Plant The Trees
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Plant The Trees
Bear, Lynx, Goshawks, and 350 Beaver Dams per Sq. Mile: Forest Management and Biodiversity — With Ethan Tapper
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We’re planting all of these trees, many of which carry the goal of ecological benefit: conservation, regeneration, fish, wildlife, water quality, flood mitigation, relative homeostasis in weather and climate. But what does intact nature really look like in the forested biome (biomes) of the Northeast United States? The Mid Atlantic, Great Lakes, the Humid midwest? How can we know? How can we get there?
There is no one answer, and often many answers are inherent, given that diversity is the spice of life and the spice of the forest.
Ethan Tapper is a forester from Vermont.
He’s an internationally-recognized ecologist, and bestselling author of How to Love a Forest. An Audobon-endorsed forester, Ethan works with landowners to steward forests for both wildlife habitat and income.
Ethan works as a consulting forester across Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Maine, and served as the Chittenden County Forester from 2016-2024. Ethan stewards Bear Island, his 175 acre forest, homestead and sugarbush in Vermont.
We're planting all of these trees, many of which carry the goal of ecological benefit. Conservation, regeneration, fish and wildlife, water quality, flood mitigation, relative homeostasis in weather and climate. But what does intact nature really look like in the forested biome or biomes of the Northeast United States? The Mid-Atlantic, the Great Lakes, the humid Midwest? How can we know? How can we get there? There is no one answer. And often many answers are inherent, given that diversity is the spice of life and the spice of the forest. Ethan Tapper is a forester from Vermont. He's an internationally recognized ecologist and best-selling author of How to Love a Forest. An Audubon endorsed forester, Ethan works with landowners to steward forests for both wildlife habitat and income. He works as a consulting forester across Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Maine, and served as the Chittenden County Forester from 2016 to 2024. Ethan stewards Bear Island, his 175-acre forest, homestead, and sugar bush in Vermont. Without further ado, please welcome Ethan Tabper. Ethan, welcome to the Plant the Trees podcast. I believe we met in 2012 when we were both at the University of Vermont eating potatoes and figuring out our place in all of this. You're now the author of How to Love a Forest, but first and foremost, you're a consulting forester. And for a while I remember that meant getting up at 3 a.m. in February, driving two hours, marking trees for eight hours on snowshoes, and driving back home.
SPEAKER_01That is correct, Harry. Yes. And disclosure to the listener, we are real life friends and also, you know, now, now colleagues. And in my professional life, I'm mostly a forester and an ecologist. Um I run a consulting forestry company called Bear Island Forestry. If you have heard of my name, though, it's probably not from that. It's probably from the fact that I wrote this book called How to Love a Forest, which came out in 2024. And then I'm also a social media guy. And I have these social media channels that reach a lot of different people all across the world. And then I'm also I do a lot of public speaking work and I'm an advocate. I get to travel all over the country and talk about forests and how we take care of them.
SPEAKER_00And I think we we ran the Vermont City Marathon, the half marathon relay in 2012. We came in 12th, but I think we won our weight class. For sure. Yeah. And I and of course I was pulling pulling most of the weight. Yeah, 100%. And so beyond being a consulting forester, you own and manage a few hundred acres of forest in Vermont. Could you tell us a little bit about Bear Island?
SPEAKER_01Sure. Bear Island is a 175-acre forest now conserved. I donated a conservation easement on it in 2022. And it's really become, you know, like such a catalyst for a lot of the stuff that I talk about, which is really, if I were to put it in a nutshell, what I really am an advocate for is this concept of ecological responsibility, you know, this ancient and beautiful act that we call stewardship of our ecosystems. And uh it's this forest, one of the reasons why it's so perfect to talk about these concepts of stewardship is because, like a lot of our forests, it is not this pristine, you know, perfect ecosystem. When I got here, my first impression was that it was like one of the least healthy forests I'd ever been in. You know, that there were no healthy trees and it had every problem that a forest could have. And then I had to decide what I was gonna do about it. If I was just gonna sort of like take this approach that I think many of us that that love forests do, which is to say, oh, well, nature is so wise and so beautiful and nature will figure it out, or to take a more pragmatic and I think more realistic approach, which is to be like, how can we actually help? You know, and and not from a place of like, how do I, you know, mold this ecosystem into what I want it to be, my vision for it, but like how to help it be itself, and to then sort of find my place uh within that. And, you know, it's hilarious in a way. And Harry, you've planted trees there. The soil's bad, the ground's bad, the access is bad. When I got there, it was like, you know, literally like the only flat place on the property was this old log landing where we planted some trees, and now I have this little orchard, and it was just covered in trash, beat up skitter ruts everywhere, and just gnarly. And so, you know, now I've taken this approach of like, you know, doing stuff, including some like stuff that a lot of people who love ecosystems wouldn't think about as being one of the ways that we heal forests, as like, you know, things like cutting trees and killing deer. And really seeing this forest go from being, I think, a symbol of like everything that's wrong with the world, this forest that have every had every problem that a forest could have, to in my mind, really being a symbol of hope and a symbol of like what's possible within our ecosystems if we're willing to like actually do the work and utilize the tools at our disposal to effect positive change. And really, I think step into our role as, like it or not, like the caretakers of these ecosystems.
SPEAKER_00And when you got to Bear Island, there was some biodiversity. What were the different strata of the forest like? Were there nice trees? Were there scraggly trees? What what was the state?
SPEAKER_01So the what really happened to Bear Island, it was a few different things. So the sort of the big story, or you know, maybe the story with a capital S is that, you know, this was where I am in Vermont, everywhere that you go, like the landscape history is different. Where I am in Vermont, probably our forests were sort of these multi-generational closed canopy old growth forests with these really, really less of a fire history than there are in other parts of the Northeast, like in less indigenous fire, less natural fire, and um really, really a lot of beaver activity and probably 300 beaver dams per square mile, which is crazy to think about in our valleys, you know, a square mile, 640 acres, that's beaver dam every two acres. And then we had this history of settler settler colonialism. You know, a lot of these forests, almost all of these forests, what I tell people in New England is that just assume that if you're in a forest in New England, it was an agricultural field, cleared for agriculture within the last 200 years, probably has been an agricultural use within the last hundred years. And that was certainly true of Bear Island. And then, you know, as it regrew, these forests that regrow in the aftermath of that disturbance, it takes time to recover those missing attributes. And as they're recovering, they're also dealing with all of this other stuff. So they're dealing with the fact that they're missing multiple important tree species that have been lost or functionally lost, like the American chestnut, which I know, Harry, is one very close to your heart. And, you know, functionally lost species like American Elm to Dutch Elm disease and you know, butternut, and the one that I'm gonna talk about, American beach, it's sort of that are still on the landscape, but functionally not able to fulfill their historic ecological role, the phenomenon that we call cryptic function loss. And so they're dealing with all of this stuff, and of course, this landscape that is also fragmented by human development and you know, smaller and smaller intact forest blocks. And then 30 years before I came to this land, the landowner of this forest just told these loggers, go cut every tree bigger than 10 inches in diameter. And that's a practice that we call diameter limit cutting, which is where it's really what we call high grading, which is where you go into the forest, you cut all of the most valuable, quote unquote, high grade trees, and you leave the least valuable, quote unquote, low-grade trees standing there. The problem is that those high grade trees are also usually the healthiest trees in the forest, those low-grade trees are the least healthy trees in the forest. So you're doing the opposite of what any responsible forester, landowner, logger would ever do. And so my impression when I got there was that there were no healthy trees in this forest. I couldn't find one. And one of the things that was also interacting with that, you know, the fact that just basically every uh every unhealthy tree had been left and every healthy tree had been cut was this pathogen called beech bark disease, which was affecting many of the remaining trees, which were this species American beech, which we think was like 60% of all the trees in this part of this region of Vermont, and preventing them from fulfilling this historic ecological role. And there was other things like deer overpopulation, introduced plant species that were also sort of like stepping in, making the forest natural process of resilience even more difficult. So, with a lot of these forests, as you learn more about them, I've really transitioned into this role of being like as much just an ecologist as I am a forester in the traditional sense, and you start to see all of these different aspects of forest ecology, it's almost like you're like looking at this ecosystem through like a dirty lens, some filter where you're like, I can see what this ecosystem has been, I can see what this ecosystem could be, and then standing between you and that thing is all of this human-created stuff, which is interacting and preventing that forest and its natural ability to like regenerate and to be resilient and to provide habitat and to support its biodiversity, such as it has been for thousands of years. And then, sort of what I've gotten interested in is like how do we clean that lens, right? And how do we help this forest get from wherever we find them to a better place?
SPEAKER_00How do you think about that climax ecosystem, perhaps in Vermont or elsewhere, but specifically where you are? Call it, you're you're flying a drone over this land either 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago, maybe uh a few turns of the clock after the glacier receded. What is that highest expression of the land look like?
SPEAKER_01So you can answer that in a few different ways. I think that really the most important word to think about that is diversity. We think that we had very diverse landscapes, and diversity means a bunch of different things. So here in Vermont, again, where we have these non-fire adapted systems mostly, we think we had these forests that had a lot of uh structural diversity. So many different sizes and ages of trees, many different what we call in the forestry vernacular cohorts or age classes of trees, each resulting from these natural disturbances, these times when trees died either individually or in groups, and the forest regenerated, creating this new generation of trees. And when we see in our remnant old growth forests, what we see is these forests that they're not all trees that are the same age, like a park. They're this very like stratified canopy, multi-layered canopy, and there's gaps in the canopy, and there's some big trees, but also small trees and middle-aged trees all growing together. We call that vertical structural diversity or structural complexity. And then we would also have horizontal structural complexity or structural diversity, which is where you have also areas of trees that are all young, that are the result of like a large natural disturbance or that are all older, right? Interspersed with those areas that have more vertical structural diversity, would have these areas that have less vertical structural diversity but contribute to horizontal structural diversity across the entire landscape. We sometimes think of that as also landscape level diversity. So we would have all of these different forest types and ages and expressions scattered across the landscape in this mosaic, right? And every it wouldn't be that every forest would be the same everywhere. They would have the same sort of patterns and processes, but they would be the landscape would be very different. And if you've ever been to a large area of old growth forest, I had the privilege of going to one in 2024 called Big Reed, which is 5,000 acres of old growth forest in northern Maine. You just like there's no regular. You walk for, you know, five steps and you feel like you're in a totally different forest. And then you walk for five steps and you feel like you're in a totally different forest, which is such a shock coming from New England, which is where you'll be in what we call a stand, just an area of trees that are like all about the same in structure and composition and species, whatever. And then you like cross a stone wall, right? Which is a place where one day a farmer was like, you know what, we'll let that far pasture go. And then all the trees in that area are the same. So it's like I've likened it to sort of like walking through rooms. You like enter another room, and you're like, oh, this is this room's like this. And then you enter another room, this room's like this. And then you go into an old growth forest, there are no rooms, there are no walls, there's no roof. There's like, you know, just this ecosystem, which is defined by its complexity, its irregularity, its variability. So that's part of it. And then, but yeah, so basically the combination of vertical structural diversity, horizontal structural diversity, and sort of that landscape-level diversity would have defined the landscape. And the other thing is just giving a shout out to, you know, probably the biggest single creators of really novel habitats on our landscape were the beaver, which, you know, as I mentioned, was really, really abundant, especially in our valleys, and was responsible for creating like a lot of habitats that would not have been represented outside of those valleys. So it would have been creating some areas of what we call early successional habitat, some areas of like these sort of meadow-like habitats that are really important for our pollinators, and then also obviously benefiting our hydrology and stuff like that as well.
SPEAKER_00We're painting this really vivid picture of forestry in Vermont and these complex old growth forests. I'm thinking also about the animal trophic pyramid. We have 350 beaver dams per square mile. I would suspect that they create the habitat for salamanders and canids, not canids, felids, like lynx. And would the lynx be eating the beaver?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so one of the things that I I really need to like explain to people in order to let them know how necessary it is for us to sort of help ecosystems out is communicating how much they have changed. If we think that ecosystems are just like as they have always been, then we can just leave them alone, and as they always have, they will be okay, right? But then when we start to add up all of these different things that have happened to them, that's when we really see it. And so, in addition to all these landscape level changes with respect to vegetation, trees, other types of ecosystems, massive changes uh in terms of the big species that are up here. And I mentioned to you before we were recording that I'm working on a book about critters, which will be out sometime in the indefinite future. And so I've been thinking about this a lot. This is also a really interesting part of how this landscape has changed. So we had beaver. Beavers would have been hunted, I think, by by felids like like bobcat and lynx, which would certainly both be here. Also, species like wolverines, which is our, I believe, our largest mustelid. I don't know if otters are yeah, I think they're our largest mustelid, but they're not here anymore. Wolves, which there's a lot of debate. We can talk, I could talk to you about wolves all day long. Uh a lot of debate about which wolf we had and what they were like. Probably we would have had some version of what is now known as the Eastern Wolf, aka Red Wolf, which now resides in a small population, really not much of a population at all, in coastal North Carolina, and another population like centered around the Algonquin Park in Ontario. And we would have had large ungulates, the eastern elk, caribou, the last caribou was seen in Vermont as as recently as 1840, which is kind of crazy to think about. Small populations of white tear, the white-tailed deer, moose, and they would have been hunted by by wolves and what we call in Vermont the catamount, the eastern cougar. Yeah, and and a ver a variety of other different species. But so what you see as you do really across this country is the loss of these sort of like upper trophic levels, right? So the loss of these wolves, um, which are really the apex predator and those catamounts, apex predator in that system, and also the loss of one species of very large ungulate, that elk. And then through restoration, we have species like white-tailed deer here now, which probably weren't very present. And actually, you know, most people don't know that almost every population of whitetailed deer in the eastern United States is reintroduced from a time in the 1900s when they almost went extinct. And species like turkey, you know, that were reintroduced, fissure that were reintroduced. Um yeah, so so there's a really interesting story there of like what wildlife were here prior to colonization. We lost a lot of those species, and then the 1900s have recovered some, but not all of them.
SPEAKER_00So goshawks on e-bird, what I'm hearing is that that would be a really good indicator of ecosystem health.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so goshawks are there's actually the goshawk and what we in Vermont call the partridge, but is actually not a partridge, it's a rough grouse, are two really interesting species that symbolize both the importance of what we call old growth forests or late successional forests, is is really what we should be calling them. Forests that are late in this process of succession, and the importance of landscape level diversity. So that goshawk we think of as like a mature forest or late successional forest bird, that it tends to occupy these forests that are like later down the road of forest development. And so if we see it, you know, and birds actually do this a lot where they're, you know, they're so tied to these specific habitat qualities that we can infer the presence of those qualities from the presence of the bird. So they're like eco-indicators. And so goshawk is an eco-indicator of these sort of like late successional forests, which we could think of as being like a forest that has, you know, that is healthier, that is more resilient, that has access to more of these habitats that have been here for thousands of years, potentially providing more habitat and refuge for our biodiversity compared to adjacent forests. But an interesting thing about the goshawk is that, so here you have this goshawk, and it is, you know, we think of it as a species of older forests. And its primary prey, or one of its primary preys, is the rough grouse, which is a species which is very, very indicative of younger forests, right? Early successional forests, forests that have just experienced a relatively major natural disturbance. And sometimes when you start to put together the pieces of like these different critters that we know are here and have been here for thousands of years, you start to wonder, you know, or you start to be able to sort of deduce what habitat conditions were here. Those two things, the fact that the goshawk, you know, utilizes that habitat and preys on this other species, the rough grass was utilizes this totally different habitat, couldn't be true unless we had these landscapes that were really diverse, right? And that had this mosaic of these early successional forests along with these later successional forests. And what you see is that as you start to study, you know, wildlife biology and ecology, that these patterns repeat themselves again and again and again. That we have tons of different species that require not one single forest type or one single forest condition, but like a plurality of them. And and may have been allowed to exist or they've adapted these tendencies and these life histories because of the presence for thousands of years of those things on the landscape.
SPEAKER_00I feel like we could talk about the ecological components of forests for six plus hours, and I want to tie in the human ecology of all this and then circle back to the non-human ecosystem. You and I are both thankful for houses. We both we both live in one. And I'm curious in Vermont, uh, and we can tie this into central New York, Adirondacks, etc. Where is the wood that is harvested from these forests mainly going? You know, it's such a weird the way that we do this is so weird.
SPEAKER_01Uh and yeah, so the answer is that we have lost so much of our manufacturing capacity and our ability to process these raw products, wood, you know, what should be a local renewable resource, that much of it is getting transported out of state because we've just we've just lost these mills and these markets that used to really define. In our landscapes here, you know, and not to say that like everything that was ever done to cut a stick of wood in Vermont was good, but I think that it we can all agree that we would rather be processing and utilizing local renewable resources here rather than buying wood from who knows where processed under who knows what condition, right?
SPEAKER_00So dug fur from Home Depot, from Oregon, from clear-cut forests.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you don't have you don't have to be an ecologist or a forester or an expert of any kind to know that it makes no sense, you know, in this state that has so many forests to be shipping our wood out of state and then buying wood from out of state. So most of our wood is getting, you know, the wood that I cut, it some of it a very small amount, um, depending on the species. We have a couple good pine mills that mill pine and hemlock softwood lumber, and we'll always send it to them if we're cutting that kind. But all hardwood, uh, there's essentially no option. We end up sending that to Canada, which is actually the most local option that we can. We have, you can also send it to these log yards, which they don't actually process that those logs into lumber, they just re-merchandise it, right? They buy it and then they remerchandise it. And we found out that a lot of you know those hardwood logs end up going overseas. It's a problem with the way that our economy works. When you can, you know, cut down an ash tree and put that ash tree, put those logs from that ash tree, you know, ship it to this, get it onto the landing, get it onto a log truck, ship it to the yard, and then it gets put on a container, on a truck, put on a barge, shipped around the Panama Canal to China, made into stuff, put back on a barge, shipped back around the Panama Canal to us, and that that is somehow, quote unquote, cheaper than if we just process that wood into stuff here.
SPEAKER_00And just from a small business perspective, moving logs and wood just eats margin. So processing locally just adds immense value to local economies. 100%.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I think that sometimes when we think that we're being, you know, that we're loving our forests, we're being good environmentalists, and you know, as I I identify as an environmentalist, and we think that, you know, if we're closing down this big scary lumber mill, you know, or or at least, you know, just not supporting it, you know, not advocating for policies that support it, etc., that we are somehow, you know, doing something good like for the environment because suddenly there won't be all these logs from cut trees that are stacked up there. And in reality, it's just the opposite. You know, it's we're losing out on all of the positive local economic benefits, and we're just shipping all of the bad stuff away. And we still get it, we just don't have to deal with knowing that we're getting it. And we also get to displace a lot of these things onto people who don't have the privilege of saying, not in my backyard, which is problematic. And so, you know, I think one of the things that I've been really thinking about a lot, and I so I have another book that's coming out in October called The Forest Year. And one of the chapters in it, I talk about this term that I made up, called which I call deep environmentalism. And it's this idea that it's environmentalism if we thought about it a little bit harder. And the way that we think about it harder is like, let's think about not just how do we, you know, stop that tree from getting cut down or how do we, you know, protest that oil tanker, you know, and a lot of these legitimate, totally legitimate concerns that have been what have defined environmentalism since there's been environmentalism. And we are forever grateful, by the way, for the gains that have been made by our environmentalists in the past. But then also, if we were to actually vision a world where we live here, you know, in a way that is environmentally responsible and that is responsible to each other, what would that actually look like? Like what where would we actually get stuff? And how would we actually need to be in relationship with our ecosystems? And I think that when you actually think about it that way, you're like, well, geez, wood is like one of the most incredible resources that we can have. And it displaces all of these other resources that we know to be much more problematic and much more environmentally costly and much more, you know, costly with respect to human costs, things like steel and concrete, you know, and plastic. And so we would want to move toward that. And it only works to sort of like think that, oh, if we just shut down the lumber mill or stop the people from cutting the trees in our communities, that we're in some way gaining anything if we're just not thinking about it that hard. Right. Or if we're just thinking about how do I save this one tree that I like, versus thinking about like how do we build a world that works ecologically, culturally, economically, and in a world that we actually want to live in. And so, yeah, I think to me, whenever I start talking about wood, that's what I start to think about.
SPEAKER_00There's so much nuance between Ferngully and Avatar and the destruction that we've seen in the movies, which is jarring. And there's a spectrum between don't touch anything, plug your ears and stay at home, and that. And the responsible human interaction that you've just laid out is fundamental and paramount to all of this.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. You know what is interesting too, is like I did an event with indigenous scholar Lila June Johnson, Dr. Lila June Johnson. And she said something that that really stuck with me, which is that she was like, I feel like it's part of my job to free people from the existential shame of being a human. You know, and I'm a social media guy, so I like get all of this we these weird themes and elements of human culture just like blasted at me from hundreds of thousands of people every day. And one of the things that I hear a lot is, you know, people will just say something like, humans are just a scourge on this earth. Everything we do is bad, everything we touch turns to crap. Like every, you know, and it's such a fundamentally unhelpful thing to say, where it's just like, you know, okay, you know, and and you're right, like we have not done a good job in many cases and contexts, our species, especially those of us, you know, who are the descendants of colonists, especially. Jesus, crow, you know. And uh, we haven't done a great job, but that also that was them, and this is us. You know, like we have an opportunity to be who we are. And if we know enough to be able to actually identify that what has been done is not good, we can also like do a different thing. Welcome to being a human, right? And there's actually a quote that I really like from my first book, How to Love a Forest, that I think about all the time. It's near the end of the book. I say, we owe too much to the future to be imprisoned by the past. We could just continue to beat ourselves up about it and to feel depressed about the way that things are or how they got that way. And we could even be like, Well, it's not our fault, you know, because someone else did that. And also, we live here.
SPEAKER_00It's not our fault, but it's our problem or our opportunity. Absolutely. Yeah. Just one note on ancestor-driven guilt. That's the status quo in North Korea. So we want to be really careful about blaming ourselves personally or casting blame interpersonally based on ancestry. And we can take responsibility without the crippling weight of blame. And I think we can kind of shift this towards action that we can take in forests and human intervention in forests for the purpose of providing for society and increasing ecological function.
SPEAKER_01Sure. You know, it's I I think it's it's awesome to take responsibility for stuff and and also let that be the exact reason why we do a different thing. And that's really the way that we can differentiate ourselves from you know all of these legacies of the past is like, cool, like we're gonna be different. Yeah, I think that that's just a real missing piece sometimes in the ecological puzzle, is that really what the future will look like, when I vision what a better future looks like, it's this world where we're closer to ecosystems, not farther away. And it's not a world where there are no people. It's a world where we live here and future generations of people live here. And they live in this world that is functional and beautiful and more abundant than the world of today. I also vision a world because I'm like, you know, just spent my life advocating for ecosystems where the world is also more abundant for all living things, right, than it is today. And that's actually something that we can build. You know, it doesn't have to be about just throwing up our hands and doing nothing, you know, or creating this weird, like techno-dystopian future either. Like we we actually have the tools to like to do a better job.
SPEAKER_00I don't have this idea fully fleshed out yet, but there seems to be a tendency among uh open-minded, ecology-interested people to observe rather than to do. And I think if we inspire action in those that are interested and uh observe and interact with ecology, there's so much opportunity there. In in your book, you talk about well segue into say barberry and invasive shrubs, and there's a quote here from the book the forest is beyond inaction. It will not save itself. And if we sit and observe and let the land heal itself, letting the land heal itself is kind of a myth at this point. Can you walk us through disturbed succession, not succession due to disturbance, but the disrupted process of succession where we are?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I think we need to understand that what a lot of people know, which is true, is that forests are very resilient systems, and they've been recovering from massive amounts of change and disturbance, death, for a long, long time, for many thousands of years. There's a couple things that we need to get straight, though, about this process to really understand how sometimes just leaving it there is like a little bit limited. One is that we do have a tendency to not really understand time. This is an argument that people often make for around in you know, introduced plants. It's an argument that people often make about nature healing itself. It's an argument that people often make about climate change, where people are like, well, these things have always been changing. There have always been new species. And what they don't understand is that when the glaciers moved north out of here the last time, which took thousands of years, our forests came north and they changed, and but they were mostly comprised of species that are here now. You know, that they're moving like a mile or two per century. And now what we're talking about is environmental changes from a climatic perspective, let alone all of these other things that have been thrown in the mix. Environmental changes from a climatic perspective where it's, you know, thousands of years of change in decades, which exceeds the forest's sort of natural abilities to deal with those changes. From a perspective of folks who, well, people tell me around invasive plants a lot, they're like, oh, our ecosystem will just adapt to these species. And again, you're also talking about a process that takes thousands of years and is potentially costly. And we don't have actually a lot of analogs for what that looks like. You know, maybe one of the best analogues that we have is when humans arrive in new continents as they have historically over the last 50,000 years, which are usually accompanied by mass extinctions, right? A thing that people often say also is like, well, nature will heal. Like it's just our value, all we're protecting is like our values and what we want out of nature, which also isn't totally true. Like, if we were to just like walk away and humans went extinct right now, there would be something here. Like there would be some trees and there would be some plants and there would be some climate. But that doesn't mean that that would be a climate that would be inhabited by all the species that live here now or have lived here historically, or that would, you know, have even have the ability to sustain life as we know it. Right. So I just believe that we have a responsibility to not just throw up our hands and allow this mass extinction to happen and allow the fundamental destabilization of our biosphere and say, oh, that's nature doing its thing. It's not, it's us. And that's us actually, I believe, abdicating our responsibility to nature to help it recover from what's been done to it. And I know that I'm I'm off on a tangent, but I do want to just posit this term that people will see in the literature, which is global change. And you'll see global change, you'll see global change ecology. Global change is just sort of this big word that is meant to encompass like all of the stuff that's happening to ecosystems right now. So it is inclusive of climate change, but also introduce plants, animals, pests, and pathogens, deer overpopulation, forest fragmentation, deforestation, fire suppression, pollution, all of these different things, which, by the way, any one of those things by itself would have the potential to fundamentally destabilize our biosphere. And right now, all those things are happening to ecosystems at the same time. So I think it's just we really need to understand, not in a general way, or I guess in a general way, but also in a very specific way. It's not just like some stuff that's happening to ecosystems, it's like a fundamental existential threat to ecosystems that is preventing them from being themselves, and that they don't just have this magical ability to snap back from anything that happens to them. Now, this has all come back now to this to your question about Barbary. A forest's ability to be itself, to be able to like fulfill these, provide these habitats, to fulfill these natural processes that have sustained it for millennia. One of the most important abilities that it has is its ability to respond to disturbances. Now, the the biggest way that the forest experiences disturbances is through tree mortality. So, forest, you're right, they're this, they're, you know, this ecosystem, I think of it sort of like as a coral reef, this living community that's woven around this living structure of these big, hard, tall plants, which we call trees. And these disturbances affect those trees. In doing so, fundamentally change conditions within that ecosystem. And what forests have been doing thousands of years is a tree dies, or a group of trees dies, and the forest regenerates. It creates this flush of herbaceous plant regeneration, shrubs, and all of these other species of insects and other critters that come along with those things. And then eventually a new generation of trees comes, regenerates, establishes, reaches up toward the canopy, and the canopy closes, and then some trees die and we start over again. These forests that are recovering from this history of exploitation and this history of being managed as agricultural land, in order to like, you know, become like forests have been on this landscape for thousands of years and providing all of those functions and those natural processes and all this different stuff, they need to be able to have trees die to experience disturbances and to regenerate from them. That's how we get multi-generational forests. That's how we get these foundational habitat qualities like dead wood on the ground, dead standing trees, you know, a gappy irregular canopy, landscape level diversity, all of these different things. What happens with some of this stuff, and introduced plants in particular, and deer overpopulation is also part of this, um, is that the disturbance happens, the forest, you know, gets ready and says, Oh, time to regenerate, let's go. And that regeneration doesn't happen. Right? Instead of this flush of native species that bring with them these waves of other species that depend on them, insects, birds, mammals. We just get this monoculture of a species, in the in my case, Japanese barberry, that none of these native species have any relationship with, and that inhibit the ability of those plants, those shrubs, those trees to regenerate. And then they just hold on forever. You know, it's sort of like this natural process and really beautiful, by the way, process of tree mortality and regeneration is completely derailed. And thus the forest's ability to sustain itself is taken offline.
SPEAKER_00So it sounds like not only a 30 to 50 year pause button on succession, but a fundamental change in what uh that potential climax ecosystem can be.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I'm not to be too apocalyptic about it, but I think a lot of these a lot of these invasive plant areas are are headed to a condition which is like a invasive monoculture shrubland.
SPEAKER_00That would be a total bummer. I feel like we can do so much better than poison parsnip, barberry, honeysuckle, privet, buckthorn. Yeah. I have a lot of privet, and uh the forestry multure is good, a lot of things to do there. Um, I want to segue towards establishing an ecosystem on a denuded landscape, which is a task that I'm given very often and we are given at Propagate. Oh, yeah. Let's say you have a decent budget and 30 years to reforest an abandoned field. You're going to use planned ecological succession to turn that field into a forest that's maximally beneficial to wildlife. How are you going to do it?
SPEAKER_01Such a great question. And of course, we'd want to know as as you would, you know, other things about the site, right?
SPEAKER_00Like soils, etc. You can bounce back and forth between poor drainage and good drainage. Okay. Let's say you have a not horrible site.
SPEAKER_01So I think that, you know, if we're trying to, which I think we we often are, just because we're we're in recognition of like where we're at with respect to you know being on a compressed timeline with for a lot of stuff. So I would be planting trees. Whereas, you know, if I wasn't worried about that, I might just be seeing what succession would do, like seeing what would naturally establish there. I think that there are many parts of the country where going from a field to a forest is no longer reliable because of the pressure from invasive plants that you just end up with this, this, you know, where the where the seed source is established on the landscape, you're just not going to get anything. So then you have to think about planting trees. So I think here, if I was gonna spend all the energy to plant trees, I would probably be planting not just like climax species, sort of these late successional species that can live a long time. I would also be trying to really lean into species that are at the northern end of their range. So I would be thinking about where I am in Vermont, this would be oaks. So this would be specifically red oak, white oak, swamp white oak, chestnut oak, burr oak, and then hickories, which are also, by the way, like really awesome wildlife trees. You know, like oaks are there's an awesome book by Doug Talamy called The Nature of Oaks. Oaks support this massive volume of invertebrate life, especially caterpillars that are really important to birds, and they of course produce acorns, which are this really, really important wildlife food source in autumn. So I would be starting there, and and you might have situations where if you're trying to regenerate this forest and the invasive pressure is so high that like the second you stop mowing, you feel like you just get inundated with these introduced plants, like buckthorn, privet, whatever. You might for a period of time be like mowing between those trees, right? Or brush hogging between those trees. And then gradually, as those canopies are closing, hopefully, you're gaining the ability to do less and less of that. And I think that you could also experiment with native shrubs in the understory that have the ability to like take up space, outcompete some of those non native plants while also providing some really good understory structure and you know, doing exactly what forests do, which is this process of succession that is not just. Often straight to trees, but goes sort of from herbaceous plants to shrubs to trees, and you know, be providing some of these benefits that could be produced by like a willow, you know, or a dogwood, or one of these plants that are actually pretty cheap to plant that you can like live stake in the understory. There's a couple things I really want to learn more about. One is soil, you know, preparations. Like what can we how can we amend these soils and improve them such that we can, you know, maybe have some of these other native species will be outcome able to outcompete these introduced plants on improved soils. I know that invasive plants, introduced plants, tend to do better on degraded soils. So that can be another like co-goal of the work is also trying to improve those soils. I think that that's where I'd start. I mean, I think there's other, depending on where you're at, the other thing that I would just tell folks is to look to relatively intact ecosystems where you are for some inspiration for like some of the plants that you might be able to utilize that might do well on that site. So if you're like, you know, near a place where an area is forested and it seems to have similar soil qualities and it's doing a really good job growing baroque, maybe that's an inspiration to you. Or you'll see that like Huckleberry is doing really well there, or winterberry, or you know, one of these other ones. Really uh listen to what these ecosystems are telling you and try to capitalize on that as much as you can.
SPEAKER_00I like that you brought up willow. Uh, I have about it's I think a half an acre on my farm that I've planted with a process similar to what you described, but it's very heavy on salicaceae, on willows and poplars. And it has biomass willow that tops out at 25 feet or so, and then with shade effectively just dies. Uh, so you have that like self-liquidating biomass. And another thought is cottonwood or hybrid poplar that will senesse much sooner than the oaks. If you had the opportunity to go in and fell a bunch of that, would you leave it on the ground or would you leave it as standing deadwood? Probably do a mix.
SPEAKER_01That's a good, a really good point, too. Like I know I've spoken to some folks that work in areas of very high invasive plant pressure, and they will plant a sort of fast-growing generalist species like a cottonwood or white pine, even. You know, if even if it seems like it's a little bit off-site, just to sort of take up that space and then create that canopy, and then they can sort of like work toward species that they actually want there that are actually well suited to that environment. And like you mentioned, both dead standing trees and deadwood on the ground are really foundational habitat qualities and structures. And so you have the opportunity to like, you're not just growing this tree for 20 years and then getting rid of it, and then it was just a big waste of time. Like, you're actually building something, you're building the building blocks of a future ecosystem that's more diverse. And one of the things that I think it's really important that we understand as folks who, you know, are doing ecosystem management in an ecosystem, are even doing like, you know, more permaculture design stuff, is to understand that in those systems, it's not like we can either have a climax, you know, late successional, totally intact, perfect forest, or nothing. Many of the values that we find in these ecosystems, we can have piecemeal, right? So when we put a 10-inch cottonwood log on the ground, it's not the same as when a 200-year-old hemlock tree falls over in the woods, but it's providing some of those deadwood values and some of those soil-building values and some of those hydrologic values. And sometimes that's the best we can do right now. And when we develop, you know, a multi-generational forest, like I was working on this relatively young sugar maple forest, all the trees are small, but I was still creating canopy gaps, putting deadwood on the ground, creating structural diversity. And it's not going to fool anybody into thinking it's like a real old growth forest, but it is creating those qualities that will still be utilized by the species that would utilize similar qualities in an old growth forest. Maybe not to the same extent, maybe not the same number of species, but better than the alternative, which is none of them.
SPEAKER_00I have a bunch of aspen in the woods that's about ready to senesse. And the question I have for myself is do I want to girdle it and leave it as standing deadwood, or do I want to fell it and pull it out and mill it for wood that I don't need right now? I already milled a bunch of aspen for this barn where my office is. Well, there's no waste in the forest, Harry.
SPEAKER_01All that stuff gets used. It's a funny thing, too, because I in in How to Love a Forest, I wrote about girdling an aspen tree. You know, where you girdling, for those of you to the listener who doesn't know, is just this process of you go around the tree with a chainsaw and you just cut very shallowly into the tree, just deep enough to touch its wood, right through the bark. And and then you go and do a ring around the circumference of the tree, do two of those, and it kills the tree, severs the cambium, inner bark of the tree, and but retains it as a dead standing tree. And dead standing trees are this foundational habitat structure, as I mentioned. And uh one of the funny things that we learned about girdling since I wrote that actually in the book, is that girdling trees actually doesn't really, in most cases, provide a good snag. It's a good way to kill a tree. I utilize it for like big, wonky white pine trees that are like scary to fell, and it's faster than you know, fell in a tree. And I'll sometimes do it around trees that I need to be gone, but I want to retain some of the structural values of the tree, like if it has cavities, you know, holes in the tree that are really important nesting in denning habitat. But it actually, when you girdle a healthy tree, it kills that tree too fast. What really makes a snag valuable from an ecological perspective is that it provides cavities. It has these holes in the tree that are utilized by dozens of different species of birds and mammals for nesting and deading habitat. And uh the way that those cavities develop, I just thought that this is like so beautiful, really. Uh, the way that those cavities develop is that the tree starts to decline, it succumbs to this very slow-growing heart rot fungi. And then gradually the heartrot fungi creates conditions such that it can be attacked by wood-boring beetles and stuff. And then those get foraged for by woodpeckers, and eventually these cavities develop. But when we girdle the tree, it doesn't give time for those that slow natural process of decline to happen and for the tree to die on its own schedule. So it's a funny thing where we just like also have to just sometimes let trees die. You know, I think for us where we we always want to, you know, sort of like let's, you know, let's go. I think it's pretty neat. There are qualities that we can develop today, and then there are also things that we can't develop, which I think is actually really wonderful. You know, just these qualities. A lot of the um the same thing is true for some of the values provided by old trees. Like, I think it's so fascinating that big trees and old trees are actually potentially providing different values. Like you could have a big cottonwood that's only 60 years old. It has a big crown, it has, you know, a lot of biomass and providing some of these values that that critters will use, but it's fundamentally different from a 300-year-old oak tree that is has you know developed all of these qualities that you can't accelerate the development of. They just have to happen on their own across vast periods of time. Stuff like complex bark structure, like these deeply furrowed bark, which is really important habitat for all of these invertebrates, especially in these mosses, lichens, liverworts, that sometimes take centuries to develop. And foraging habitat for bark foragers like brown creeper and nuthatches, they develop this complex canopy habitat where the canopy, the crown, becomes this landscape of living wood and dead wood. And it's just a real and that that heart rot that provides these cavities, especially large diameter cavities, which are really, really underrepresented across our landscape relative probably to historical conditions. So yeah, there are certain values that we can create, and there's others that create themselves. So so my advice to you, Harry, would be that I would, in the interest of manifesting diversity, just let the aspen die. Well, I would probably do everything, right? I would probably be like, if you have a bunch of aspen, yeah, let some of them die, put some of them on the ground, and maybe even girdle some of them as well.
SPEAKER_00That sounds good. I have a follow-up challenge question for uh an amendment to the previous question of a planned succession. We still want to benefit non-human wildlife, but we're gonna optimize for a human-centric, culturally relevant, accessible forest that creates private sector jobs and ecosystem services. What are you gonna change?
SPEAKER_01So, my my plan, I would tell you that I don't believe that the you know those two values are mutually exclusive. I think that a lot of times when we think of managing a forest as being either a question of how do we maximize human value or maximize ecological value is a false dichotomy. And and that really we can do both. And I know because I'm a professional forester and I do it every damn day, right? Where I am managing forests, and I would say that I put ecological value front and center, and also am managing for local renewable resources and cutting them, working with loggers, shipping them to a mill all the time. And I don't feel like I need to really compromise that much at all. And it just is, I think, about having the right mindset. But to your point about if I were to get it really granular about this sort of like starting this forest idea, would you throw some hickory in there?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Might taste better than a red oak acorn.
SPEAKER_01Oh, sure. Why not? You know, this is the other thing about it too. Like, we we want to be, you know, we don't just want to like throw out ecosystems and and think that we want to just say, ah, you know, we're gonna create whatever we want for people. Like uh restoration's supposed to be a celebration, it's supposed to be joyful, right? We're supposed to, we're building this world that we want to live in. And so, like uh as long as you're not, you know, you're using ecologically relevant species, it's like, you know, have some fun with it. And I think you could also, like, to get granular with it, you know, we could also think about that stuff that we talked about, like growing sort of a fast-growing, maybe somewhat shorter lived species, almost like as a bridge generation, and then harvesting that, having a short-term harvest of that, like the cottonwood that you mentioned, if we could, if we know what we're gonna do with that, you know, or white pine or something like that, you know, have that bridge generation that's gonna allow us a short-term wood benefit as we're developing, you know, in lower layers of the canopy, other longer-lived species like those oaks, you know, and stuff like that. That could be pretty cool. And and also like thinking about species that can occupy different canopy roles that can be, there are a lot of species that are not just good food for people, right? They're good food for wildlife too. And what's better than that? Like in a lot of uh when it stuff that I've done in the southern Midwest, I really am impressed by this species, Pawpaw. It's such a cool species. One of the things that is so cool about it is that it creates this really durable understory structure, which is deer browse, somewhat deer browse resistant and is providing like an edible food crop, which gets people excited about it. And also, you know, you know that you're not the only critter that likes to eat a pawpaw. So, yeah, there's a lot of species like that that were like, I don't love the idea of just like treating a forest like it's a garden, but if we're restoring forests and we're thinking about both these human values and ecological values, and we're being sensitive to you know what species are native, I think we can do some really fun, cool stuff.
SPEAKER_00And we can eat some deer along the way. Why don't we think about deer as a resource?
SPEAKER_01It boggles my mind. Like I tell people this all the time. It's a bizarre thing that we can have this many deer on this landscape. Like, especially because at the same time we know that commodity beef production is like so problematic and so costly and so unsustainable that we can uh we can have commodity beef production suck that hard and have ecosystems that are degraded by a species which is made of red meat, which tastes better and is better for us than beef. How can both those two things be true at the same time? It's bizarre to me. And I was on a hunting podcast, and one thing that I that I mentioned, which you know, hunters are not usually, and I'm a hunter too, I should say, but you know, sort of old school hunters are not that excited about, is that I was like, maybe we just need to reintroduce market hunting and have this be, instead of this be this weird line never to be crossed of like you can't sell game, recognize that the conditions that we have today are different than the conditions that led to us banning market hunting 125 years ago. And that maybe a market-based solution might really help. Like, why is it not why can we not have venison on the restaurants, on the menus of restaurants in New York City? You know, and why can we not have and why is that not people not eating that and feeling like really good about themselves because they're, you know, it's like having a meatless Monday or whatever in a weird way because they're consuming this this source of protein, this meat from this animal that is, you know, fundamentally destroying forests and at the very least degrading them as a result of a completely human-caused, bizarre situation, and that requires no inputs, you know, that we don't feed it anything. And it's just like similar to me thinking about wood, where I'm like, what could be a better resource than this? I think about that with deer meat. I'm like, geez, Louise, what would be a better source of meat than this? But we have this taboo about selling it. You know, I understand why. So the reason for to the listener, if you don't know why, the reason is because basically every large animal species in this country was almost driven to extinction in the late 1800s. And a big cause of that was market hunting. And in the case of white tail deer, it was hide hunting in large part, like for the meat to a certain extent, but the hides were really the thing. And people would just kill large amounts of animals and not even use the whole animal, they would just cut the part that they wanted off. The craziest example of this, a lot of birds, including like loons and egrets, were killed by plume hunters for their feathers to put in hats. Beaver were extirpated from vast parts of this country for centuries because just for their pelts, which were used also in hats. The American elk, Service Canadensis, was reduced by more than 99% its population in the 1800s. And there's this crazy letter from Theodore Roosevelt to this guy, I think Henry Melvin, who's the in 1907 the chair of the benevolent protective order of elks, what we know as the Elks Club. Right. And one thing he's saying is that you guys are causing elks to basically become extinct or to almost become extinct, because they used this little thing, this what's called an elk ivory in their keychain, which is this atavistic or vestigial, I should say, tusk that elks have that's made of ivory. It's this little thing they have like with their these false canines, kind of. And it's been prized by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. And yeah, so people people were just literally shooting thousands of elk and then just pulling out these two teeth. So, like, that's where this fear of market hunting comes from. And, you know, as I mentioned, deer, whitetailed deer were reduced by 99%, and basically all the deer where you are are the stock of populations that were reintroduced mostly after 1937, after this act called the Pittman Robertson Act. In 1900, they're really probably one of the most foundational important pieces of legislation, uh, the Lacey Act, which effectively ended the era of market hunting and basically saved all of these different species of wildlife, from elk to deer to turkey, pronghorn, you know, all of these different species, bear. So that's where we're coming from. But now, obviously, I think we can all agree that the world is a little different than it was in 1900, and that, you know, in lieu of just a cultural revolution, that one thing that we can do with like the economic system that we happen to have at the moment is we can create a means for like professional hunters to go out there and kill deer and we can eat them.
SPEAKER_00Eat more deer, plant more trees. Ethan, thank you so much for joining us on the Plant the Trees podcast. You'll be out in Ithaca and Trumansburg on May 1st for a walk and talk at my farm, Ramble On, which we can link in the description of the episode. But if if folks want to learn more, where can they find you?
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Yes, of course I am honored to be part of Birding Man. I'm very, very easy to find. You can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, my hand and Blue Sky. My handle is at How to Love a Forest. And my website is EthanTapper.com. You can see some of my merch and sign up for my email list there. Um, and you can also see all the events that I'm doing. I go all across the country, so I might be coming to where you are. My book is called How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World. It actually just came out on paperback. And so in most places, you can find it as a hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook. And then stay tuned. I have a book that's coming out in October that's called The Forest Year: Finding Hope in a World Worth Saving. That'll be out on Timber Press on October 6th.
SPEAKER_00And so stay tuned for the pre-order of that as well. Phenomenal. Thanks so much, and let's talk again soon. Thanks, Harry. What a phenomenal conversation. I've enjoyed talking or shooting the deer with Ethan since we met in 2012. And I'm looking forward to many more conversations on planting trees, forests, and how we as humans can not only steward, but create intact ecosystems that provide for us as a species and for all the life that surrounds us. If you're listening to this before May in 2026, don't you dare hesitate to sign up for Birding Men, where you'll get to walk and talk with Ethan in the forest at Ramble On Farm in Trumansburg, New York. We have a day of workshops lined up for Saturday, May 2nd, along with an art show, two bands, and DJ Dijon to close out the evening. So plant the trees, make it count, and I'll see you at the first ever third annual Birding Man.