Ethan Tapper '12, an alumnus of the Rubenstein School's forestry program and a current graduate student, released his book , earlier this month. In his book, Ethan asks readers what it means to live in a time when ecosystems are in retreat, and further questions how we can reach toward a better future. Ethan's time as a Rubenstein student and his work with forests (particularly his work as the Chittenden County forester and with his consulting company, Bear Island Forestry) were major influences on his decision to write a book.
How to Love a Forest is now available wherever books are sold.
How would you describe your book?
How to Love a Forest is a reimagining of forests and our relationship to them. It’s a vision for a new ethic for the modern world – one that recognizes how vital and how beautiful ecosystems are, and also the many bittersweet decisions necessary to care for them. How to Love a Forest is also a love story – it’s a love letter to my land, “Bear Island,” a love letter to forests and other ecosystems, a love letter to biodiversity. And it’s also a love letter to a world that doesn’t exist yet – it’s the world that we can create if we’re willing to make the complex and bittersweet decisions to save ourselves and everything that is precious. Like any great love story, caring for ecosystems requires compromises and sacrifices, requires us to do things we never thought we’d have to do – we do it anyway, because this is what we do for love. That’s what How to Love a Forest is all about.
Can you talk about the timeline of the book and how it came to be?
I started writing How to Love a Forest more than six years ago. In my work as a forester, I was struggling with how consistently forests and other ecosystems – and the measures necessary to protect them – were misunderstood. It seemed to me that most people believed in this dichotomy that doesn’t really exist: that either we love forests and leave them alone, or we manage them because we don’t care about them. I was seeing how consistently our ecosystems needed help, and how consistently they were denied that help because people believed that the only expression of compassion for forests was to remove ourselves from them. In my mind, as forests struggle under the harmful legacies of the past, the threats and stressors of the present, and a future that promises challenges like never before, inaction is often an expression of negligence, not love. The ecosystems of this world need our help, and these misunderstandings about forests and what it means to care for them were getting in the way of that – so I decided that I needed to starting writing.
I figured out that the time when my mind was the most creative and productive was the first hour of my day – from 5:00 to 6:00 AM – and that became my writing time – as it still is, every day of my life. When I began writing, I don’t know what I thought I was doing – I think if I had thought that I was trying to write a book, I never would have gotten started. For years it felt like something that I just did, not something that could ever actually be done.
If you were to ask me how to write a book, I would tell you the truth -- which is that I don’t really know. Over the years, I realized that I was teaching myself how to write, and mostly teaching myself how to write this book, teaching myself how to write the book that I believed that the world needed from me in this moment. I still believe that I don’t really know how to write a book – I only know how to write this one.
What experiences do you believe have most influenced your views on environmental issues?
My most impactful experiences have been working in the woods – as a consulting forester and a service forester – and managing Bear Island. When you work with forests every day, you build an understanding the depth and breadth of the challenges they face. It’s one thing to say that “nature” will take care of itself in principle, and quite another when, day in and day out, you are trying to care for ecosystems that are degraded, dealing with nonnative plants, animals, pests and pathogens, in the midst of a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis. When you engage in deep relationship with ecosystems, you start to realize that it is completely unreasonable to ask them to weather all of these challenges alone.
Bear Island has been especially important, because when I first came to this land it was the most degraded and unhealthy forest that I’d ever been to. Over the last seven years, as I’ve worked hard and made countless bittersweet decisions to protect it, this land has been transformed. Now, I see it as a symbol of hope: a symbol of what is possible if we’re willing to make the decisions and take the action necessary to protect and restore ecosystems.
Frances Cannon called How to Love a Forest “a manifesto against apathy.” How do you stay hopeful and fight against apathy in the face of so many scary changes in the ecosystem and in your forest?
It is so important to me that we frame our efforts to save this biosphere within the context of love and hope – love for this precious and irreplaceable world, and hope for a better future. In my mind, especially as I take all of these complex and counter-intuitive actions to care for forests – things as complex and bittersweet as cutting trees – it’s important to remember that this moment is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity not just to keep from losing everything, but also to build a better world, to help ecosystems rediscover a capacity for life that this world hasn’t known for many generations. That’s what keeps me going, and I think that’s really what we should be striving for.
What was your favorite class from your undergrad days at Rubenstein and why was it your favorite?
My favorite teacher (ever) was John Shane, and my favorite class was NR 103 – his ecology course. John led the whole class with no PowerPoint and no visual aid – just a piece of chalk – and everyone in it was completely engaged the whole time. We nicknamed the class: “John Shane explains the mysteries of the Universe.” Even the tests were great – John would ask us to explain some natural phenomena that we hadn’t discussed but that could be explained by applying principles that we had discussed, so even the tests required real problem-solving and critical thinking and were themselves powerful teaching tools.
What is your most treasured memory from your time as a student at Rubenstein?
I loved being a TA for Dendrology for two years, and also “Forestry Summer Camp” – the forestry summer intensive course.
What prompted you to return to the Rubenstein School for your graduate studies?
I have so many connections and relationships with Rubenstein faculty – and so, so much respect for them – through my professional career (I’m also a consulting forester and was the Chittenden County Forester from 2016 -2024) and so it seemed like a perfect fit!
What’s something you learned after college that you think current students should know and keep in mind?
I struggled earlier in my career with imposter syndrome – who am I to manage forests, to talk to people about forests and forestry, to write a book about it? I realized that, first, everybody has a little bit of imposter syndrome; and secondly, that the people who become advocates and leaders in our field are not necessarily the ones who are the most “qualified” – they’re the ones who decide that they’re going to get over their imposter syndrome and just go for it.
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All photos by Sally McCay.
