Ethan Tapper hopped out of his truck and pointed his binoculars to the sky, scanning the tops of the trees on his 175-acre property in Bolton.
“I’m not a birder, but I love birds,” he said, a smile spreading across his face as he watched a black-throated blue warbler bounce from branch to branch.
“This year I really started to focus on them because they tell you a lot about the forest,” he said, mimicking the chirps of different bird species flying around him. “They all use different types of habitats, different species of trees, different ages of trees, different structures, like dead standing trees, and big trees. It’s not just birdsong. It’s all these different species that are all really different.”
Other than knowing how to identify just about every bird that crosses his property by the sound of its call, Tapper is a master at reading forests altogether, a mastery he cultivated in the eight years he spent as Chittenden County’s forester.
But that chapter in his life has ended this month as he moves onto a different, yet familiar path that began on his property, which he calls Bear Island.
The expansive acreage has been his since 2017 and was purchased for a bargain price of $150,000. But this wasn’t technically a stroke of good luck, he said, since the forests inhabiting the property had about every issue a forest could have. The long and sometimes tedious process of tending the land has also been the basis of his new book, “How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World,” set for release Sept. 10.
The property, he said, has been a massive learning experience that has taught him about some of life’s biggest and greatest lessons: death, love and how acts of compassion can look very different than what we think they should look like.
“A lot of people have this idea that to love a forest means to leave it alone because how could cutting a tree ever be something that’s positive for any ecosystem? But when I happened upon this forest, I was like, ‘This needs help,’” he said. “I can’t help it just by leaving it alone. That started this whole journey of, ‘OK, what does it mean to love a forest? What does it mean to care for this place?’”
An idyllic view of Camels Hump can be seen from almost every vantage point on the property, and it’s likely that on an early 8 a.m. hike, the iconic peak will be covered in billowing clouds and a soft, misty fog. It’s the perfect time of year to catch the first waves of “spring foliage,” he said, trudging up one particularly never-ending steep hill tucked deep inside the property’s boundaries.
“It’s way more subtle than autumn foliage,” he said, taking meditative steps that resembled a thankful prayer. “The maple leaves are red, and the sugar maple flowers are bright green, and the aspens are all white. This is one of the things about managing an ecosystem, there’s just so much here. It’s such a profound responsibility, and humbling experience to try and care for this.”
Pointing to different forest markers along the way, he brought his focus back to the hill.
“In the book, I walk up the hill and I say, ‘I wonder how many times in my life. I will walk up this damn hill.’”
But the hill itself is representative of the struggles it took to get the land where it is today, the internal battles he had to face to shape the forest to maximum health, and the countless hours it took to complete the more than 200-page book. The work mirrors largely his work as a forester, creating management plans for countless forests while educating people about what it means to care radically for a forest. In a lot of ways, trees are like humans, he said, but in even more ways, they are not.
“There’s also a lot of discourse in books and in media about forests as these utopian, perfect societies, which is really not how they work at all,” he said. “They’re incredibly dynamic and imperfect and that’s what makes them so amazing. People anthropomorphize trees, but if they are like humans, it’s because they’re imperfect, they’re in process.”
Forest lens
The concept has led him to grapple with death in a unique way. Through the lens of forest management, the same tools meant for destruction can oftentimes be used to bring about an entirely new abundance. In other words, the death of some trees is sometimes necessary for the rejuvenation of an entire forest — a bittersweet concept he recognizes as a radical act of compassion.
“I also can’t tell you that it’s a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s a thing that can be good or bad,” he said, noting for example that much of his land was destroyed 30 years ago due to logging. “It can degrade forests, but it can also be a tool of healing. The difference between those is just a lot of nuances.”
Tree mortality plays an equally important role in forest maintenance as nurturing new growth, he said.
“If we think about trees like people, then the death of a tree is like the death of a person and you have to avoid it at all costs,” he said. “But if we think about forests more holistically, you see that tree mortality is one of the most foundational parts of the system.”
While the book explores these larger themes, it also feels like a personal memoir, he said, mostly because the work he does every day is very personal. For the past five years, when he wasn’t working 10-hour days as a county forester and spending the weekends working even longer hours tending to Bear Island, he spent the first hours of his morning chipping away at pages.
As Tapper guides his readers through the intricate world of wolf trees, spring ephemerals and the mysterious creatures of the rhizosphere and the necrosphere, he’s also giving a glimpse into his own personal life.
“First, let me show you how much I love this forest and every forest and then hopefully you’ll trust me when I show you this incredibly confusing concept,” he said.
As he embarks on this new adventure, he won’t be abandoning his forestry roots altogether. For now, he plans to pursue his own private forestry consulting firm, Bear Island Forestry, to continue bringing his knowledge in the field to more Vermonters. And, of course, he will continue most of his days up on his property where most of this story began.
“It’s been such a process, all of this,” he said. “Working on the book and working up here on Bear Island, those journeys have really paralleled each other. I didn’t know how to write a book any more than I knew how to run a skidder or an excavator. I had a lot of frustrating moments, but I refused to give up.”
