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[00:00:00] Ethan Tapper: if you were to talk to some foresters, they would term the value and the purpose of forestry solely as a means to extract resources from forests, to harvest timber, to produce wood. And then, you might talk to other people who are foresters, who don’t think that that’s our job at all, that in fact, see our job, and I’m one of these, I should say, that see our job as yes, harvesting timber from forests, by the way, timber is a local renewable resource, and we know that we need a lot more of those, but doing so in a way that is always within the context of how do we care for these ecosystems in a holistic way, in a way that actually benefits their integrity their resilience, their diversity that’s actually regenerative.

[00:00:43] Michael Hawk: Forestry is incredibly interesting and important, and it really speaks to me personally, because it’s one of these fields that’s inherently interdisciplinary. You have to understand how things relate and connect to create a healthy, sustainable system. But traditionally forestry was all about resource extraction, which is often done at the expense of longterm sustainability. And my guest today, Ethan Tapper is just the person to help us understand how forestry is changing. Ethan is a professional Forester and has an incredibly unique personal experience, which has helped him gain a compelling perspective on what makes for a healthy forest and the trade offs involved in getting there. Ethan personally manages a track to forest called bear island in Vermont.

[00:01:27] And he’s had to deal with expanses of invasive species disease. Previous mismanagement and much, much more to turn the tides and make the forest healthier. Today we discuss exactly how Ethan defines what a healthy forest is. The trade-offs he considers when facing challenges, such as invasive species and disease using herbicides and forest thinning and other tools at our disposal, and much, much more. And by the way, Ethan has packaged his personal journey into a book due out in September, 2024, called how to love a forest.

[00:01:58] And you can find him on Instagram, Tik, TOK, and YouTube at how to love a forest. All one word. So without additional delay, Ethan Tapper.

[00:02:07] Ethan, I’m really excited to have you today on the show.

[00:02:10] Ethan Tapper: Thanks for having me.

[00:02:11] Michael Hawk: we had a brief chat maybe what a month or two ago, and you got me really excited about your upcoming book and your perspective on forestry in general.

[00:02:22] So I think today we’re going to get into all of that, but for the uninitiated, what does forestry entail? I’m guessing it’s a pretty broad definition for different activities that one may perform.

[00:02:37] Ethan Tapper: It’s such a good question, and I actually, when I first got into Forestry, I remember looking at a list of the majors at the University of Vermont, where I had the scholarship to go. I’d been away for a couple of years and they told me when I was coming back, I had to come back within a certain period of time.

[00:02:52] Or I was going to lose my scholarship. So I was looking at the list of majors and I was like, Forestry has the word forest in it. And that is all that I knew about it. But and it’s been a journey of discovery since then, cause forestry is actually a lot of different things.

[00:03:04] So I would, I would say that what forestry really is, is foresters are the people who navigate our relationship with forests and that takes all different kinds of forms but sort of the biggest bucket is within this, the role of forest management in our forests. So how we manage forests in a bunch of different ways, but often using the cutting of trees as a tool to achieve different objectives.

[00:03:30] Now, if you were to talk to some foresters, they would term the value and the purpose of forestry solely as a means to extract resources from forests, to harvest timber, to produce wood. And then, you might talk to other people who are foresters, who don’t think that that’s our job at all, that in fact, see our job, and I’m one of these, I should say, that see our job as yes, harvesting timber from forests, by the way, timber is a local renewable resource, and we know that we need a lot more of those, but doing so in a way that is always within the context of how do we care for these ecosystems in a holistic way, in a way that actually benefits their integrity their resilience, their diversity that’s actually regenerative. And what we’re seeing is there will always be a role for production forestry and forestry that produces these local renewable resources in the field of forestry, but then there’s also many of us who really think about our role as ecosystem managers.

[00:04:27] Michael Hawk: the question that came to my mind as you were explaining that, if you have, I know it’s more complex than just a simple dichotomy, but if you have a spectrum of foresters who range from optimizing for resource extraction on one end and then on the other end, optimizing for the sustainability and health of the forest.

[00:04:48] How much of that difference is just the time scale that the two are thinking about?

[00:04:54] Ethan Tapper: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is, you know, and think a lot of it is also the different benefits that we’re considering, what we consider our job to be, right? If forestry is a means to extract timber then our ability to do that in an efficient way on a, compressed timescale is us doing a good job, right?

[00:05:13] And if forestry is, our ability to just care for ecosystems generally, then, timber might be part of that, but it’s certainly, we’re looking at it through a totally different lens, totally different array of objectives and goals, and on a totally different timescale.

[00:05:29] Michael Hawk: So before we get much further into all the individual journeys and lessons that you’ve had, I do want to back up a little bit because you said a little tantalizing piece there that you saw forestry as a major at University of Vermont and you saw the word forest. So that kind of drew you in.

[00:05:46] tell me how you got to that point. Like what led you to, I guess in a way, blindly pick forestry because of that word.

[00:05:54] Ethan Tapper: I was actually, I was just talking to some high school kids from my high school this morning about it. And it’s fun to like, for the book, you know, and then also in talking to people about the book, it’s been fun to try to like, trace back like, what is my origin story, and I think that you hear a lot when you, you talk to folks who work in natural resources or in, wildlife biology, ecology, whatever that everybody’s just like, I was the nature kid, and I was always like, out there looking at birds or looking at bugs, and that wasn’t the case for me at all. I grew up in Southeastern Vermont, Windham County, in a little village called Saxon’s River. That was maybe about 300 people. Vermont is majority forested, 75 percent forested. So forests were like always around me and, we’d go into the woods and play around and go into the woods when I was in high school, and make mischief or whatever. But it wasn’t like I’m going to be a forester. What actually happened, interestingly, is that my first serious girlfriend, when I was like 18, 19. First love of my life.

[00:06:52] She, when I was in my first couple of semesters at the University of Vermont, not really knowing what I wanted to do, she went on this big experience with this organization called Croka Expeditions, sort of like an outward bound type experience, she went down to Ecuador and she had this like transformative experience for basically six months, she came back and I had no way to relate to her with this new experience.

[00:07:16] And I was like, Oh my God, as an 18 year old, right? Like my relationships going to end because I can’t understand her. And so then with two weeks notice, I just signed up for the next expedition that, that organization was offering. Six month exped, I was just like, okay, we’re doing this now. And then, and which was a six month expedition in the winter.

[00:07:35] We skied North for two months and then built a canoe and canoed back down basically. So it was this full circle, incredibly powerful, transformative experience. And after that, I ended up, really just, I wanted to be in the woods and worked as a wilderness guide. Apprenticed with these folks doing like primitive skills, primitive homestead stuff in the woods of Maine.

[00:07:59] and that brought me to University of Vermont, reaching out to me and being like, Hey man, you’re going to, you’re going to lose your scholarship if you don’t come back. And I was like, Oh shoot, what do I want to study? And that’s sort of what, what led me there. So a little bit of a different route where I don’t, I didn’t have any idea that I was interested in, doing forestry stuff until I was really an adult.

[00:08:19] Michael Hawk: And these days when you, when you enter into a program like that can you just give me a little bit of lay of the land in terms of what is taught and like what the curriculum looks like?

[00:08:29] Ethan Tapper: I think that it’s different depending on what program you go to. At the University of Vermont, I think it’s a very well rounded sort of ecology forward program. Whereas there, I think there are other programs that have much more of a production component to them. So we were much more focused on, on how forested ecosystems function.

[00:08:47] . More than we were on like, how do we produce wood as efficiently as possible? We just don’t really have production forests like they do in the southeastern United States, northwestern United States, up in northern Maine and New Brunswick where forests are being managed in that sort of very intensive, way to produce timber and other forest products.

[00:09:07] So, yeah, so it was much more ecology focused, but one of the things about forestry that’s, that’s so interesting is that, we’re, there are all these other sort of like subsets of these fields, right? There’s like ecology and there’s biology and there’s botany and there’s mycology and ornithology and, all these different other mammology, all these different aspects that describe all of these different subsets of these different things, all of those things are part of forests, right?

[00:09:33] We’re not dendrologists, right? We’re foresters. And our job is ultimately to manage this incredibly complex system. So we have to know about all of those things. And, in soil science and hydrology, and you have to have this, really complex, multidisciplinary approach. If you’re gonna be able to, understand it, then by extension, care for forested ecosystems. So it’s a fascinating thing to study because it just sort of like explodes everything, about how ecosystems work, you have to like know everything. And then, what is pretty wild then is that I would argue that we’re the only discipline of all of those who fundamentally are about taking action.

[00:10:14] if you want to understand what’s going on in a forested ecosystem in a very like fine tuned way. Bring in an ecologist, right? If you want to do something about it, bring in a forester, because we know how to actually like effect changes in those ecosystems and are very good at, doing that.

[00:10:33] So one of the sort of my journeys has been then taking this forest ecology background and then mixing that up with other experiences that I’ve had that are more sort of like on the timber focused side. And then asking this question of how do we use these tools of action to then, not just produce timber, I’m also very proud to be able to produce renewable resources, but to also use that to affect positive change with respect to forest ecology, biodiversity, all these other things.

[00:11:02] Michael Hawk: So I have a really hard question. At least I think it’s hard. How do you measure the health of a forest?

[00:11:07] Ethan Tapper: That’s incredibly hard.

[00:11:09] I always, so usually what happens when people ask me this question we’re on a walk or whatever, is that then I go on a 45 minute tangent where I just talk about everything. But more and more the word that I use to describe forest health and healthy forests is their resilience.

[00:11:25] Resilience is something that we talk about, especially in terms of managing forests for climate change, building their climate resilience. But it’s also a term that is so good at describing so many different things. I actually heard it used in our medical community, right? That they’re like, how do we describe if a person is healthy?

[00:11:41] And it’s really their resilience, right? Their ability of their body, to deal with changes, right? And to, to be able to adapt. That’s really the best way that we can, describe forest health because there are all these components about a forest that we think of as being unhealthy, or, or like symbols of, the lack of health.

[00:12:00] And some of those are true, but some of those, it turns out are just like normal parts of forest ecology. You know, If we were to go into a forest and cut every tree that would never make a saw log, every tree that had a cavity, every tree that had internal rot, every tree that had some sort of form of canopy decline, and we were to remove all those and create a forest that was a hundred percent perfect, like in, in quotes, we’d call it acceptable growing stock, healthy forest, we would be missing out on a lot of really important ecological features, right? We’d be missing out on cavity trees, which are so important to forests. Ecology provides habitat for somewhere between a third to a half of all the creatures that live in this forest. We’d be missing out on the benefits of these old declining trees that inhabit this period that we call the perimortem period, the period that precedes death, this long period of death and decline that may take centuries, and that within which all of these cool habitats, complex bark structure, complex canopy structure, All of those things are realized.

[00:12:55] We’d be missing out on what happens when those trees die and fall on the ground. Deadwood on the ground, tip ups, falling over trees are vital features, not just to biodiversity, to stuff like invertebrates and young trees and plants and salamanders, but also to things like forest soil health and to things like forest hydrology and the ability of that forest to deal with precipitation events have increased severity and intensity and frequency.

[00:13:21] So yeah, so, when I talk about forest health, I’m usually talking about it in terms of resilience and then of course, how do we define resilience? A lot of it has been through, looking at the features within forests that are going to enable them to remain healthy as a system when they’re confronted with adversity. And so a lot of the things interestingly, that confer adversity to a forest are the same qualities that we find in our old growth forests.

[00:13:48] So those are diversity, what we call risk spreading. So diversity in terms of composition, different species of trees, diversity in terms of structure, different sizes and ages of trees, what, what I call multi generationality. Diversity in terms of structural conditions. So that could be like having dead wood on the ground, having some big old trees.

[00:14:07] All of these things are part of how we do what’s called risk spreading, not putting all of our eggs in one basket, which allow a forest to, when something happens that adversely impacts one part of a forest, that the forest as a whole can remain stable and healthy.

[00:14:21] Michael Hawk: I really like that definition. I was thinking about some specific examples like in a highly diverse and heterogeneous forest, how wildfire might affect it versus in a forest that is more so a tree farm with a single species densely planted. How that same wildfire, how less much less resilient that forest, that second forest would be to that same wildfire.

[00:14:46] Ethan Tapper: yeah. And now I think that folks are realizing also that in the West, that when they plant a diversity of different tree species, that those are also more forest fire resilient. Yeah, I think about forest resilience as it’s not like their ability to resist changes, it’s their ability to accept small changes to avoid these more catastrophic changes.

[00:15:08] in the same way that we want to have forest fires of a certain type, so these low, high frequency, low intensity forest fires. In fire dependent ecosystems, which we don’t have a lot of here in Vermont. In Vermont, we want to have some disturbances, high frequency, low intensity disturbances, but for the most part, we want to avoid these larger scale catastrophic disturbances that can be created by things like monocultures and trees that are even all the same age.

[00:15:35] An even aged forest is much less resilient to that kind of thing than a multi aged forest.

[00:15:40] Michael Hawk: I imagine a, even aged forest may have less resilience to say certain insect pests or, things like that as well. If they’re at an age where they have not built up their defenses, for

[00:15:52] Ethan Tapper: Yeah. Well, so there’s some, there’s examples from out West, right? Where it’s like you have drought and you have different species of trees that are more or less drought tolerant and more or less susceptible to droughts. All your species are stressed at once, and then you have huge bark beetle outbreaks, or, these more catastrophic forest fires, whereas if you had a species diversity, or even just structural diversity, different generations of trees they wouldn’t all be reacting to that same condition in the same way that created that huge response.

[00:16:22] I know that the mountain pine beetle, right, was a native insect that sort of was driven to this outbreak status that it now inhabits permanently by these massive monoculture plantations that all got stressed at once, used to only attack stress trees and suddenly, it exploded and became like a totally different thing.

[00:16:39] Michael Hawk: Right.

[00:16:40] Well, I think, I think you’ve painted a really good picture of what resilience looks like, and it’s definitely evocative to me. I’ve, I’ve spent enough time in the forest and I’ve seen the effects of say, a fallen tree and how it slowly decays over time and all the plant community that grows along that fallen tree trunk and, all these different things that you’re talking about, which is amazing.

[00:17:00] And I’m just going to admit, I wrote a question down based on our first discussion and I don’t quite remember what it was about, so I’m hoping you do, so when we spoke previously, you mentioned that there’s a false dichotomy in our relationship with forests, so I’m hoping you recall that and can tell me what you meant.

[00:17:16] Ethan Tapper: I do. And I remember it Michael, because that’s largely what I wrote this book about. So how to love a forest. This book that is coming out in September that I wrote I know I’m butchering this, this saying, but it’s like, if, if there’s a book that you’d really like to read and it doesn’t exist, you should go write it.

[00:17:35] So something to that effect, right? So, what I was really realizing was there’s a lot of books about forests are cool, right? Forests are amazing. Different aspects of forests are neat. And then very little, in my view, about what do we do about it? What does it mean to, to care for a forest at this moment in time?

[00:17:52] And I think that the dichotomy is like, over here, on one side, we have people that love forests, right? And for many of us who actively work with forests and are operating from a place of Deep knowledge of forests and other ecosystems. This is a little bit more complicated, but I run into a lot in the general public people who are like to love a forest means to leave it alone, to protect it from ourselves.

[00:18:16] Right. And that’s based on, number one, we need to acknowledge the idea that the cutting of a tree, the killing of a tree could be something that’s positive for forests. Makes no sense to most people, right? It’s, it’s this incredibly nuanced thing. We need to understand all these different things about forest ecology and the role of disturbances and the history and all this stuff.

[00:18:35] So that’s valid, but also it’s more complicated. Right. And then I think another part of it is humans just having such a bad track record of managing ecosystems that we assume that there must be nothing good that we could do, nothing that we could do that could like actually benefit them.

[00:18:51] Everything is just about degrading them. That’s the only relationship that we could have with ecosystems, which is also not true, but, so that’s one side. People love forests, but they’re like, we love them. And it means that we don’t do anything to them. And then on the other side is people who don’t, right.

[00:19:07] And, and they do stuff to them. They’re the ones that like cut trees. Right. And they’re the ones who are like, killing invasive plants. And they’re the ones who are like killing deer. And it’s all because they don’t care. So there’s this, and I’m saying all these things in air quotes, right? Cause this dichotomy doesn’t really exist, but the perception is that, so here are these two different ends of the spectrum, people who love forest, they don’t do anything, people who don’t care about forest and the ones that do stuff.

[00:19:30] And what this book is really about and what my work as a forester has really been about is starting from the place of love. I love forests and other ecosystems deeply and intrinsically. I don’t care that they give me anything. I just care about them. And then have had to ask myself, really, what does it mean to love these forests?

[00:19:55] And what I’ve realized is that many of the things that we would have normally thought of as being the province of the people who don’t care, doing things like cutting trees. Can actually be used in the right way, can actually be such more radical forms of compassion for these ecosystems when we consider all of their needs for healing, all of the ways in which we need to help them build resilience to climate change and all these other things, all of the stuff that we’ve done to them, that not all of which can just be undone.

[00:20:22] by leaving them alone. And so, no one had written a book for me that told me what it was like to, for instance, manage my own land, Bear Island, which is a forest that’s been degraded for centuries. And when I first arrived at it, I was like, there are no healthy trees here.

[00:20:37] There’s a horrible invasive plant problem. There’s a deer overpopulation. And I had to ask myself, was I just going to say? Well, well, nature will solve everything. Or was I going to ask myself radically, like, what can I do about it? To help this ecosystem heal?

[00:20:51] I think that now that that dichotomy doesn’t really exist, it’s just a perception. And what we really need to do as, people who talk about ecosystems and our relationship to them is to invite people who believe that that perception still exists. To come have this more nuanced discussion with us and be like, let’s talk about this.

[00:21:10] And, and I think that if we can do that, if we can bring people in that, a lot of that will go away and they’ll understand this incredibly nuanced reality that we all inhabit.

[00:21:18] Michael Hawk: There is, I think, still a little bit of this dichotomy out there for real, because I, I was co leading a BioBlitz here recently. And one of the participants was very much of the opinion that it should be hands off everywhere. So it wasn’t specific to forests but definitely there’s still a little bit of work to be done.

[00:21:36] And I think that you bring up a great point where, when we’re talking about already highly impacted and highly modified systems that, have invasive species and maybe have not had the disturbance that they normally have because of the way they’ve been managed, or perhaps too much disturbance.

[00:21:53] It changes all the variables. And then that, to your point, that’s where it gets really difficult because then what do you do? So let’s talk about what you did at Bear Island. Tell me a little bit more about how you came to steward this property and how big is it and what did it look

[00:22:08] like.

[00:22:08] Ethan Tapper: So at the end of that expedition that I was talking about, I had a life changing event happen. This is before I even started my forestry education, which is that I was working in construction. I was winching these two, posts together on this timber frame barn and the rope that the come along was attached to broke and the come along snagged back and hit me in the face.

[00:22:27] And instantly blinded me in my left eye which was a, speaking of resilience, right, remarkably destabilizing event. And some good things came out of that. One of them was that I got an insurance settlement for a couple hundred thousand dollars.

[00:22:41] And which then became what I used to buy my land, which I now call Bear Island. So Bear Island, the first time that I came to it, it was funny. Like I was living in Burlington, which is Vermont’s biggest city. It’s still only 60, 000 people, only 600, 000 people live in the state, by the way, tiny.

[00:22:55] And it’s sort of like look, looking for land with this idea that we were going to have this beautiful homestead somewhere. And, this dream that I feel like a lot of people in my community have. And this piece of land had been on the market for like two years. You couldn’t tell anything about it.

[00:23:09] All that was on the real, the realtor’s website was the picture of this clearing with this beautiful view. They were just trying to sell it as this estate lot, they would call it. And I was like, I don’t, seems big. It was, they, they said it was 225 acres. I learned later it was 175 acres.

[00:23:26] And they had it listed for like 250, 000$. Which for here was, was low. So I was like, what’s wrong with it? Drove up there. Sure enough. The first thing I encountered was the entire road to get up into the property was just completely washed out. I had like the wheels of my truck straddling either side of this ravine.

[00:23:44] And then when I got up onto the log landing, which is where the road ended there was just trash everywhere. Logger pieces of equipment busted like the door of an excavator, the track of an excavator. With moss growing over it and skidder cables and bags of trash and buried trash and hydraulic oil buckets and big, deep ruts everywhere.

[00:24:04] And I was like, oh, this is not a very good start and not very auspicious start to this. But you know, went for a walk and. Crazy, we’d call it crazy ground, steep ground, just really, really steep, rocky, soaked in sweat the whole time, getting covered in ticks. One thing that I realized when I’d been walking for 30, 45 minutes and I stopped at this place and I still remember exactly where I stopped and I go there all the time.

[00:24:30] And I realized that there were no healthy trees there at all. I don’t think I’ve seen a healthy tree. And, what had happened is that 30 years before this property was, was high graded. So that just means that loggers came through unsupervised, basically according to the old timers that I’ve talked to, I think that they told the loggers to cut every tree 10 inches in diameter and up, which is pretty small.

[00:24:52] And they just basically slicked off this whole mountain. They cut the biggest trees, the most valuable trees, which are also usually the healthiest trees and left the smaller, less valuable, less healthy trees, essentially managing for a less healthy forest. There’s some argument that, that doing forest management like this is actually more harmful than clear cutting, because at least if you clear cut, you’re going to regenerate a new generation of trees that has a chance to be healthy, this way you’re just thinning around all the least healthy trees.

[00:25:18] And not creating enough light, they’re actually getting

[00:25:21] regeneration.

[00:25:22] Michael Hawk: selecting for the unhealthy trees,

[00:25:24] which is the opposite of what you’d want.

[00:25:26] Ethan Tapper: And we have these, these really diverse multi species forests, here at Bear Island, there’s probably 30 species of trees. And so when you do that, you’re also causing like some demographic impact.

[00:25:35] So it had created this like beech monoculture. which is a species that used to be very important to this forest, but now has this non native pathogen and now sometimes gets in the way of us having a more diverse forest. And there’s more about that in the book. I don’t need to get into it, but you know, I also found that like there was about 30 acres of the worst invasive plant infestation that I had ever seen. Japanese barberry, waist high, far as the eye can see. It was crazy. Deer, evidence of deer overpopulation. I basically just like crawled my way up over these cliffs back to the truck and I was like, screw this place. I’m going home.

[00:26:10] Michael Hawk: I can’t imagine why you’d feel that

[00:26:13] Ethan Tapper: yeah, I was just like, I was just like, this isn’t, this ain’t it, and so I went home and then, sure enough, I just kept on thinking about it and I actually took a course in silviculture where we were talking about restoring these degraded pine oak hemlock forests, which is what the forest type here at Bear Island is largely. And I started to think about it. I was like, geez, maybe there was something there.

[00:26:34] Went back later, later in the summer, and I just started finding all this cool stuff. And it really felt like there was something there that was worth saving and that was beautiful and important and vital, but that was just so, so beat up, and so like occluded by all of the stuff that had been done to this forest that, it, it needed help. It wasn’t gonna continue to exist on its own. It felt like a ecosystem on the verge of collapse, but that was still glimmering, with these sparks of hope. And so ended up buying it. I bought it for like 800 an acre. Since then, that was seven years ago, I’ve like really dedicated my life to caring for this forest, you know, and just cleaning up messes that I didn’t cause, which is just if you, if you manage ecosystems, you end up doing that all day long, every day. Most days is dealing with the legacies of the past and just having to not think about if it’s fair or not that you’re doing this, you just, you just go and do it, and gaining skills.

[00:27:35] So. Taught myself to run an excavator, and every year I run an excavator for a week and close out old, unstable, eroding skid trails and build, build new, more resilient skid trails. I bought a skidder. It’s so ironic that, of course, a skidder and a chainsaw, the same tools that were used to degrade this forest 30 years ago, are the tools that I’m now using to help it out.

[00:27:59] And I go in areas where there’s no healthy trees at all, I create openings and opportunities for new regeneration. In areas where there’s some healthy trees, I cut less healthy trees that are competing with them. It’s just this like, really a really cool, has been a really cool experience to see this forest transformed.

[00:28:15] And you can actually walk through these areas. Now I walk through it with colleagues and they’re like, Oh, it’s nice forest. And I say. I swear to God, these trees weren’t here before. Like, cause, cause there was so, there were so many unhealthy trees and it was just so beat up that your perception of that forest was totally different.

[00:28:33] And now, I’m just like really aggressively doing what I can to give this forest the tools to be healthy again.

[00:28:38] Michael Hawk: And you’re just seven years into this and you’re

[00:28:40] already seeing this kind of difference.

[00:28:42] Ethan Tapper: Yeah. Another, I mean, another big thing that I have to talk about a lot, that’s really difficult because I’m always worried that I’m going to get like canceled by a lot of folks.

[00:28:49] If you actually do this work and you’re actually managing non native invasive plants, that this is what we all do, which is using herbicide. And that was like, for me, spraying herbicide on Japanese barberry. After trying, I did try to, to control it without using herbicide.

[00:29:06] And you know, I used herbicide and the problem is solved in a year. Basically. And then with a little followup treatments thereafter, it’s just radical, when you, when you really think about it. , And I was like, man, I hear people talk about all the time, these invasive plant problems that they can’t solve, and it’s such a biodiversity problem and they just sort of like throw up their hands and I’m like, not true. You could solve those, but you’re sometimes not willing to do a gross thing to, allow, that ecosystem to be healthy again. And I did a gross thing for 12 days, year one. And now I have spring ephemerals, wildflowers growing there, trilliums and Dutchman’s breeches and spring beauties and wild ginger and all these plants that weren’t there.

[00:29:51] And that’s a pretty remarkable thing.

[00:29:53] Michael Hawk: I think it’s, it’s interesting. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to better communicate the fact that everything we do has a trade off or multiple trade offs and it’s kind of like, what are you optimizing for? What’s your goal to decide whether the trade offs are worth it? So,

[00:30:08] What I hear you saying is it’s not like herbicides are without negative side effect.

[00:30:13] But in this case, the limited application, the benefits far outweighed the, the negative side of that equation.

[00:30:21] Ethan Tapper: here’s a nuance, in the same way that I’m running skidder and using a chainsaw, and would in no way ever say that everybody that runs a skidder and uses a chainsaw is okay and is doing a good job,, if I was king of the world, I’d probably say that the only thing you could use herbicide for was controlling non native invasive plants. And that’s something that is just when you start to really, dig into some of the nuances of this stuff, it just really changes how you think about it. The analogy that I think of a lot is if you were a parent and you had a child and the child was sick, wouldn’t you just move mountains and compromise and give up anything, so that your child could be healthy again, even if that meant that you had to give them a kind of medicine that you didn’t feel totally comfortable with, or whatever, had to in some way compromise something that you, had been a belief that you’d had, or you would do it. And I don’t know why we can’t afford our ecosystem, the same level of dignity and sacrifice and compromise.

[00:31:26] They are sick and they need help and we have the tools to help them. That’s one of the things that I’ve really thought about and internalized this knowledge. And I think it’s important that we all know is that we are not waiting for a new invention that will allow us to solve these problems.

[00:31:42] In many cases, these solutions already exist with existing technology, with existing resources. It’s just about how we use it.

[00:31:52] Michael Hawk: So, you mentioned, I think half jokingly, like you, you don’t like to talk about the herbicide thing because you’re afraid of getting canceled. But I mean, I think that, that that’s a real fear for some people when you go against what the kind of perceived notion is, and I’m wondering, you talk about that we have the tools and, some of them perhaps are, are in this category of, having a negative preconceived perception, I’m trying to formulate the question, but I’m wondering how much of it is that, that people who care for the ecosystem, they just need to take a stronger stand in, in what they care for versus not being aware that these

[00:32:29] Ethan Tapper: A

[00:32:29] Michael Hawk: exist.

[00:32:29] Ethan Tapper: Percent, a hundred percent. Yeah. Cause I think one thing that I’ve really noticed, at least where I work, again, this conversation about “should we be using a herbicide, in some ways in controlling non native invasive plants”. In our conservation community, this conversation has already been had decades ago. And, to ask ourself, what’s worse, right? These invasive plants or the herbicide. We decided, everyone decided, that the invasive plants are worse. Right. And that we can use, we know that we can use it in a way that’s responsible. However there, there’s a lot of power that comes from the partnership, right.

[00:33:05] These organizations, I’m not going to name them here, but conservation organizations that have a tremendous amount of public trust. And I talked to, someone from one of them one time where, actually the only old growth forest in the county that I live in, I saw a dead barberry there, and it was just dead.

[00:33:20] And I talked to the conservation organization, that owns this forest, and I said, hey uh, you use herbicide on that, on those Japanese barberry? And the director was like, yeah, but we, didn’t make a big deal about it. And I was like, well, geez, I wish you would.

[00:33:34] Because if everybody’s been doing it and everybody’s so scared of the optics that no one talks about it. And then when I go out there and I’m just like, this is what we do. Like, this is the difference between success and failure with respect to controlling these plants is herbicide. And so I’m like, yeah, I want to talk about it, but it makes me feel like I’m standing by myself when in fact, every conservation organization is doing the exact same thing.

[00:34:02] They’re just too scared to talk about it. And, to a lesser extent, the same could be said for, the management work we do cutting trees, like everybody’s afraid of getting canceled because they’re talking about cutting trees and afraid to post Instagram reel or whatever where there’s like a guy with a chainsaw cutting down a tree because they’re gonna get totally dragged by the world when in fact we have all you know we’re professionals who have worked really hard to develop these incredibly nuanced solutions to these incredibly nuanced problems. And this is what we do. And if this is what we do, we should be celebrating it. And, and we should give the public the credit that they deserve, that they will be able to understand it, and give them a lot of opportunities to understand it. Really work hard to help form that nuance understanding rather than, trying to have less negative input by just not being fully honest about the stuff we’re doing.

[00:34:53] Michael Hawk: to help the public understand this hoping that you have lots of photos and have documented the transformation of your own land.

[00:35:00] Ethan Tapper: Yeah. I wish I had more, I wish I had taken more photos, like year zero. But I take more and more now.

[00:35:06] Michael Hawk: Yeah. And you’re exactly right. I know from a couple of the agencies that I volunteer with that herbicide uses is very common and it’s they know what they’re doing with it. It’s not blindly applied in, in, year after year after year, it’s for a specific case. And it, it does, it seems to work. I want to back up because this I found really interesting. your book and when we spoke before, but you, you hinted a bit before about the beech trees and how they’ve changed over the years and maybe they’re behaving even differently than perhaps they would have decades ago. So tell me a bit more about what you encountered with the beech tree stands on your property.

[00:35:44] Ethan Tapper: Beech is such a weird species. So American beech and that’s B E E C H not B E A Right. Fagus grandifolia. Uh, It’s a fascinating tree species because we have these, these pre settlement, pre colonial records of when they did the original surveys of the area that I live in, northwestern Vermont.

[00:36:05] We know from these records that , beech was by far the most common tree in our forest. And that, in fact, our forests were somewhere between 40 and 60 percent beech. So it’s it’s this shade tolerant, long lived tree species that or in these forests where large scale disturbances are less common you end up with these long lived, relatively shade tolerant tree species.

[00:36:26] And the other species, eastern hemlock, that was the second most common tree species Very similar, very long lived, very tolerant of shade. So, American beech at that time could live to be like 400 years old, this massive hardwood forest tree that also produced beech nuts, which are this really important food for wildlife, especially black bears, really have a special relationship with them.

[00:36:48] And then basically all of our forests got cleared. I say to people, the story of our landscape here in the Northeast is that every forest you’ve ever been in was an agricultural field in the 1800s. And then, between 1900 and like 1960 is when we saw a lot of those agricultural fields revert.

[00:37:05] And now we’re 75 percent forested again. But our forests are pretty young.

[00:37:10] Michael Hawk: And what do you mean by revert? Was that active management or like a natural,

[00:37:14] Ethan Tapper: natural. So just fields, farm fields going fallow. And here, for the last couple hundred years, when that happened, they became forest again. Although, some of them are skewed towards species like white pine, eastern white pine. That are species that happen to have adaptations that make them good at growing in old fields, which is not really a normal adaptation.

[00:37:36] It’s interesting that we have some species that are over represented just because they’re good at growing in these old fields. So, anyway, as those forests started to re establish on our landscape, a new pathogen called, that we call beech bark disease, which is the combination of a fungus and a scale insect, started in Nova Scotia, I think it was like in the 20s, and started spreading southwest from there.

[00:37:59] So now beech trees are a completely different species essentially. So instead of living to be 400 years old and become these massive smooth bark trees, I learned them as having elephant skin bark, they live to be 40 to 60 years old, 10 or 12 inches in diameter. They’re all cracked and pockmarked and they’re messed up looking.

[00:38:19] And then, beech trees for millennia have had this adaptation where when they get stressed or when they’re close to death, that they will clone themselves. So from the root system, they’ll shoot up all these clones, sprouts which allow them to essentially prolong their life almost indefinitely, right?

[00:38:34] The main trunk dies and you get these clones that take up the space and it fills the gap created by the death of itself. So the beech trees here, they get beech bark disease when they’re 40, they shoot up all these clones. The predominance of those clones in the understory of our forests is made worse by the fact that deer don’t like to browse young beech trees, and they really like to browse all these other species.

[00:38:57] So you can just get into a situation where you have a beech monoculture, where you have diseased beech trees in the overstory, diseased beech clones in the understory, and these waves of mortality that prevent the forest from being healthy. And you get stuck in this, cycle. And so that was largely going on.

[00:39:14] At Bear Island, when I got here, which was they, the loggers had gone in, cut all the biggest trees, which were largely oak, and some other species like sugar maple, and beech had been in the understory, or the mid story, rose into the canopy, got beech bark disease, started to die, cloned itself, those ones rose into the canopy, they’re not resistant to beech bark disease because they’re clones, They have the same genetics, get beech bark disease, die, and around and around and around we go.

[00:39:40] So yeah, so it’s just interesting, we talk about, there’s a term, a great term for this, which is called cryptic function loss. Which is actually something that we’re experiencing with several of our tree species here in Vermont. So it’s cryptic, because it’s secret, and the function loss is, losing the functions associated with some of our native tree species.

[00:40:00] So, the reason that it’s cryptic or secret is because those tree species are still here. Beech is still a part of our forest. It’s not going extinct. Same thing with our elm trees. Dutch elm’s disease basically prevents any of our elm trees from getting to reach their historic stature. And they die when they’re little, but they’re still here.

[00:40:19] The species is still here. Same with our butternut trees. But the functions that were associated with those tree species, when they were able to be, big and hundreds of years old and massive have been lost. Right. So that’s why we call it cryptic function loss. And That’s, what’s going on with beech trees. It’s pretty scary when you think about the fact that our most common forest tree can no longer fulfill the vast majority of any of its historic ecological roles.

[00:40:47] Michael Hawk: it’s not producing beech nuts anymore, I presume,

[00:40:49] Ethan Tapper: they, they will produce beech nuts, but not, a lot of them never get big enough to produce very many. And we don’t even really know what ecological attributes would be afforded by a big healthy beech tree anymore.

[00:41:04] That it just aren’t there. If a forest of beech trees, 400 year old beech trees, and it’s 40 to 60 percent of all the trees. Think about the degree to which all of the species that live in these forests would have been adapted to some part or another of the way that tree lives.

[00:41:19] From its flowers to the beech nuts, to the habitats, that it produces as it declines to the unique composition of its wood as it dies and falls on the ground, it becomes large diameter, dead wood. It’s, it’s pretty wild to think about, how much, how many different functions could now be missing.

[00:41:36] Michael Hawk: Are there any, stands of refugia that have not been affected by the beech bark disease?

[00:41:43] Ethan Tapper: I’m not aware of any stands up here. So if you go further south, like I was in New Jersey and it wasn’t really a big deal down there yet. And I’ve heard from folks in like Maryland, it’s not a big deal down there. And, it seems to be like pretty slow moving, but now, so backing up, there are resistant beech trees and here at Bear Island, I love beech.

[00:42:02] I think it’s an awesome species. I just want, I just want it to be healthy. So whenever I find a tree that has still has pretty smooth bark, it doesn’t seem like it’s being affected by beech park disease and so it could have some genetic resistance. That’s always a tree that I’ll leave and try to encourage. Unfortunately, now there’s another non native pathogen called beech Leaf Disease that seems like it might just pretty much wipe them all out. So I don’t know. It’s just when we think about our mandate to care for ecosystems, it’s so important that we understand all of these little stories where you start to add all these things up and you’re like, how could we think that the best thing that we could do for ecosystems is nothing. How could we think that, in forests that have lost or functionally lost the most, it’s most important tree species that have been, that are young and simple, that have been cleared and degraded, that have non native invasive plants, , and deer overpopulations that have lost all of its apex predators and numerous other species that have been historically important to it.

[00:43:01] How could we think that, like, oh, just, nature will just take care of it and, like, everything will be fine and all we need to