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.