How do you love a forest? Ethan Tapper has thoughts. | The Excerpt
On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: With climate change, the threat of wildfires, and human encroachment among other things, our trees and forests are in desperate need of guardians. From tropical rainforests, often referred to as the lungs of the planet, to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in California’s White Mountains, home to some of the oldest living organisms on earth, what is being done to protect our woodlands? Forester and author Ethan Tapper joins The Excerpt to share both his practical and philosophical perspectives outlined in his new book, "How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World."
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, February 9th, 2025.
With climate change, the threat of wildfires, and human encroachment, among other things, our trees and forests are in desperate need of guardians. From tropical rainforests, often referred to as the lungs of the planet, to the ancient bristlecone pine forest in California's White Mountains, home to some of the oldest living organisms on earth, what's being done to protect our woodlands? Here to discuss what he's called, the bittersweet work of tending to a changing world, is forester and author Ethan Tapper, whose book, How to Love a Forest, is available now.
Ethan, thanks for joining me.
Ethan Tapper:
Thanks so much for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Forests are, of course, so much more than trees. There's an abundance of biodiversity, both in and beneath those canopies. What has your work as a forester taught you about the balance between plants, animals, microorganisms, not only in the forest but on earth?
Ethan Tapper:
One of the things that I talk about in How to Love a Forest and that I named the first chapter of the book after is this idea of reimagining forests. So I think that a lot of us, if I asked you, what is a forest? Everybody would know the answer to that question. And then if I pressed you on it, everybody would crumble, right? Because we really actually just have this really sort of superficial idea of what these ecosystems are and usually when we think about them, we think about them as a bunch of trees. It's a place with this bunch of trees.
But when I talk about the forest, what the forest is to me is like a coral reef. And in this analogy, the trees are like the coral. They're this living structure around which this community is built. But of course, if any of us were to think about or describe or picture a coral reef, we would never be like, it's just a place with a bunch of coral. We would think about it in terms of this incredibly dense and diverse and beautiful community of life that's woven around that living structure. That's what a forest is to me, right? It's not just the trees, but it's also the trees and the plants and the animals and the birds and the bears and the fungi, and even the natural processes that are a part of those ecosystems, the way they change over time.
Dana Taylor:
You wrote about how we humans are unitary organisms. Well, trees are modular organisms. I want to understand that a bit better. When we look at a single tree, what sort of collective is there and how has that informed your work?
Ethan Tapper:
So within an individual tree, it's very interesting. I first came to this concept by listening to an interview with a botanist who is referred to sort of almost offhandedly this idea that some people see trees as colonial organisms, meaning that they are less like an individual entity than a colony of these semi-autonomous branches. So it led me down this rabbit hole to discuss this concept that's called branch autonomy.
And basically the long and the short of it is, yes, a tree is a single organism, and at the same time, many of the branches within that tree have their own energetic economies so they can take care of their own needs before exporting resources to the rest of the tree when they're photosynthesizing and they sort of live and die on their own. And I just thought of this as a really interesting way to also talk about our societies.
Dana Taylor:
For better or worse, humans have helped shape forests. What led to your change of heart regarding whether the best way to care for forests was to simply leave them alone or to act?
Ethan Tapper:
I think that a big theme behind How to Love a Forest is this concept, right? That I think in our culture, we've seen the way that people have harmed ecosystems. And so it makes sense in some ways to think that the way that we must care for these ecosystems is by just protecting them. And what that means is to protect them from ourselves, right? Just keep humans out of them. We caused all these problems and so it must be that the way that we take care of them is to just remove ourselves from them.
And an important thing to recognize with that is that we can't do it. That actually we talk about forests as these socio-ecological systems. We are forever a part of these ecosystems, and we always will be. And you really can't make that separation at all, objectively. But then also when you really enter into sort of deep understanding and deep relationships with these ecosystems as you do when you work in them every day, the veil is sort of pulled away from your eyes and you see them as they truly are and where they truly are.
And the fact is that our ecosystems are dealing with these profound legacies of the way they've been managed in the past, these profound threats and stressors in the present, and then this future that promises challenges like never before. And you start to realize that what we call nature is actually not this magical, mystical, ethereal thing, but is actually like these ecosystems which are comprised of thousands of different species of organisms, millions or billions of which may be found in a single handful of forest soil. And that in this moment, those ecosystems are in trouble and that there are actually things that we can do to help them. And I believe that if we have the tools to help them in this moment, that we have to.
Dana Taylor:
Have you found that others are also more open to the idea of acting to aid in the resiliency of forests? Has that been a challenging argument to make to your peers?
Ethan Tapper:
Absolutely. I mean, I think less to my peers in the conservation community because we engage in these really nuanced and complex relationships with ecosystems all time. But to a lot of people, taking, for example, one of the most powerful tools that we have access to help forests and to affect changes in these forests, the cutting of a tree.
Now, who could ever believe if you love forests and you love trees as I do, who could believe that the cutting of a tree could be something that's positive for an ecosystem? It doesn't make any sense and yet it's true. And I think that one of the things that I wanted to express with How to Love a Forest is how a lot of these counterintuitive and bittersweet actions that are necessary to help us care for these ecosystems, can be these profound acts of love.
I had never read a book that really described what it felt like for me to do these things, which is really hard and really bittersweet. And having to deal with all of this dissonance and all these counterintuitive actions and what they really felt like at the end of the day was such a profound act of compassion. Because they required me to not just do what's easy and convenient and comfortable, but to actually do what was necessary to protect these ecosystems even when it was really hard.
Dana Taylor:
Can you tell us in a way a non-forester like me can understand, the role of forests in the carbon cycle, and why is this understanding crucial in combating climate change?
Ethan Tapper:
So forests are carbon sinks in general. So what that means is that we have all this carbon that's in the atmosphere and that forests are able to pull it out of the atmosphere through a process that we call sequestration and to store it in forest soils, in the trunks of trees and in the wood of those trees and the branches and the roots and all different aspects of this forest communities.
When we talk about carbon in forests, we talk about it like this amorphous abstract thing, like it's something that would be in a beaker in a lab somewhere, but really it's the most basic thing in the world. As these trees are photosynthesizing, as they're doing this amazing thing that they do with sunlight, they're pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and they're turning it into sugars and starches, tree food, essentially. And they're converting that into wood, right?
And so the ability of these forests to in the longterm be that climate solution is dependent on their ability to be healthy, right? To photosynthesize the ability of trees and plants to be healthy and happy. And so it's also important as we think about longterm climate solutions to recognize that our ability to keep these forests healthy is integral to their ability to help us regulate climate change
Dana Taylor:
Despite our actions or inactions, forests are resilient. That being said, they do face major threats to the ecosystems and biodiversity contained within them. What do you consider to be the biggest threat to our forests?
Ethan Tapper:
As I mentioned a moment ago, by far the biggest threat is deforestation because there are all these other threats that threaten forests as they are, but if we can't keep forests as forests, we can't do anything. And even in my home state of Vermont, teeny tiny little state, we are losing more than 10,000 acres of forest land a year.
And so I think that that should be where our primary focus is on, is protecting forests from forest loss. I know that sometimes it can be more exciting to do things like protest forest management, logging, right? But in reality, deforestation and forest fragmentation, the conversion of forests to other things is a far greater threat to forests and the biodiversity they support in every part of them.
Dana Taylor:
And can you give me an example of where you've witnessed their resilience?
Ethan Tapper:
Forests are naturally resilient. They are the systems really that are ... they're not destabilized by these natural disturbances by on a normal scale, wind events and forest fires and things like that as they've been happening across our landscape for thousands of years. That's normal. That's what it means to be a forest is to change. And the way that they express that resilience is when those things happen, yes, trees die, but the forest regenerates. And there are actually so many species of organisms and so many vital natural processes that are supported not just by the life of trees, but by those mortality events.
Dana Taylor:
Ethan, there is, of course, something deeply mysterious about forests. Growing up, my family was stationed in Germany, and my memories of a third grade field trip to the Black Forest are as vivid today as they were then. Have your years spent nurturing forests unraveled any mysteries of the forest for you?
Ethan Tapper:
I think one of the things that I've really had to accept about forests is that we may never fully understand them. They're just these incredibly diverse and dynamic systems, and they are inherently mysterious. And so I think that accepting that. I think when I first started studying forests, I was like, "I'm just going to figure them out." And now what I realized is part of how we figure them out is just recognizing that there are parts of them that may always elude us.
And that's another interesting part of caring for them, is we have to have the humility to understand that we may never fully understand these ecosystems, not every piece and every part. And also, we have to take action anyway to recognize that uncertainty and not have it paralyze us and not have it keep us from doing these really important actions to care for ecosystems, because we're so scared that we're going to do something wrong or that we don't understand all of the repercussions of one of our actions. We just need to be humble and to be ourselves, resilient, and willing to fail and willing to change. That's a really, really important part of how we're going to have a better relationship with ecosystems going forward.
Dana Taylor:
You poignantly wrote about the humbling realization that our lives will always come at a cost. You posed this question and I'll ask it of you: what do you want your impact to be?
Ethan Tapper:
I would hope that in my life, that I would help people have a better understanding of forests and other ecosystems of this biosphere and how they work, how they function, how integral they are to our lives. And for us to understand that not just mentally, but also in our actions and the way that we treat them, to treat them like the precious things that they are, and also to help people understand that it can be an act of love to care for them. That we can have a relationship with these ecosystems that is essential and profoundly positive. That we can even be keystone species in these ecosystems.
Dana Taylor:
Ethan, can you take us into one of your favorite forests and help us understand the importance of its ecosystem and also its beauty?
Ethan Tapper:
So my favorite forest by far is my own land, which I call Bear Island, and I write about it a lot in the book. It's this forest that when I got here seven years ago, I described it as a forest with every problem that a forest could have. It had been poorly managed in the past, like most of New England's forests. It had been cleared 200 years ago, maintained as a pasture for a hundred years. It had really bad non-native invasive plant problems. It was dealing with these non-native invasive tree pathogens. It had deer overpopulation. It was eroding soils. Pretty much everything that you can imagine.
And the reason I love it so much is that now I have seen it transform and through action, I've seen it become this incredibly beautiful and hopeful and abundant ecosystem. And to me, it's gone from being a symbol of everything that was wrong with the world, a forest with every problem that a forest could have, to really being a symbol of what's possible and a symbol of hope.
Dana Taylor:
It's been a joy spending time with you, Ethan. Thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.
Ethan Tapper:
Thanks so much for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty.
Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening, I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.