on BHA's behalf and our perspective on that, we're opposed to just the rescindion of
- that rule, like blanket.
- and just opening up forests for the building of roads. There are certainly some areas where preservation
- is the best approach. That would be the best management approach. When we look at our forests here in
- Indiana, though, we might see something different. Different type of forests make up than the Tongass,
- for example. What we see in the Hoosier as a forest that was cleared in the 19th century. Indiana was
- once 80% forested.
- And that was cleared by the turn of the century. And we've seen these efforts to rebuild our forests
- and to allow them to come back. And they've been, in large part, successful. And I think it's an amazing
- thing. But management's necessary here. But there are definitely other places where, and so management's
- necessary here for the sake of wildlife, as well as for the forest, for that natural community, where
- we see out west, perhaps, there are places where that's not the case, where that active management could,
- in fact, hinder wildlife.
- Yeah, I mean, yes. Yes, everything they said. But what you said before has really resounded with me.
- We are nature's greatest threat, and we're its last best hope, I guess. We are in a position now, we
- have put ourselves in a position where if we do nothing, we do bad. So we need to intervene.
- It's this interesting situation where we're gonna pick winners and losers. That's the nature of this,
- right? I like rough grouse. I grew up in Pennsylvania. It was my state bird. I love rough grouse. They're
- all but extirpated from this state, and there's things we can do to slow their true extirpation and
- bring them back, and that's management, right? So there are things we have to do, but things,
- will die in that process. Things will be removed from the equation in that process. And that's where
- we are. That's the reality. You're right. There are still some places on Earth where true preservation
- is probably the best course. Unfortunately, Indiana is not that place, in my estimation, that has been
- so impacted that we're in this situation where we have to act. Hi.
- Thanks for coming, you guys. This has been great. I'd like to follow up on the question of how do we
- know what trees used to be there, and also on Ethan's mention of native communities, which I hadn't
- heard of. So I'll tell you up front, I'm a misplaced Idahoan, which I was surprised BHA is in Indiana,
- but anyway. So I'm from the West, and I have a Western mindset. I'm a science geek, and I have a soils
- background.
- But it sounds like native communities are ecological sites. And ecological sites, and I've looked at
- some of them for Indiana. I'm more familiar with them in the West. But ecological sites tell you what
- trees were there. I think ecological sites started in the West, because I know Joel Brown at NRCS was
- the instigator behind it. And the idea is,
- They were based on range sites, which are based on soils. And we would make fun of, they were called
- habitat types in the West, because it's a ponderosa pine forest. Well, it could be something else next
- week. But a Wyoming big sagebrush 12 inch precip zone is always a Wyoming sagebrush 12 inch precip zone,
- even if you mow all the sagebrush off. And so ecological sites have state and transition models.
- Do you use them in Indiana? Because I wrote up a thing. I'm a huge fan, if you can't tell. I wrote up
- a handout about it for the Purdue forest owners thing. And I'd be happy to pass it on, if you can put
- it in the newsletter. Do you guys use them? I mean, yes, I'm evangelizing.
- Ecological sites, there's a lot of... Ecological sites, if you want to know what used to be on your
- place. And in Indiana, they actually have diagrams for where your soil is on the landscape, and they're
- based on... Ecological sites are based on texture and position on the landscape. Yeah.
- Right. And they're one step beyond soils. They start with soils. Every soil is assigned an ecological
- site. But the soils don't have the state and transition models. And then how do you get from what you
- have now to what you want? Is it fire? Is it taking out the invasives? Anyway, ecological sites. I hope
- you use them.
- It's difficult to know what Indiana exactly looked like, because Indiana has been so altered over the
- years. The West is different. You know, the West had so much public land set aside early that there
- are vast areas that are still essentially what they were at one time. When Indiana became a state, actually
- when the... what we now know as the Northwest Territories, and that act was passed by Congress, one
- of the requirements of that was that the land would be surveyed.
- by surveyors who would lay out a system of townships and ranges and section lines. And in their journals,
- they were required by law to write a couple of things. One was they had to record witness trees. So
- when they set a corner, they had to say, well, this corner was so far from a tree and they would name
- the species of this size. And they would often along that section line describe the
- trees that they saw also. There were times when they didn't see trees even. They described grasslands
- or prairies or what they, in the southern part of the state, barrens is what they recorded. The purpose
- of that was that as settlers came to Indiana, they could read the surveyor's notes and decide for themselves,
- was that going to be good farmland or not, based on the trees that were growing there.
- But that gives us today, 200 years later, a record, a rough record, but it gives us a record of what
- the vegetation types were at that time. And there are a few little quirks about it that we have to be
- cautious, but it gives us some good information. Ethan mentioned that a natural community engages its
- processes too. And so we often see in their notes that they would record that there were areas with fire.
- I mean, there were very few people in Indiana at this time. And so the question is, why were we having
- fires out on the landscape? And a lot of this is thought to have been, initially, Native Americans were
- using fire to manage the land. And so to adequately, I think, go back to a template of what we need,
- we have to think about, what does the land want? And what does the land want to grow? We can look at
- those land surveyor's notes
- and we can try to bring those processes back. And our forest types are really habitat, I mean, disturbance
- dependent. They love disturbance and they thrive on disturbance. And as he mentioned, we think of in
- our time and place, we think of our forest as being static. That is a myth. Our forests are dynamic
- and they're changing all the time. And we have to come to grips with that, that dynamism in a forest
- is an okay thing.
- It's okay for the forest to change, and it's okay for things to die, and it's okay for disturbance to
- happen, because that's what that forest wants. Anyone else? I hadn't heard of that ecological sites
- thing. I'm going to look it up. Natural communities was the one I... I'll look up ecological sites,
- you look up natural communities, and then we'll trade. Yes. When I started WebSol survey, I thought
- there was going to be an article on the news. I use it all the time.
- said a few things that made me get up, but getting people more involved. So I'm a clinical herbalist,
- and I own the only herbal apothecary in the state of Indiana. And some of my friends are conservationists.
- And they had posted a whole list of like six different opportunistic plants, right? Invasives, I call
- them opportunistic. But I said, well, what are you guys going to do with them? He said, well, we're
- trying so hard.
- to get people to come out to our weed wrangle so we can get rid of them. And I was like, I sell and
- use every one of those in my apothecary. And I sell out of them, right? So what we started in some of
- the counties throughout Indiana is where herbalists and wild food foragers are teaming up with people
- like you. And so we have now had more people coming out than what they've ever expected. They have to
- cap it now.
- So they have to cap it because people are coming out, they're getting rid of the invasives, but they're
- also learning how to use the invasives for both wild food and medicinal purposes. So have you done that
- or have you thought about doing that in your areas? Like garlic mustard, we weren't shoving it in plastic
- trash bags this year. We were teaching people how to eat it and how to use it for its medicinal purposes.
- I can't tell you how much Japanese barberry that I sell.
- that I just dug up, right? Because it is highly invasive, right? But people are also buying in a capsule
- called berberine, if you've heard of it, right? So people are making so much money off of isolating
- its alkaloids, when we can use the whole plant and teach people how to do it, because it's so simple.
- So you get, I watched your YouTube video on that, and I was like, get out! I wish I was with him right now!
- so that I could harvest all this with him, because it's such a medicinal plant with all the Berberus
- family plants, but that one is a stinker, so I get it. And then Japanese knotweed. I mean, I go through
- Japanese knotweed, like so much of it, to where I sell out of it and have to harvest it for the next
- year. So those were ideas of things that we have been seeing in our state, where you combine skilled,
- very trained herbalists with conservationists, and we've seen amazing
- results with that. So I wanted to know if you've done anything like that or any of you. Yeah, yeah,
- I have. I haven't. I think so with the. It's with the herbalist, with the herbal, the herbal, the medicine,
- medicinal and edible value of these plants. I think it is a beautiful thing. And I think it's I think
- it's wonderful. And then and then the nuance, of course, is like
- holding these two truths up at the same time, which is that we can use this plant for this amazing thing.
- And also, that doesn't mean that it's necessarily a good thing to have everywhere. Right. And I think
- that one thing that I see a lot of is folks who have a big Japanese barberry problem across a huge acreage.
- for instance, or Japanese knotweed, and are like, well, I'm going to leave that right there in the woods
- because it's medicine, which is not what we want to do. So the nuance is, can we find a way to be like,
- when we're removing these plants, in certain situations, in certain places, let's get a bunch of people
- together, let's harvest a bunch of food and a bunch of medicine, and also understanding the circumstances
- where we do a different approach, and where that won't be enough to
- You know to restore these ecosystems but there's nothing wrong with with finding value in these things
- and if we can find value in these things and also like remove them while also recognizing that you know
- probably just doing that isn't going to be enough to solve the problem everywhere. I think that's a
- beautiful thing.
- walks all over the state of Indiana, and the invasives are insane. I can walk on every property and
- already know what I'm going to find with the invasives. And yeah, I think it's sort of like co-teaching
- also that there is something that we can use that also doesn't mean that it's good in every context,
- which is a nuanced reality that's hard for us to sometimes express. And then I think the other thing
- that is important to acknowledge is that
- There will always be these plants on the landscape. We are not going to control them to death, nor are
- we really trying to. I think that if eradication is our goal of these plants, we will fail. And the
- goal is what we call control. Control is where we're doing our best to control these plants and to keep
- them from being a threat to our biodiversity, to our ecosystems, as best we can.
- Right. And this will be a constant process. So even if we don't worry like even if we control these
- plants through every means that we have we will still have these plants on our landscape as well. We're
- not we're not going to eradicate them. I think I outside of garlic mustard and and watercress.
- I've thrown them all away. I didn't know these had any value, so this is great for me to know. But what
- I think I would say, I don't want to speak for you guys, but I'm relatively confident in this. All of
- us would rather something be utilized than thrown away, but we want to get it out. We want it out of
- the natural ecosystem we're trying to keep as natural as we can. But if someone's going to use it, that's
- a whole lot better than shoving it in a plastic trash bag and
- take it to the incinerator. Another partner there too is the culinary community. I know I've been at
- like wild game cook-offs where you would score extra points if you were using invasives because you're
- being incentivized to remove them, right? And so there's that too. I think to add to what everybody's
- already said, I think that there's also a point that we have to remember that though these plants may have been
- are they adding to the community, the natural community itself? And that's, I think, one of the balancing
- points. And I've worked in forestry. I've also worked in row crop agriculture. And it's a conversation
- I've had with both sides of the coin. We have to feed America, but is a 100-acre field of corn adding
- to the ecological community? And being able to make that balance and understanding, OK,
- what impact are we trying to go after, which one is the better gain, the gain of the natural community,
- the gain of the individual human's health, you know, and how much do we need of each? And being able
- to keep that balance in check and focusing from the conservation aspect of keeping that, you know, like
- Ethan said about the term control and not eradication, you know, yes, it'd be awesome if I could snap
- my fingers and all invasives would be eradicated and I would
- do it in a heartbeat. I'd snap here all night long. But that's not happening. And being able to focus
- on the greater gain. And I'm going to take it back to earlier there was a comment made about using herbicide.
- And it's a conversation I've had with hundreds of people. I had a conversation with a landowner not
- too long ago where she asked me, she said, hey, my husband really likes using herbicide on these invasives.
- I don't like it. Can you explain to me if it's good or not?
- We had about a 20-minute conversation, and she then ended it with, well, I think I'm just going to tell
- him that he can spray whenever I go shopping. And I had to laugh because she was like, I understand
- the greater good. I just can't bring my personal ethics to be OK with it. And I think that's where we
- have to be willing to
- agree with the greater good, but remember of where our ethics are personally and what, you know, what
- we can forego and what we have to be able to turn a kind of a blind eye, per se, too. So, but yeah,
- that balancing of all the ecosystems and all the parts involved in that ecosystem. Assume good intent.
- Like, we're all, all of us are trying to do good by our natural communities here. We may have different
- mechanisms. Assume good intent and let
- people get to where they get to. Well, thank you all so much. Thank you for that thought-provoking question,
- and thank you to the panelists. This concludes our panel discussion time, and we'll transition on to
- the next phase. Thank you all so much.
- Judy Brown, coordinator for the Let the Sunshine In program in Indiana. And on behalf of all of our
- sponsors, we wanted to, well, we wanna thank our sponsors again for making this evening possible. We
- wanna thank our panelists. We wanna thank Ethan for joining us this evening. We also like to thank all
- of you for coming out this evening and enjoying this really thought-provoking conversation.
- We do have a couple of door prizes. We have two of Ethan's books that we'd like to give away. And we
- do have some empty seats. And so what I will ask is for Ethan to pick a number between 1 and 126. Just
- randomly pick one. Three. OK. So number three is Danielle Archer. And is Danielle here? All right.
- Another one? 94. 94. It's Brian Burr. Is Brian here? Yep. Yep. All right. All right. All right.
- Once again, we wanted to thank everyone for coming. And Ethan has signed those books, by the way, the
- ones that we just gave out.
- If you do have books that you would like for Ethan to sign, there's a room around the corner if you
- want to bring your books and Ethan will be there at a table and we'll sign the books. And again, if
- you want to just come over, we also have a lot of the sponsors have tables so you can come and check
- out the tables, chat with Ethan a little bit before you head home. Again, thank you all for coming and
- have a safe journey home.