What Does It Mean to Love a Forest? Ethan Tapper in conversation with Brian Donahue

Only those who love trees should cut them, writes forester Ethan Tapper. In How to Love a Forest, he asks: what does it mean to live in a time in which ecosystems are in retreat and extinctions rattle the bones of the earth? How do we respond to the harmful legacies of the past? How do we use our species’ incredible power to heal rather than to harm? How do we reach towards a better future?

How to Love a Forest walks us through the fragile and resilient community that is a forest, introducing us to wolf trees and spring ephemerals, to the cryptic creatures of the rhizosphere and the necrosphere, helping us reimagine forests and what it means to care for them. This world, Tapper writes, is degraded both by people who do too much and by those who do nothing. In his tender and fearless literary debut, he writes that we must take action to protect ecosystems, and that the actions we must take will often be counterintuitive, uncomfortable, even heartbreaking. In striking prose, he shows how bittersweet acts—like loving deer and hunting deer, loving trees and felling trees—can be radical expressions of compassion. In this poetic and visionary book, Tapper weaves a new land ethic for the modern world, reminding us that what is simple is rarely true, and what is necessary is rarely easy. How to Love a Forest, Ethan’s first book, has been listed as a bestseller and endorsed by prominent environmental authors including Bill McKibben, Doug Tallamy and Ben Goldfarb.

Ethan will be joined in conversation by Brian Donahue.

Ethan Tapper is a forester, bestselling author, birder, naturalist and digital creator from Vermont. He has been recognized as a thought-leader and a disruptor in the forestry and conservation community of the northeastern United States and beyond, winning multiple regional and national awards for his work. Ethan is a regular contributor to Northern Woodlands magazine and a variety of other publications, and is a digital creator with tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook. In his personal life, Ethan works, writes, hunts and birds at Bear Island and plays in his 10-piece punk band — The Bubs.