Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, welcome to the crime Pace it Bonny
Doesn't Podcast. I'm here with Ethan Tapper, who's you're based
out of Vermont?
Speaker 2: Right, that's right?
Speaker 1: Is that correct? And who's who put out a book
called how to Love a Forest? Who just released it?
When did you release it? Like a year or two ago?
Speaker 2: It was September twenty four?
Speaker 1: Oh okay, yeah, so about a year ago. And I've
been following you on social media for a while. I
think one of your first posts looped me in and
then just all the stuff I see I love, I
love it. I love the stuff you post. And you
were the one who You were the one who told me,
of course, to start off talking about ticks right away,
that you guys just started getting ticks up in Vermont recently,
like to a bad extent, which is nuts to me.
I mean, it's like the same thing when you like,
Iceland has mosquitoes.
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, we didn't. Even when I was growing up
in Vermont, we didn't have him. The first one I
ever saw I was in Portland, Maine, like in a
Whole Foods or something, and I didn't know I saw
it on me and I didn't know what it was.
I thought it was just a little spider, and so
I was like, you know, I was in this big
store and I was like, well, I'm not going to
let you out here, buddy, and so I put it
back on me, like you can hang out of me,
you can jump off when we get back out of
the barking. And then I found it embedded at me
later and asked someone else. I was like, oh, is
this what a ticket?
Speaker 1: Oh wow? So you didn't even fuck that's crazy. You
didn't know what it was. I was going to say,
you just put it on the floor. You know, they'll come.
They'll get it when they come. Wax though, when the
janitor comes waxes it later that night.
Speaker 2: You know, No, I didn't. I didn't even have a
frame of reference for I'd never seen one before that
was in So that was probably two thousand and nine
or twenty ten.
Speaker 1: That's crazy.
Speaker 2: Now it's a big deal. And basically every every forester,
every biologist, everybody that works in the field that I
know has, you know, had at least one tickboard disease.
I've had Live's disease pretty much all foresters have.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's horrible up there in the Northeast man, I
mean it's it's it's just like that's one of the
reasons that might be one of the reasons it's kept
me out for a while. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, sorry,
what'd you say?
Speaker 2: I said, you're a Southwestern boy, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's where I've learned. That's why I've spent most
of my time. I was in California for twenty years.
I left Chicago when I was like seventeen. That's where
I grew up, and I was in California for twenty years,
and that's where I learned botany and then yeah, I
mean you get ticks in California. Like the first time
I ever found a ticket was embedded in my nuts
and I had, you know, a friend who I was
later romantically involved with. It was very nice she pulled
it out for me. But but it was like it was,
you know, I was because I didn't know what to
do and I was free. I was like panicking because
I've never gotten. I'd never gotten before. I'd spent you know,
when I was a teenager, I was spent my time
like growing up in cities and riding the subway and
shit like that, and uh yeah, and I used to
be absolutely just terrified of him. And now I'm just
like whatever, I'll just pull them off later. But you know,
I go to all these habitats where they burn enough now,
you know, on the eastern in the eastern side of
the hundredth meridian where it's more humid, you know, east
coast and uh, and so you don't really get them
when they when they burn a lot. But that's that's
perplexing to me that you guys used to not get them.
Why was that? Do you think just because of the
cold winters? And was there a history of burning in
Vermont or what not?
Speaker 2: Really? No, I mean we think of It's actually been
fun so now that I've since the book has come out,
and you know, just a big part of my life
has been traveling around doing this public speaking stuff and conferences,
and so I've begin able to see all different forest types.
And one of the big discoveries for me has been
seeing what a big roll fireplaces in these ecosystems. Because
here in Vermont we have a few fire adapted systems.
We have a few areas of this natural community that
we call sandplane forest, which is like pitch pine and
a small area little pockets of some other fire adapted
systems red pine forests, natural red and forest, and dry
oak forest. But fire isn't a big deal here, so
I think it was just that they were limited, you know,
climatically to a certain extent.
Speaker 1: Well, you guys were glaciated too, like relatively recently ten
thousand years ago, was all was Vermont under ice? Did
they come that far south?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I think we were glaciated. And I think
that they say that the only part of the Northeast
that ticks are native to is like Long Island, New York,
which I believe I think is unglaciated or is right
at the edge. That's why. Yeah, everywhere, So that happened.
Like so like another example of you know, with these
with climate change, like this weird stuff that's happening, is
that we have all these issues with what we call
the winter tick, which is this very large tick. When
they're in gorge there, they're huge, They're like the size
of peanut m and m's, and they're they back, they
attack servants. So they're like been really causing damage to
our moose populations to the point where in their first
year of life we lose sixty to eighty percent of
our moose and we lose them to anemia because they
get these winter ticks on a one year old moose,
they might have one hundred and eighty thousand of them
on it, and they're huge. And they actually are a
species that historically is co evolved with deer white tail deer,
so deer because they're co evolved with them, have this
preening behavior they pick them off. But the historic ranges
of deer and moose didn't used to cross, and now
that their range is cross, we have winter ticks in
moose's range and they don't have any evolutionary relationship with
that species, so they don't really have any way to
deal with it.
Speaker 1: When you think about what it's going to take to get,
you know, to kill a moose, I mean, the extent
of infestation is it's just that's so disgusting, and I
mean it's they got to look like Papaloma's like wartz
or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they do, and they have this thing that they
we call them the ghost moose because they'll lose all
their hair and they'll have this like white translucent skin
from all the ticks. Yeah, I mean, it's just one
of these things like it's like everybody. It's starting to
feel like everybody's taken these ecosystems, you know, and just
put like they're in a snow globe and just shook
them up. Yeah, you have different you know, obviously tons
of introduced species causing all this mayhem, and then even
native species that are sort of like mixed around and
exposed to these novel conditions that are becoming a problem.
I mean, white tailed deer is a species like that, right.
Speaker 1: Or ordinative species. They used to have checks and you know,
stop gaps that are now removed, and so they just
get out of control like fight. You know. Fire is
a great example of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, I mean so now, having having done events
and done work and visited areas like Mississippi and some
of these plains regions, it's just a remarkable thinking about
the impact that fireus had on the landscape and how
much these places have changed without it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh, I could I could say a lot.
I was just in Florida. It's brutal to see I
was in I think Orlando's the most terrible place I've
ever been to. H But it's a great I mean,
it must have been forgive the squeaking style in the
background too. That's his dog. I'm watching. He's I'm it's
if I put him outside, he's just gonna whine and
we're gonna hear him anyway. So anyway, but uh, we
all love Jimmy over here. But you know, Florida must
have been paradise. It was beautiful, and it's just everyone
that lives there now is so strange from what actually
what actually evolved there and grew there. What the reality is.
You know, it's like they got oranges on the license
plates and then it's everything is just the car slam
and toll roads everywhere, and highest level of corruption i've
seen in terms of you know, development and business ties
to politicians. There's just no regulations whatsoever. It seems like
there's nothing to do to stop it. But yeah, I mean,
you know, you see it everywhere. It's like it's gonna
it is the sixth mass extinction. It's gonna hit a
wall at some point. But I mean, you know, I
once I learned the geologic timescale, it changed everything for me.
It was like, oh, like this sucks, but life comes back,
and it's just in the end, it's just you know,
the massive amount of suffering and needless waste that we're causing.
But yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2: It's it's the thing Joey too that I like that
I write about and talk about a lot, is just
like this weird dichotomy that we've developed in our culture
where it's like, you know, either way, nature gets screwed,
which is not like either you know, people don't understand
how important it is and how valuable it is and
how it sustains its functional and beautiful and so they
exploit it and they degrade it and they treat it
like a commodity or you know, the people who like
who love nature, who understand its value, they're like, we'll
just leave it alone. You know, nature will find a
way nature you know, to do anything is to ruin
it and despoil it.
Speaker 1: Who do you know that says that? Though? Because I
feel like that's I.
Speaker 2: Hear that really the prevailing system it that I hear.
Speaker 1: That's crazy because I hear management all the time, Like
I that kind of because I think most people know
that such an antiquated kind of you know, miroram way
to view things where it's just hands off, like it'll it'll,
it'll figure it out like I just you know, it's it's.
Speaker 2: I think I think it's really depressing. I mean I
I hear like on my channels and and and At
talks to a certain extent stuff like that. I mean,
I hear it all the time.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the dumbest shit I've ever heard. I
can't believe that. I mean, yeah, it's like for.
Speaker 2: Me, it's just it's just another kind of abdication, you know,
it's just like, uh, and it's just another kind of
lack of understanding as well. It's like people are very
people's minds are very flexible, and like whatever is just
the easiest for them to understand, or the easiest for
them to wrap their heads around, is they're just they'll
just go there.
Speaker 1: I mean, but you don't hear a collegist saying that, though,
do you.
Speaker 2: I mean, absolutely, no no ecologists, no biologsts, no people
who actually understand these ecosysms.
Speaker 1: Are you just talk about like normies, just like members
of the square community, just normals? Yeah, yeah, No, no
offense to them. I'm just saying, you know, there's this
there's this spot for them too. They're important assets to
the economy that we have here in the United States
that might be collapsing soon. But I think, you know,
I people get up bummed down. They asked me all
the ten like, you know, how do you go continue
going on? You know? And I think they're mostly younger kids,
which I totally get because I was like that too,
But I'm like, how do I continue? One? Yeah, it's
geologic timescale, like I said, But also too, it's we're
recently new to this consciousness thing, Like we're still monkeys.
We still operate on the monkey brain. We have this
lowest common denominator view of things. You know, we just
respond to to emotional impulses and wants and dopamine responses.
And I want this. I want that this person has
set me whatever. Like there's so little enlightenment and that's
a that's a bummer. But I think it just means, okay, well,
if it's just an enlightenment problem, I mean it's a
big problem. It's a big requires a big solution. But
it means there's hope, you know. It means that there's
a way to just telling people be self aware, be
aware of this machine, this living machine, this biosphere and
how it works. There's no getting around it. You have
to work with it. You can't fucking run off to Mars.
It's not really gonna work. It's not it's a you know,
it's it's not it's not a real it's not a
realistic dream. And even if it was, it's not a
place you want to actually be. Uh, you know, it's
it's like focus on this and understand it. It's just,
you know, everything is just still so new and there's
still so much time.
Speaker 2: Well oh yeah, well, and I I mean, I do.
I think one of one of my jobs, it feels like,
is to go around and have this like sort of
spread this message of hope and just being like there
is stuff we can do and there is things we
can save, and and that, you know, is something that
I think people don't hear a lot of times. To
your earlier point though about like our you know, just
being these like monkey brains and stuff. EO. Wilson had
a really funny thing that he said about that, which
is that he said, we have uh, paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions,
and godlike technology. Yeah, it's like how could that work?
Speaker 1: That dude, is that that guy's one of my I
mean him and Sagan and and other people, Octavia Butler, Bukowski,
like all these people, you know, they're like it's like
if I ever design a curricula, it'll be in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But but some.
Speaker 2: Of this stuff, like you know, like you mentioned, I
just feel like so much of what is necessary to
sort of like to bring people in and change courses.
It's like, for a lot of folks, I don't even
think it's that we need to necessarily like change their minds.
We just need to bring them in a little deeper, right,
which is what you do and which is what I
try to do. And and when you know, by exposing
them to the reality of like where these ecosystems are
at and like what our relationship with them actually is
and what it can be. You know that that's the
reason why you don't see these silly philosophies from people
like who are biologists and botanists and ecologists and you know,
folks who actually like do this work, is because we're
in deep enough to know that these ecosystems are precious
and also that they need our help, right, And so
it's sort of like, how do we trick people into
coming in a little deeper?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, it's I mean, I think it's that. But ye,
it's not about trying to change their minds or persuade
them because it doesn't happen overnight. But I think they'll
change their own minds the more they learn, and if
you politely just informed them. I'm like, look, man, you
just don't know about this, and that's okay. Like I
don't know how to play guitar. Like I can play drums,
I can get a keep a beat, but I don't
know how to play guitar, and so my opinions on
guitar are not the ones that are worth listening to
when it comes to playing guitar music, you know. But
if someone taught me, if I learned something, you know,
And that's why that's the same thing I say. So
it's like, you know, you've got opinions on this stuff
and no offense, but they may not be worth listening
to because you don't know a lot about it. And
that's part of just being a humble human being, you know.
I you know, I don't know. People don't do that anymore.
Of course, now everyone's a fucking expert, but you know,
I don't know a lot about that. I'm not gonna come.
I'm not gonna say anything. Okay, Well, let me tell you.
I've been spending the last fifteen years of my life
in places like this and trying to understand them, and
you know it's for me. It's I mean, I see
a lot of hope, man. I see the native plant
thing went from just being this quaint, feel good thing
about you know, I hate horticulture, to be honest with you,
Like culture is just about beauty, which doesn't mean anything.
It's subjective and you know what, it's just it's it
doesn't it's not really what I do is in horticulture.
I grow a shit ton of stuff. It's not horroriculture.
I'm trying to like restore pieces to this living machine
back or I'm just interested in how plants work physiologically
and what evolutionary adaptations they might have based on where
they're from. And so that's you know, I'll grow some
non native stuff just to study it. But but you know,
the native plant thing is like going into this like
oh wow, just using plants as infrastructure. It's not just
this feels good and it's good for the pollinators. Like
I don't even I don't even like using that word
pollinators anymore because to to like someone who doesn't have
any background in this, it doesn't mean anything. It's just
it feels corny. And if it's like a pat yourself
on the back. Oh, it's good for the pollinators. I
just say beneficial insects. The beneficial insects, the insects that
benefit us as a species. They keep pest populations down,
pests that directly parasitize us or parasitize the plants we want. It's,
you know, everything is a check and check and balance,
because it's that's the what an ecosystem is. You know,
one plant is not as good as the other. It
depends where they evolved and what what living machine they
evolved in. They're important over there, but they're horrible over here.
They smother ecosystems and they throw a gear, you know,
they throw a wrench in the gears of the living
machine here. But I but I see a lot of hope.
So I guess when I when these when younger people
say that to me, like how do you have hope,
I'm like, man, I don't know how to answer that,
Like I've got a lot of hope, Like it's you know,
and then if you know, if it fails, then we
just we're going to go extinct. Anyway, It's just like
that's well, that solution just solved itself, you know, it
problems just solved itself.
Speaker 2: So anyway, And I like and one thing that I
talk about a lot and right about is like my
land here, which is I call Bear Island, which is
like a big part of the of how to love
a forest and a big part of the content that
I make and what I talk about stuff and and
and that's sort of like it's a hopeful story because
when I came to this land, you know, it had
I say, it had like every problem that a forest
could have. You know, I have been really pulling. Man
is what we call high graded. So they'd like the
previouest landowner had told these loggers to come in and
just cut every tree bigger than ten inches in diameter,
which were not just the most valuable trees but also
the healthiest trees. So there's like no healthy trees here left.
Fear overpopulation, you know, really intense invasive species infestation, eroding
skid trails, like you know, piles of trash, the whole thing,
and and I you know, over the last Now it's
been we're at the end of eight growing season eight,
just seeing the transformation that's possible when we like bring
to bear all of this technology. We're not afraid to
do tough stuff like, you know, cut a tree if
we need to restore before us we actually have a
tremendous amount of power, you know. I'm just like, I
own this, this skidder piece of log and equipment, you know,
and I'm like, oh shit, this thing is powerful. Like
if we use it in the right way, we can
affect some real positive change. And we just need to
be purists.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fill me in on the because I'm totally unfamiliar
with the Northeast, with the habitat of Vermont. These are
all hardwood forests. There's conifers there too, or is.
Speaker 2: It, Yeah, there's conifers there as well. But like, so
the big story, Joey is that, you know, really here
in Vermont and really throughout New England, the timing is
a little bit different, just based on the timing of
when places were colonized. But here in Vermont, starting in
the early eighteen hundreds, we had basically every forest on
our landscape was cleared for agriculture, so like we are
in very mountainous terrain. But it's remarkable when you see
these historic photos of what Vermont used to look like.
What I tell people is that just assume that every
forest you've ever been in in Vermont was a pasture
in the eighteen hundreds. And it's actually pretty remarkable. Between
about eighteen twenty and about eighteen fifty, with draft animals
and saws and axes, you know, we went from nine
five percent forested state to being a less than twenty percent.
And we have today like somewhere between one tenth of
one percent and one half of one percent of old
growth remaining, but we have we are seventy five percent
forested now. So like throughout in the nineteen hundreds, a
lot of those forests came back, but they are not
like the forests that were cleared from this landscape in
the eighteen hundreds. You know, they just haven't had time
to develop all of these these qualities of what you know,
an old growth ecosystem would look like on this landscape
for thousands of years and so here where fire wasn't
a big thing, what we mostly have is these relatively
closed canopy, multi aged predominantly hardwood, but also mixed. We
have some conifers, eastern hemlock, eastern white pine, red spruce,
balsam fur. But we would have had these these these
multi aged forests with mostly like small intensity natural disturbances
creating these multi layered canopies, tons of dead wood on
the ground. Prior to colonization, the large ungulates on our
landscape were like caribou and a now extinct species of
elk called the eastern elk and those and they were
hunted by wolves and cougars. That are all all of
those species are in Alkon except for the moose.
Speaker 1: There was an elk species. When did that get driven
to extinction? You know?
Speaker 2: Was that eastern elk I think was gone by the
end of the seventeen hundreds. Oh and they actually the
only place in the East where they've reintroduced it is
in Pennsylvania. In the early nineteen hundreds, Pennsylvania brought over
some elk, like on a train from Yellowstone from western Elk.
And so they now have a stable enough population in
part of Pennsylvania where they have a season for elk.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: But so they you know, and the other big story
that I think you'd be interested in enjoy. Is that
we think that had in our valleys somewhere between well
probably about three hundred beaver dams per square mile, so
that's a square miles six hundred and forty acres. It's
a beaver and m every two acres. And so, like
all of these valleys that are now where like people
live and we have these villages and we have these
agricultural fields and roads and all this stuff, were probably
this like kind of amphibious world of these open water habitats,
shrubby wetland habitats, beaver meadows, and the beavers were gone
by the end of the sixteen hundreds because of European
trapping and also this like economy that Europeans created with
the indigenous folks here where they were trading them all
this steel and guns and whatever cool stuff for beaver pelts.
And they actually incited a series of wars between the
indigenous peoples in this region because of the economy that
they created, called the beaver wars, where they would like
trap out their all the beavers in their region and
go to war with their neighbors.
Speaker 1: Oh so it was, I mean it was due to
over extraction of resources basically.
Speaker 2: For for for hat to make hats.
Speaker 1: The resources being the beavers, and so that's why the beavers,
Natives and the Europeans started fighting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, it was it was indigenous people fighting
other indigenous people, oh wow, for their beaver drapt because
of but it was because of colonization.
Speaker 1: Because they could sell them, and so it was market
hunting basically, right, it was taking more than you need
that right, what did Yeah, how did the beavers affect
I mean, when you've got a beaver deentsity that high,
how did that affect the landscape there?
Speaker 2: Well, so I think that there we have all these
species on our landscape today that you know, they're really
we're like why is this? Why is it here? You know,
because we don't have any habitat for it. And these
are largely species that are endemic to these like meadow
like environments, which we don't really have a natural analog
for because we don't really have fire. And for these
early successional habitats like has big areas of like purely
young forest, young trees, and probably what those those species
were sustained by it was just this constant flux of
different beaver created habitat. So you have like the open
water habitat, and the beavers would like utilize all the resources,
eat all the trees around there, and they would like
go somewhere else, and then that open water habitat would
become we call it a beaver meadow, which creates all
these you know herbaceous plant diversity. Looks like a meadow
with joke, you know, joe high weed.
Speaker 1: And set basically where more alike can reach the ground. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And then and then they would go from that
to being like a shrubland, and then it would go
from that to being like a young forest, and then
the beers would come back and it would start all
over again.
Speaker 1: God, man, have you have you been to Museum of
Natural History in New York City?
Speaker 2: I was there last week.
Speaker 1: Man, I'm fine.
Speaker 2: I was in New York for a thing. Yeah, it
was so cool. Went there basically every time I'm in
New York City.
Speaker 1: I went there once and I tried the in for free,
and then I fucking griped. You know, I'm like a
cheap attank. I griped about the twenty five dollars price.
It's probably fucking thirty how or something, you know, I
did like a Polly Walnuts scripe about the price. I
fucking paid it. Anyway, went in. The person I was
with was like getting embarrassed. She was like, she's from
she was from Europe. You know, they don't do that
over there. But anyway, but we went in and then
I just I was in looking at all their little
dioramas because back in the day, they used to be
the way that you would show people, uh you know,
could before you know, photogra I mean there were photographs,
but not you wouldn't find like entire picture books on
like the Namib desert or a certain region of the world.
So these you know, bondanists and mammal experts biologists would
form you know, make those little dioramas to kind of
portray the habitat the people and the plants were remarkable,
like the plant models and some of those are remarkable,
and all the plants are listed, you know, on the side.
Speaker 2: So I got it just like I'm like they listed
the Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was so jazzed on that. I was like, this
is fucking great, man, this is so cool. Like Field
Museum in Chicago has a few of those too. They've
got to they've but I think they've got a Northeast
this is where I'm going with this. They've got but
they've got a well Witchy at Diorama too, which is
like one day when if I, you know, whenever I croak,
I want my ashes putting like the well Witchy at Diorama,
if one of my friends can sneak them in there,
and then maybe like in the salsa bar at Taco Pee,
you know, which is like a local taco chain down here.
But anyway, but you know, the dioramas, I went to
the one. I went to one of them, and you know,
it was like a Northeast woodland and I was like, fuck,
this is this is so beautiful and you can't see this,
you know, in like ninety nine percent of the places
that it used to be like now. Because I think
of the Northeast and I think of I mean, well,
so much of the United States is hideous really to
be honest, but at least the human infrastructure. I mean,
it's the ugliest landscape in the first world. But I
think of the Northeast and I think of like that sign,
you know, like that area of like Pennsylvania that's always
used in the memes where it's got like Lewis and
Clark and the fucking you know, and they're like looking
over this valley of like Amaco signs and like dollar
generals and shit. And because I think that's what I
think of, Like everything's developed, but you know, I'd love
to see little bits of those remnant forests that are
well maintained. I mean, I was just in a place
in Florida, like that Tiger Creek and it was like, fuck,
this is old growth long leaf pines, old growth pinus clossa,
these grasslands that are just incredible, all in this bleach
white sand. It was like, man, people have no idea
what they're missing, you know.
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, I think about that, like the because I'm
a birder and and birds, if you really get to
know birds, they like tell you so much about what's
what's present on the landscape. And you know, when I
go to these forests that that actually you know, have
naturally or through human intervention developed these qualities that we
think the forest here had for thousands of years, there's
so much more, you know, and it's like it's such
a weird thing like on this landscape here, and I
think this is probably true across most of the US
where we have we think we know what is normal,
you know, and we think we know like what a
forest is supposed to look like, or whatever, what an
ecosystem of any type is supposed to look like, and
we really don't. We're really what we're seeing are these
landscapes and these ecosystems that have been so altered that
they don't, you know, provide nearly as much capacity for
life and for all of these beautiful things that than
they could, you know. So like here a big thing
that I do, you know, on my land and in
my work as a forest or on my client's lands,
is like utilizing forest management as a tool to take
these forests, which most of the forests on our landscape
now just reverted from agricultural land within the last hundred years,
and they probably to become like what we call an
old growth forest might take another two hundred years. But
if we cut trees in the right way, we can
divide up these habitat qualities that old growth forests had
here and that are underrepresented across our landscape, that old
growth forests had for thousands of years, which are the
all these qualities that directly correlate to habitats for species
of concern, habitats for all of this diversity of forest birds,
which are all declining or bacious species, all the whole
suite of these different species on our landscape. And so
like a lot of the work that I do is
sort of restoring those old growth characteristics actively.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's wild to me that you know people
that I mean, I guess it's I mean, I guess
I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying you knew
people that were like involved. Like anyone who's even like
a borderline naturalist knows that like hands off approach is ridiculous, it's.
Speaker 2: Bullshit, you know, No, just the normals.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, because I mean it's just people who don't
spend time there. Yeah, right, exactly, cause it's right. It's
I mean, humans have been managing land in good ways
and bad ways for the last three hundred thousand years
that we've been a species, you know, and probably before
that when we were just crazy, you know, fucking hominids
running around because hominids are a little bit older than humans,
but you know, probably long before then. But you know,
you get when you don't manage it you get what
I call the shitty woods syndrome. It's like the sh
it's the shitty woods. It's what I grew up with
in Chicago, Like, why the fuck you want to go
to a forest preserve. It's a bunch of shitty woods.
It's overgrown with invasive buckthorn, it's you can't walk through it.
There's ticks everywhere. Uh, it's over popular with deer. There's
deer on the dead on the side of the road
all the time because there's nothing to keep them in check.
There's no predators or human hunters, you know, And why
do you want to go there? But then when you
see a landscape that but you're also you're seeing you know,
I would think that when I was a kid, not
knowing that I was looking at, you know, the result
of one hundred and fifty years of terrible land management
and idiocy and just that kind of mentality like hands off,
you know. And if I could have seen it five
hundred years ago, I'm sure it would have been an
amazing place to spend time in those the woods, like
the forest reserves of Chicago or the prairies too. I mean,
the prairies are the same way if they don't get fire,
they look like shit. And I imagine most places in
eastern North America because of how much more rain the
east gets than the west. You know, the burn intervals
in eastern North America were like two to three years,
two to five and if five was pushing it. But
you know, and if you don't burn them, it's just
it gets smothered and it looks like shit, and the
tips get really bad and the chiggers get really bad,
and you know.
Speaker 2: So yeah, well, and where I've been, like I just
did a week of talks in Kentucky and southern Indiana,
you know, and out there it's like not only does
it get you know, sort of likes messed up a
little bit, it becomes a forest. These historic grasslands like
a big thing out there is they've got these closed
scanpy forests now and they're experiencing this thing messification, you know,
where they're becoming more and more fire resistant due to
indigenous display from the landscape, from natural fire suppression, and
from the loss of bison to a certain extent, these
herds of hundreds of millions of bison, they've had what
was these prairies and savannahs and oak woodlands to come
these closed canopy forests, and so now they have to
get people to you know, to do all this really
intensive stuff to bring them back. You know, it's like
it's not even like it's just like a crappier prairie.
It's like it's a it's a forest. And everybody's like, well,
don't we love forests, you know, don't we love for us?
And it's like yeah, but that you know, there's there's
a certain amount of you've got to be a little
bit brave. And so one thing that's actually joey to
this point about like the things that people say to
get out of, you know, do it having to do
any management. So here in and Vermont in the Northeast,
there are whole organizations that are based on opposing forest management,
just being like all like literally institutionally based a they're
just trying to you know, all every forest needs is
to be left alone and everything will be fine. And
really what it is is it's a not in my
backyard thing, and it's just not wanting, you know, being
uncomfortable with those changes that happen when they manage forests.
They're anti burning, they're anti any kind of cutting of
trees anti game management in many cases.
Speaker 1: Does anybody tell them to shut up? I mean, or
are they just rich so they've got to do But.
Speaker 2: They're well, they're persistent, they're often you know, well resourced.
And the thing about it that that confuses people is
that they have a narrative which is for a late
to delay people so much easier to understand, which is
we love trees. We love for it because you know,
they don't the trees.
Speaker 1: They think nature and they think trees. They don't there's
they can never and it must be.
Speaker 2: That if we love trees, like cutting trees is bad.
But so an interesting thing to think about in terms
of the psychology of people is, you know, those are
the same people that often pacific about wanting to empower
indigenous peoples and justice and all this stuff.
Speaker 1: And when I went, oh, I know, I believe I'm
very familiar with the liberal self flagellating Caucasian Don't worry,
I've got plenty of experiences.
Speaker 2: So but but here's an interesting thing that I discovered
is so when I went out to these places that
had historically burned, Indigenous people have been burning there for
ten thousand years plus. Uh, you know. I was like, huh, well,
they have some of those groups that are anti management,
anti intervention. I was like, I wonder which drive for
them will be stronger. Will it be the drive to
you know, like like represent indigenous folks well and want
to you know, take care of that, or will it
be the drive to say no management? And these people
believe they're so against any kind of intervention in ecosystems
that their position is that there were never indigenous people
there and that they never burned.
Speaker 1: Damn, that's crazy. That's just by this logic they well
what kept them out?
Speaker 2: How they would rather disempower any erase entire peoples than
deal with the uncomfortable reality of the fact that, like
we have to take action there.
Speaker 1: Where are you finding these That's what I'm saying. It
just seems like because I anyone, I mean to think
that people actually listen to them, like anyone in city
government or estate government listens to people like that. They
just seem so clueless where.
Speaker 2: Those people their narrative is so much cleaner for often
for politicians. So like in Massachusetts a couple of years ago,
they succeeded in getting the entire state of Massachusetts to
pass a moratorium on any management on state lands. So
it's not it's not like a fringe thing.
Speaker 1: If this is a moratorium on on.
Speaker 2: What any any management for wildlife, any management for anything
on state lands.
Speaker 1: Really like, don't touch anything, don't no burning, no cutting,
no masticating, no really nothing. Of course, Oh god, good
luck with the good luck with the tic problem. Then
you know what is not I will say, I will
say it's nice about that the alpha gal for everybody
that alpha gal meat syndrome, you know, where you can't
eat meat.
Speaker 2: Probably probably good for the environment.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's lesser impact. Yeah, it'll cause the whole
meat industry to at least in the Northeast to collapse.
That's good, you know, because that really does I mean
the amount of energy it takes. And the way Americans
eat meat too. I mean, I'm not anti meat at all.
Vegans are some of the most annoying people, or some
vegans are some of the most annoying people have that
I ever ever interacted with. But you know, the way
Americans shovel fucking hamburgers into their mouths when like, if
you're if you're living like a triath running triathlons and
living like an extremely athletic life. I can understand that,
but like, no, man, you're like sitting in your car
three hours a day and then sitting at a desk.
You're sitting most Americans sit down most of the waking
hours of the day. You don't need to eat that shit.
It's horrible for you. You're gonna get colon cancer. But anyway, Yeah,
there was an article that came out in the New
York Times a month or two ago about all these
the burgeoning vegan scene, the involuntarily vegan scene. Uh in
Cape cod in the northeast. It's like, oh, yeah, they
all get the tics are so bad, they all get
alpha gal they can't they develop meat allergies, and if
it's really bad, they developed dairy allergies. And now they
had their like obligate vegans. So that's crazy though, So
you can't, you can't do anything. And that's in Massachusetts
for the whole state.
Speaker 2: Now. So now that now they've relaxed it and they're
able to do some stuff, but it's been a it's
a struggle for them with every single thing that they do.
Speaker 1: Damn, you gotta find some tweakers. To set fire to
the woods. It's it's what they do in California, you know. Yeah,
there's there's some guy it's like a bag of meth
told them to go light the woods and the fucking
Santa Monica on fire. And I don't know anyway, sorry,
go ahead, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I know. It's just it's it's a big deal out here,
you know. And again it's like, uh, one of the
hard things is that the narrative that I have to
tell and what I do in like the book and
stuff is like this much more nuanced and complex narrative
about like where we are with these ecosystems and where
ecosystems are at and these really counterintuitive things that you
got to do to take care of them. And the
narrative for those folks is so easy, you know, and
it's easier for people to understand. And people are like,
there's so much stuff that people are dealing with that
they need to figure out what they think about and
everything that they're just like, you know, okay, great, you know,
trees good logging or cutting trees bad. You know. Yeah,
And of course that's not the nuanced perspective that we need,
but it allows them to go on with their lives.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think that's that's for anybody who's
into ecological science or biological sciences and outdoors today. It's
that's the uphill battle as you're you know, this is
after two or three hundred years of these places just
being destroyed by you know, the mind set that came
here in fourteen ninety two, and then having to work
up hill. I mean, so much has been a race.
There's so few examples to show of what you know,
management looks like compared to what there used to be.
And so it's just the shifting baseline syndrome. You know,
every generation thinks what they're growing up with is normal,
not knowing that they're inheriting the ruined spoils of their
parents and their grandparents, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's what I tell people here. I'm like,
we all have a sense for the forests that cover
this landscape, like what we think of forest is supposed
to look like, and you know, the forests and you know,
we have this shifting baseline syndrome, this new idea of
what a normal forest is supposed to look like, and
the forests that are here today have nothing to do
with the forests that we're here thousands of years ago.
They may head to some of the same species, but
they don't have any of the qualities that the forests
that we're here for thousands of years. Not only do
we have a shifting baseline, a different understanding of like
what a forest is supposed to look like, but also
a totally different understanding of like the capacity of our
forests to support life.
Speaker 1: Well, it's it's a machine with half the pieces missing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And people are just like, you know, good enough,
and it's like, well no, it's not good enough. Yeah,
And it's like, you know, they're just those of us
who go a little deeper can be like there are
all these amazing and important things that just aren't represented.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you got to get you got to get their
asses outside, like the proverbial you, not you personally, but
like I think about that with myself all the time,
Like I try to lead plan walks and shit down
here in South Texas, like just get the fuck outside.
Like there were people that I did a plant walk
like two or three years ago. There were kids that
grew up here that have never been to some of
the places I took them. I was like, fuck, that's crazy,
Like I didn't even know that existed, you know, And yeah,
a bunch of people met each other and it became
friends and then you know, just stuff like that, just
getting people out there, you know, because they're not going
to see it on TV.
Speaker 2: And they're not going to see it. Like the other
thing too. I think about this with birds all the time.
Like I grew up in this teeny little town in
southeastern Vermont called Saxon's River, which is three hundred people
lived there. And I went back there because my mom
wanted me to give a talk at the little like
community center, and I was there this summer and as
I was walking to the community center, I heard this
little chirping, bubbling call and I knew what it was,
chimney swifts. And I looked up and they were just
chimney swifts hunting above my head the time all the time,
and it was really interesting species. They're actually like they're
an old growth bird, so they historically roosted in these
big hollow trees. They can only they roost like hanging
horizontally like a bat, and they can't only take off
from a vertical, not from a horizontal, and they're just
like the general second worst hunting over our heads all
the time. And so when all those forests were cleared,
they figured out that they could roost in these chimneys,
and that that made it really into declining as chimneys
get capped and as people use them less. But anyway,
so I was like walking there and I was hearing
and suddenly seeing all these chimney swifts, and I realized
that my whole life, for eighteen years that I lived
there in that town, I had been hearing and seeing
chimney swifts, but neither hearing nor seeing them at the
same time because I wasn't tuned into them. I didn't
know what they were, I didn't know where to look
for them, I didn't know to care to look up
and so keep my ears open. And then once I
learned about birds, suddenly they were like there.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And one way that you could think about it is
like that's so sad, And then another way is like,
you know, there's all these things like this, like like
you do with plants, and like I do, you know
with trees. Maybe like that we can take people out
into the woods and if we can just like show
them something, they will see more.
Speaker 1: It's waking them up. Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's like,
I guess it's a little sad when you think about
it like that. But I try to think about it
in a way where it's like, wow, you chance, suddenly
the whole world changes when you wake up to this
shit and you wake up to everything around you like
it changed. I get. I've gotten so many emails from
people tell me, you change the way I look at everything.
Started using INAP, I started learning about all these things,
you know, I was like, oh, yeah, it's so much
nicer to focus on on the weeds growing on the
Median strip than on the billboards for some fucking slob
with a laminated face. You know. It's it's uh, it
changed me. Okay, So changing subjects slightly. How did you so?
Tell me about your background? How did you get into forestry?
How did you get into time? How'd you get into
spending time outside? How did you start on the path
that you're on now?
Speaker 2: So the you know, it's funny because like when I
hear folks often that are in our fields talk about
how they get into it, they're always like, I was
always the nature kid, you know, I was always into
forests or out in the woods, out on the wherever outside,
and and that wasn't actually in my experience at all.
I mean, I grew up in this very rural place,
like I said, this little town, three hundred people, surrounded
by forests. But I just what I really wanted was
to just get out of there. And it was boring
and it was dull and whatever. And I ended up
getting a scholarship to go to University of Vermont, and
when I was there, still didn't know what I wanted
to do, didn't have any real direction. And it happened
that my high school girlfriend, who was still dating, she
decided she wanted to go on this like five month
wilderness program with kind of it wasn't outward bound, but
it was sort of outward bound like. And she went
on this five month expedition and she came back and
she had just had this like life changing experience, and
we had this moment where we weren't connecting, and I
thought we were going to break up, you know, because
I'd just been you know, doving around in my dorm
room or whatever. And so I said, you know what
I'm going to do. I'm going on a wilderness expedition
and the next one with that program left in two
weeks and I went on and it was a six
month expedition. We skied north for three months and we
built a canoe and the canoe back down was the expedition?
Speaker 1: Where did you go?
Speaker 2: And it was? It started in southern New Hampshire and
then we went up this this kind of cool grassroots
trail that runs the length of Vermont called the Catamount Trail,
that's a ski trail, and then we camped out great
by the Canadian border and uh, and then we canoed
back on a series basically basically on the Connecticut River,
but like on a series of rivers to get to it.
Speaker 1: Damn.
Speaker 2: And so when after that I ended up, I was
in sort of like the primitive skills world for a
while and I worked as a wilderness guide. I was
living in this like yeur with a furbough floor in
the woods to Maine for a year, and then I
got a letter from the University of Vermont that told
me I had to come back or I was gonna
lose my scholarship. And I literally literally I like I
I looked at a paper list of majors from the
University of a mode that I must have printed out
at the library or something, and I saw forestry and
I didn't know what it was, but I was like, yeah,
that's the word forest in it, so we'll try that.
And that's literally how I ended up deciding to study forestry.
But it was this interesting thing too, like a bit
of a you know experience for me of like I
had been living in the woods, you know, working as
a guide, and I came back when I went to
back to school. I came to it like with so
much ego because I just thought that I understood forests
perfectly and our relationship with them perfectly. And then it's
like you actually learn about them, and I was like,
holy smokes, they changed, you know that the what forests
are changed and the measure is necessary to care for
them changed a lot because I just realized that I
hadn't really understood them that well.
Speaker 1: So in school, where you taught from where you taught
from an ecologicalspective or were you taught from an industry perspective?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think UVM is much more on the
ecological side. UBM is the abbreviation for the University of Vermont.
They is much more on the ecological side of the spectrum.
But still forestry is interesting because like old school forestry
is definitely we call it cores and boards. You know,
it's like about production, and that perspective, at least in
certain areas, is fading away and being replaced by a
much more holistic understanding of like, you know, what we're
really trying to do is not to grow products, you know,
to grow timber, but to grow forests, you know, and
like when we when it is appropriate, how are we
going to harvest timber from those forests? But it's not
like about that. But then again, if you go to
like the southeast or the northwest or the far northeast,
and very much is this like production mindset where it's
like we are growing wood, we're growing fiber, they would say. So,
like I think when I did it, it was sort of
this mix of these different things. And then an interesting
thing that happened to me was that, you know, my
first job, I was working in these sort of industrial
forests and the Adirondacks, and then and then I worked
for this consulting forestry company in Vermont, and you know,
a big part of the job is like is like
the logistics of managing a force, So it becomes about
managing the ecology and more about like working with these
loggers and roads and trails and all the markets and
timber and all these logistics. And I got like pulled
in that direction. And then I got another job as
a service force or working for the State of Vermont,
which is just sort of like a public resource, and
that allowed me to like take a step back and
remember what it's we're doing this for, which is not
to cut a bunch of wood, but to have healthy ecosystems.
And it actually ended up now I'm very grateful for
that the experience that I had which was more focused
on like logistics, because now what it allows me to
do is to know how to work with the tools
that we have, like these loggers and this equipment and
all this stuff in a way to affect these ecological goals. Right.
So it's like you can do a lot of damage
with a piece of log and equipment.
Speaker 1: We know this, we can for us, I can think
of a few strip malls. I'd like to take large
pieces of logging equipment.
Speaker 2: Well, and it's but you can you can use it
in a different way and you can do some pretty
profoundly positive stuff and about how you manage it and
and so like then I was like, you know, how
subversive is that that we what we're going to do
is we're gonna take this equipment that you know, at
the very least was not created to you know, restore ecosystems,
and then that's exactly what we're going to use it for.
And that's been sort of my journey since then.
Speaker 1: Do you do you think the I mean, do you
see among more people who are into logging, because it
doesn't seem like it doesn't seem like logging should be
anti environmentalist, you know, or pre hugger as they call it.
It seems like, listen, you're you're taking from this living machine.
You want the machine in the best running shape possible,
and just coming in and taking everything is the absolute
most like monkey brained, lowest common denominator shit for brained approach,
Like you're going to burn out the land. It's fucking stupid.
Like you want to learn, like as a loger, you
should want to learn ecology, Like how does this machine
function so I can extract without fucking breaking it? You know?
Do you see more of that?
Speaker 2: I agree?
Speaker 1: Do you see more of that coming, or is it
still like this like politicized thing between land managers and
environmentalists and logging industry.
Speaker 2: I think it depends. I mean, I think that I'm
sort of in a unique position to make both of
those groups mad because because I, you know, I do
management on land and that makes you know, the more
old school environmentalists mad. And then I also talk about
all these other values of you know, we're managing for
biodiversity or managing for climate resilience, which makes all the
old school loggers and forestry types mad at me. But
really those you know, it's a funny thing because those
sort of two polarities they galvanize each other and they
beat up each other, and they're not even oppositional, really,
they just both need to acknowledge that, you know, they're
they have this really tunnel vision mindset about what we're
supposed to do here and what we need to do here,
and just open it up a little bit and open
yourself up to the possibility that, like, we can you know,
we can achieve multiple things. And the answers to some
of these questions, if we're really asking the big questions
are not what we would think so example of this
is is like, how in the world is it that
we have gotten to a place where environmentalists like don't
like wood? You know, like wood is an amazing resource
and it's and it's like we could be using wood
and all of these applications that we're now using steel
and concrete or or fucking plastic, Like.
Speaker 1: Where do you mean that? Where do you mean environmentalists
that don't like wood?
Speaker 2: Though?
Speaker 1: Is that a is this is like a thing that
people that they don't want you to.
Speaker 2: Use it because of like it's because of like anti
logging sentiment. Wow, that it becomes like and then a
lot of times the funny thing is like this not
in my backyard. By the way, I think the not
in my backyard thing is like one of the most harmless,
harmful things within our entire culture.
Speaker 1: It's just rich people's it's just fucking rich people that
And that's why I was saying they own the politicians too,
because it's you know, if you're someone in a city,
even in like a city, I'm not even talking about
like you know, uh, citizens United, and I'm talking about
if you're someone in a city of money, the civic
leaders and you know, city officials are going to listen
to you more than they're just going to listen to
someone who's like a working class you know, single mom
who's a nurse, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and yeah, And it's a lot of like
and those are the you know, oftentimes there is there
does seem to be a correlation there between that, you know,
the people who have that sentiment and and that kind
of stuff where it's like we're it, you know, nothing
against people who like, you know, have strong opinions about
how we should be harvesting resources and stuff like that.
But it just can't be about you can't be that
you're like against everything and for nothing. We're like, where
do people think stuff comes from?
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, you got it. And also there's ways to
do it without again, without breaking the machine, the living machine.
Speaker 2: Right. So like this, and this is the thing that
I tell people a lot too, is that there's there
is a funny sort of double standard that we grape
about in the forestry community all the time, which is
that the vibe is like everybody loves agriculture and everybody
hates forestry, and we're like, but what about the fact
that like, you know, here we can do forestry. We
can harvest resources while maintaining or even you know, like
augmenting the function and the integrity and the resilience of
a living system, which is whereas everywhere that we do agriculture,
it's like this compromise, you know, or that those ecosystems
are no longer intact. Like we we we make compromises
all the time, and it's you know, it's not about
do we have to make any compromises or whatever, about
like do we want to make the right ones? And
with agriculture, we're like, yeah, I got to eat, you know.
And I think that the thing we talk about all
the time is if we could just get people to
appreciate forestry the way that they appreciate agriculture. But but
the thing about it that's weird is that the perception
sometimes is we're the one who are ruining the ecosystems,
whereas that same perception isn't applied to like the people
who are actually ruining these ecosystems, or the people who
have like you know, building houses in places where there
used to be an ecosystem, or you know, or we're
growing food on the site of or they used to
be an ecosystem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's you know, it's it's a weird
kind of misanthropy. And believe me, I get misanthropy when
I mean I love people as individuals. This is like
a thing George carl And used always say, I love
people as individuals when you meet them and they know
no one's watching them, and they're just interacting with you,
and they're not performing, and they're not trying to, you know,
because a lot of most people are full of shit
to some extent, all of us, including me and you.
I'm sure everyone's trying to, like, everyone's trying to not
look stupid. Everyone's trying, they're performing. And sometimes but when
you meet people's individuals and it's one on one and
they're not performing and they're not faking it, you know
they're they're great. But when you get them in large groups,
they're fucking They can do horrible things and they're all
they know people are watching and they're going to behave differently,
or they're just not thinking and they're just parroting the
ideologies or the things that someone next to them said
without thinking about it. But so I get I get
the misanthropy thing. But that's like a form of misanthropy,
just like everything we do is terrible. We can't you know,
like no logging, no any or you know, when people
say that the human our invasive arguments, that drives me nuts.
It's like, that's just the wrong You're not using the
word correctly. You think you know what it means, and
you don't. You have no fucking clue, you know. I
just yeah, I think there's ways to you know again,
once you realize you look at the ecoism as a
living machine that you inherit. You're borrowing. It's not yours.
You're borrowing it. You got to hand it down once
you kick the bucket and leave, you know, before they
put your ashes in the taco polenke salsa bar. You know,
when you view it like that, it's like, Okay, there's
a way to do this. It's like when I meet
people who are against hunting, it's like, yeah, I guess
I was when I was fucking ten and had no
idea how the world worked, Like when I learned out
an ecosism works. Like the Kaibab Plateaux experiment in the thirties.
You wipe out all the pumas, the deer get population
gets so big it then crashes, and you you've now
caused much more suffering than would have been if you
would have just let pumas snatch you know, deer every
couple of days. You know. So I just again, it
just comes to educating people, but also letting exposing people
to it, getting people out into these places and seeing.
Did you ever do you know anything about Japanese civil culture?
Speaker 2: No, not really.
Speaker 1: They were one of the first countries to start practicing forestry,
and I think it was maybe it was kind of
fucked up. It was like an authoritarian thing the emperor.
It is like sixteen hundred and I might be totally
fucking this up, but I only know about it because
I was really into Cryptomaria Japonica, which is like the
Japanese ancestor of the redwood, or the Japanese relative of
the California redwood. And they call them sugi. They're these
wonderful trees. They fucking massive, they look like them and
they make wonderful wood. But there are these precious trees
along with Camisiprius pacifia and a few other conifers, and
so you know, they were logging everything back five hundred
years ago, and it was getting so bad that finally
the emperors, I'm not sure who else, but people stepped in.
We're like, we need to figure out a better way
to do this, because we're going to run out. This
is we're going to break the machine, you know, And
so they started. They were one of the first countries
or the first nations to start practicing silviculture. And I'm
so curious how they did it. You know, if it
was like the way they do it like here, where
it's just everything's planted in lines, or if they were
trying to actually like restore forests, you know, like more
of like a permaculture version of of silvi culture. Anyway,
it doesn't matter, so I'm getting us off on attentiy.
Speaker 2: But the European style was like super I mean it's
it's different now and it's evolving, but like it was
super plantation.
Speaker 1: Okay, orchards.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's sort of like purre it in you know,
like not just that like it's a good way to
grow would but it's like a more refined way to
grow a forest, which is nuts. But then that you know,
a lot of early conceptions of forestry and sort of
like the first quote unquote forestry that was brought here
to this continent was based on those Western European models,
the Gifford Pinchot you know, the these kind of intensively
managed condifer plantations. Yeah, you know, and it was like
that also the weird the weirdness of like the wanting
to have a more like refined forest in a way,
or a forest that was like, uh, you know, didn't
have any waste quote unquote waste, you know, didn't have
any inefficiency. And that was like the highest thing, which
is of course like what they call waste and inefficient
that we call like ecological complexity.
Speaker 1: Right right, I call that a deranged mind processes just
just pure anthroposcentric. If it's you know, yeah, waste or inefficient,
well that's the thing that you know, when you when
you come from this deranged mindset that doesn't know anyth
about anything else. It's just pure anthropicentrism. You see, you're
looking at things that have a very important function and
a very important you know, role to play, and you
view them as wasteful because they don't benefit you directly.
They benefit you, but not directly. There's a couple other
steps involved. You know, they feed something that feeds something
that you end up needing. And again that's that's where
I see this monkey brain mentality. It's like, oh, just
you know, just so simplistic, uneducated and enlightened. And that's
what I you know, I'm I'm I'm glad things seem
like they're starting to change. There's more people pointing this out,
you know, But what is it in terms of like
the forestry that you guys do and that you and
I guess we didn't even get to that yet. But
what do you I guess what is a better model
and what do you advocate for?
Speaker 2: I think, you know, so the better the better model
is just sort of like switching it on its head,
where it's like, I think for a long time there's
been either this the preservation mentality, which is like the
hands off mentality, or seeing ecosystems like their commodity or something.
And I think that, you know, we think about it
in terms of like the triad, which is a model
that was developed especially to deal with kind of like
the spotted out controversy in the late eighties early nineties
by doctor Jerry Franklin and others West and you know,
they were like, we need all of these different things
from our forests. We need all these ecological benefits obviously
from our forests, we need all these human cultural benefits,
economic benefits, all these other things, and how are we
going to do it? And what they came up with
was this idea of having sort of like three broad
categories of forest management. One is like the sort of
unmanaged reserve. One is this the more industrial for us,
for forests are managed for products. And then there's this
middle category, which you could call like an ecologically managed
for us. It's just basically a forest that's managed for
multiple benefits. And the interesting thing about the triad is
that those three categories are in relationship with each other. Right,
So if you want everything, you want as much of
that preservation, hands off stuff as a as you can
possibly get, then we also need to have more of
that industrial for us. And if you want fewer of
those industrial for us, we need fewer of those reserves
and more of this sort of middle category of forests.
And I think that the middle category we're managing for us,
not as a as a commodity, is the place that
I kind of inhabit it, and even more so I
would say I'm interested in managing these ecosystems and then
thinking about for us products as an output that comes
from these ecosystems. But it's not what we're actually managing for, right,
It's like the ecosystem is the thing we're managing for,
and from healthy ecosystems you can harvest products. And it's
a false it's a false dichotomy right where we think
that it needs to be one thing or the other one. Actually,
you know, we we can absolutely be managed for healthy
forests and managing for healthy landscapes and managing for species
of concern and managing for biodiversity have underrepresented habitats, all
of these things. Not every time are we able to
like you know, actually in few cases are we able
to maximize the return of timber. But we're still able
to produce timber. And actually, an interesting thing to think
about is that, you know, I did this talkdown in
New Jersey, and in New Jersey they basically lost their
whole forest products industry, which you might think of, oh,
it's just an economic loss, but it's actually an ecological
loss because their ability, because they don't have the ability
to make their management work commercial. It all has to
be non commercial. So it all it needs to be
paid for from like federal or state grants or from
out of the pockets of wealthy landowners. So you know,
it basically means that they're doing about two percent of
the management work that they could be if they were
just able to work with loggers and sell some wood
off of those products. So it's like a so suddenly
like they can't do any you know, they're doing a
teeny tiny fraction of the work that they want to
do for for fire and for rare species.
Speaker 1: There's no man, it's basically going on.
Speaker 2: If we allow ourselves to like be like, you know,
how do we use this these tools that we have
to affect positive changes and ecosystems and then think about
the timber more as like a byproduct of that process
more than its own thing, then I think we can
actually get to a better place, you know, both ecologically
and economically in the long term.
Speaker 1: So Ethan, it sounds like what you're saying. It sounds
like what you're saying is that you're you're you're saying,
if we make sure the land itself, in this living
system itself is healthy, then we'll and we focus on
that and make that the main priority. Then just by
default we will have a good amount of timber to
harvest without breaking the machine instead of having this again,
this really short sighted, you know, short term gain, long
term loss idea of let's just make as much funny
as possible and focus on on not wasting anything and
letting any potential profit go to waste. You know, it's
which is a really again, that's like the way a
ten year old would look at something like a greedy,
spoiled ten year old. It's not the way like an
intelligent grown human adult.
Speaker 2: No, it's and it's not the like it only that
mindset only works if we're thinking about it on such
a short time scale, right, It only works like if
we actually allow ourselves to think about ecosystems more broadly
and how we rely on them more broadly, and what
we want our long term future on this planet to
be as a species. Right, Like, none of those decisions
make any sense. They're shooting ourselves in the foot.
Speaker 1: The parallels, the parallels between what we're talking about right
now with forestry and the larger American problem probably exists
many other places too, but I'm most familiar with America. Unfortunately,
the parallels are just I mean, this is like we've
just summed up the short term gain. Long term loss
is like a mentality that's taken over corporate America right now,
and it's taken over universities, and it's taken I mean,
you know, don't maintain for the health of the system itself.
Just just neurotically fixate on these little things that will
bring you the most money and the most return and
ignore everything else. And that's meanwhile, like society as a
whole and the land as a whole and the biosphere
as a whole just starts crumbling and falling apart, and
you can't figure out why. You know, it's it's a
fucking disease. It sounds like, well yeah.
Speaker 2: And this is the thing that like I feel like,
you know, when we think about this long term management, like,
you know, in long term I guess I would say stewardship,
which is this not a new concept, right, but a
very ancient concept on this landscape, and uh, it provides
for like all the stuff that we want, right, It
provides us with resources, and it provides us with uh,
you know, a beautiful, beautiful life with all these amazing,
beautiful communities and all the things that we need to live.
It's right there, and you know, it just doesn't allow
us to, uh, this short term thinking just doesn't allow
us to grasp this incredible opportunity. I'm the opportunity to
like to have this, you know, this beautiful world that
we get to give to our Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know. And I used to think that that
mentality because I've been shitting on this mentality for a
long time. Obviously not in forestry, because I don't know
much about forestry, uh except that I hate the way
plantation forests look and that they're not real for us.
I used to think this was just an issue of greed,
Like it's just it's just greed, you know, it's just
Gray saw it with the with the railroad when I
worked there. I mean, you see it everywhere in society.
Let's you know, fuck the poor, fund the poor because
defund public services because we need those are wasteful and
we need to focus on what's gonna you know, enrich
the shareholders or the whatever. I use to think it
was just greed, But I mean the more I look
at it, the more I realize, like what a neurotic
fixation it is on the things that don't matter and
just complete idiocy too. I mean, it's it's incredibly stupid.
It's incredibly again, it's short term gain and long term loss.
It's stepping over a dollar to grab a dime. It's
it's sacrificing the well being of the world you live
in for things that are not that that are temperamental.
You know, it's it's just it's fucking wild. You know.
It's like it's don't worry about nuclear work as we
could just live in a hole in the ground with
our rations and you know, I can set up an
underground gym and you know, I'll have a screen that
broadcasts pictures of you know, beautiful beaches. And it's crazy,
it's it's it's like a fucking is this like the
result of lead poisoning or what just like with our species.
I'm serious, it's not a fas not a stretch, you know,
something that the neurological wiring got shorted somewhere in the
gene pool and now you've got where we're at today,
and it's like a large majority of people in power
suffer from this. It's a contagious mindset, you know.
Speaker 2: Well, and then again, like I guess that you don't
feel this in the same way, but then I feel
it sort of from both sides, where I'm like, you know,
constantly confronted with these two delusional mindsets, one of which
is that we can just commodify and exploit this biosphere
and you know, at no cost to ourselves or to
the world of the future, or maybe they just don't care.
And then the other side, which is that there's nothing
good we can do right that we like this sort
of old school environmentalist mindset where it's like our whole
job is to like just stop doing everything. And so
I've started talking about this concept that I call deep environmentalism,
which is like sort of like thinking about reimagining what
we do as environmentalists. You know, as co opted as
that term has become, I'd probably identify more as like
a conservationist than an environmentalist. But still, like, if we
were really thinking about the ideals of environmentalism, which is
to like protect this world and that's precious about it,
and we were to update that and actually make it
like that a mindset that would allow us to have
a world that we could actually live in and that
would actually sustain all the stuff we need. It would
be not just about stopping doing the bad stuff, you know,
in this sort of old school environmental mentality, which is
like silent spring and you know, the first Earth Day
and all of these really important things, but then adding
to that like an imperative to also restore ecosystems, and
also an understanding of like how are we going to
make these choices about like where we get resources from.
And I think that we would all agree that the
way that we do that is not by closing every
factory and idling every piece of log and equipment, but
it's like having real decisions about getting that stuff probably
closer to home, you know, instead of just doing what
we do now, which is displacing the impacts of our
consumption onto people's and ecosystems somewhere else that don't have
the privilege to say not in my backyard, right And
if we were to think about that stuff critically. For
a resource like wood, I think we'd want more of it,
not less. Fuck yeah, and we'd want it to be here.
Speaker 1: And also, you know, instead of doing plantations, instead of
planting orchards of trees, you know, even though it might
cost a little bit more to get in there and
harvest that when you need to, because they're not a
range in a nice line. There's other ways you could
plant things, and you could plant all the understory species
that go with them, and you could plant again to
restore a living moche.
Speaker 2: You could manage, and you could manage within you know,
the confines of like modeling our management after natural processes
that actually exist on the.
Speaker 1: Landscape's culture supposed to be. You know, I should on
permaculture at supposed to be. Yeah, it's what I should
on permaculture all the time, I really do. It's fun.
I just I've met so many kooks in that it's
become a cult. But what it is supposed to be
actually sounds pretty cool. And when you take in an
awareness of native ecology, and native just means it evolved there.
It's part of that living machine. It's it's it's all
it means. It's not like some purity tests, it's not
how far back do you have to go to make it.
When you take in the native part of it, like permaculture,
if it was like native based ecology based permaculture, it
actually sounds pretty cool. You just you know, it's like Christianity, Like,
most people who are Christians that I encounter don't actually
follow the words of Christ. They're just suckers who go
to church and then the church tells them how to
vote whatever. Uh. But uh, but you know, it's that
mentality that that humans are humids are just a cancer,
and it's like, no, we're fucking not. The modern economic
mindset is a cancer. But there's other ways to live.
Like there's elements of modern society that are you know,
poisonous and flawed, but you know, humans as a species
are not. We've got examples of many other ways that
humans have lived. Oh sure that has not destroyed you know,
or been about shitting where we eat, you know, and
there's come on, well, you know.
Speaker 2: What's What's one of the things too, is like if
we condemn ourselves, we're going to lose out on probably
like our ecosystem's best chance to to be you know,
look into a better future in any kind of time
frame that's probably relevant for our space. Yeah, yeah, Like
I think I have a funny story to tell you
about about this, which is that I went to a
forestry conference out in Washington, and you know, the second
that I hit the Oregon border. The only type of
silvi culture. Don't want to have a forest dres. I
saw it was these big one hundred and twenty eight here,
clear cuts, you know, and like that we're being replanted
with these monocultures are dug.
Speaker 1: For Yeah, familiar.
Speaker 2: And then when I went I went to the Boresty
conference and I was like, hey, like, you ever hear
about anybody who doesn't do one hundred and twenty eight
clear cuntsentery playing with the monoculture of douglasher And everybody
was like, you know, I feel like I've heard of
someone who do. I'm like, oh my god. Because so
one of the things that is interesting is that we
go into these we get caught in these loops, so
like loops such as you know, they're like, okay, well,
you know, this is the species of tree that our
mills are set up for, right, and this is the
species and the size and the type of management that
is a good fit for the logging equipment that the
logging contractors that we have is you know, and without
forgetting right that the reason that those loggers have that
equipment and the reason that those mills have that you know,
the capacity to take that one species and that one
size of tree is because of the management techniques that
was producing the wood for that right, So it's like
it feeds itself. And then at some point you just
got to ask a question. It doesn't have to be
like how do we end logging in Oregon? It's like,
how do we just do this in a little bit
of a better way so that we can still have
all of these all these economic benefits and all of
these cultural benefits and still you know, have this workforce
that's there, but then just to infuse that with a
little bit more ecological you know, thoughtfulness and and you
know like maybe plants another species of tree.
Speaker 1: Or yeah, maybe you don't just want one that's just
that you know there seems like that might be a
flaw in the thinking. I think, yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: I think maybe like let them like you know, just
like maybe have some areas where you let them grow
bigger than forty years old. I think, like it's not hard.
Speaker 1: You know, if I bet if you take some of
those beef boys, and I said it with respect, it's
like a lot you know. The because I lived in
sisk County for a while, Siske County California, Northern California
where I saw it was brutal. Some of the shit
I saw up there. In terms of forestry, it was
all Southern Pacific Lumber Company, which I think was affilly
with a railroad. And then it was Sierra Pacific. And
I had friends that were botanists that would do surveys
for Sierra Pacific, but they would just God, they just
fucked up some of these forests. Man, just do the plantations,
and then you'd get an understory of a Ceanotha's species,
which is in buckthorn family, rim theycy and you'd get arctostaphlos.
I think it was Pachela, which is a beautiful plant
relative of blueberries. It's ay like really red skin relative
of uber ersi, which you probably get in Vermont. And
so that would grow in the understory, and then you'd
get as the forest would grow, they would get you know,
the lower limbs of pines. It was mostly Ponderosa pine
would die, Ponderosa and Jeffrey and then you know, they
would just they would just be sitting there. But these
and these pines are planted way too close together. Like
when you plant them is a plug is a little
tube seedling. It's great. Yeah, they got ample space, but
in ten years suddenly their branches are touching. Now. I
saw this in Chile too, which is a fucking nightmare.
Like all the forestry that was done in Chile during
the Pinochet, the fascist regime in the seventies and eighties,
like those are just tinder boxes now. And with California
and Sisky County was the same way, Like the lower
branches die. So now you've just got this dry kindling
that's still attached to the trees. The branches are dead,
they got shaded out. All the understory species of like Persia,
which is in the rose family archdel staffelos. See and
know this. They're understory species that were growing with these
pines when there was still ample sunlight growing there now
but now they're in the understory, they're starting to die.
So you've just got this massive inferno waiting to go up.
And you know that guy, he's a good kid, Jesse,
the Sacramento Food forest guy. He's always talking about the
He's always you know, he's always like, this is why
the fucking pine forests, you know, they burn and blah blah.
This is not this is not a forest. This is
a fucking plantation. Blah blah. I mean, he's right that
they're horrible. I mean, I had a friend that inherited
a bunch of land. Well, they bought this property that
was abandoned lumber company in like two thousand and six,
and man, it was just rows of planted pines and
we had to go in limb up all the trees,
remove a bunch of trees like every third one, remove
all the dense underbrush like the manzanita and the sea
and of this, and then set up burn piles because
you can't you have to be really really on top
of it when you burn out west because it's so
dry and the wind is so bad. It's not like
in the East where like don't have to be on
as on top of it. And it was just a
mess to deal with. And we were doing it not
to like I mean, it was all the collegests there
like who have the land, but we were doing it
just because we were worried about the fire risk. It
was so fucking dangerous, you know. And then actually there
ended up being a big fire in Weed, California a
few years later. It was a fucking nightmare. But I mean,
I imagine and you would see like foresters all the time,
like at the school there whatever. But if you take
somebody's beef boys and you make them take in ecology
class and then you know, maybe even take them on
a field trip and give them some mushrooms and get
them to you know, fucking let them, you know, do
like have them go on solo vision quest or something
for I'm only half joking too, because then you know,
you start to think about it, You're like, man, this
is actually cool. Like I met so many people that
got into forestry. They're like, I was just getting into forestry.
I was just getting into agriculture management, and goddamn, I
thought that was actually kind of cool. Like people that
were from cultural backgrounds that were not environmentalists at all.
And I'm not an environmentalist at all. I don't call
myself an environmentalist. But people that weren't from backgrounds that
even really appreciated nature that later got into it and
they started to see and those are the people that,
it seems like, yeah, like yourself, that are best equipped
to run these living systems. And that's what it is.
You're running a living machine.
Speaker 2: I hope. So yeah, and I think there's other people
out there like me, which is just like, you know,
people who are interested in thinking outside of the box
a little bit, you know, and like being disruptors a
little bit. It doesn't take much. And it's like a
lot of these things like that. There are all these
little innovations that I've been using as I work with
loggers that they're not used to, you know, and and
make the work that they do more ecologically responsible, and
you know, they don't cost him any more money. Most
of them actually save them money. Yeah, And it's just
about being willing to You don't have to give anything
up except for you know, just breaking the norm a
little bit, and if you're comfortable doing that, you can
actually really you know, change how this stuff is done.
And the other thing I wanted to say too, speaking
of California, is you must follow Redwood's Rising.
Speaker 1: I don't, and I don't think so may platforms.
Speaker 2: This guy, griff Griffiths, he he works for Redwoods Rising,
which is this partnership between oh California's State Park, Save
the Redwoods League, and a couple other organizations. And one
of the things that they do is basically the same
management that I do, or similar management to what I
do in these redwood forests that have been clearcuts. So
the redwind forests were clear cut and then they naturally
regenerated or they compassed or they were aerial seated with
redwoods and they grew up into these really dense even
age stands of redwood trees. And so what they're doing
very similar to what I'm doing, is harvesting trees strategically
to try and create this like multiage structure. And as
they're doing that, like I am, you know, they are
generating forest products and it's totally fine. They're like, you know,
this is what allows this work to occur. And we
were harvesting redwood timber and we're actually not taking anything
away or enriching the forest, you know, and that's like
the ultimate to me, with the ultimate windwin.
Speaker 1: So explain to me what like the management that you
advocate for and how it differs from what is what
it's been the norm for so long. What do you
call that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we would call it ecological forestry, So basically,
like you know, what the old school way would be, like,
you know, we're doing all these techniques and ultimately we're
trying to do is you know, maximize return. We're trying
to grow as much timber of the highest value as
we can. We're working with multiple species, so as many
you know, high value species, high high value timber that
we possibly can get from ever given acre, and everything's
sort of focused on that. But here we don't have
a lot of plantation forestry, so it's within the context
of like utilizing natural regeneration, harvesting trees in such a
way that trees naturally regenerate, and trying to like, you know,
grow that timber as fast as possible. What I do
is we look at natural disturbance regimes, and we look
at old growth forests, and then we try to utilize
like how forests naturally experience disturbances to inform then how
we cut trees to create these natural structures, you know.
So like it's not true everywhere, but like the most
common thing that we're trying to create is we're harvesting
individual trees and small groups of trees, which are mimicking
individual tree mortality and small group mortality, you know, to
create this multi layered canopy with this multi aged forest,
with gappy, irregular canopy with tons of dead wood on
the ground. The other thing that's that's different is that historically,
when a tree got large, you would always cut it,
and you would cut it for one of two reasons.
One reason you would cut it would be because it
was big and not valuable. And if it was big
and not valuable, they would call it decadent. In quotes,
they'd call it decadent and said they had to cut
it to get it out of the way so you
could grow younger, more valuable, faster growing quote unquote rifty trees.
And if it was big and it was valuable, you
had to cut it because it was economically mature and
it had matched out actium potential value relative to the
risk of keeping it in the woods. So the results
of that is you just never had this one critical
piece of forest ecology, which is these big old trees.
And so like we also I also retain tons of
what we call biological legacy trees, which are these trees
they're almost like a like a micro reserve within a
managed stand. They're like they're basically they're being retained in perpetuity,
and their whole job is just to be big, to
be old by become a snag fall on the ground.
You know, all of those things that are attained by
trees at these later stages of life, so that the
risk and with a lot of these things, like I
get so excited just to like put deadwood on the ground,
you know, and to like create all these structures and
this multi aged structure, to have this dense understory and
overstory at mid story and these gaps and ecanopy. And
the thing that I remind people all the time is like,
if you're a bird, you know, and and you're a
bird that nests in the understory, and because all of
our forests are even age, there are all trees at
the same age, there's there's not really any good multi
age forests around. You just have nowhere to go, you know,
or you're you're working in a suboptinal habitat. When that
habitat appears on the landscape, you don't care if that
tree fell over on its own or if I cut
it down. All you care about is that that habitat
is there now. And I think that like we need
to stop being purists about some of this stuff and
just be like, how do we actually you know, create
these forests that are that are that are more full
of life. But again, so like the parts of that
that are different from old school forestry are keeping big
trees there, keeping dead wood on the ground. There's also
this this you know in the air quotes utilization mentality,
which is that we had almost like the moral imperative
to remove every stick a wood that we cut from
the woods, which a lot of these you know trees,
they by the time they get out to them, you know,
the latter cut them down and puts a chain around
and pulls them off to the log land and get
them on a log truck, they actually have negative value.
And so I'm like, well, why don't we just lead
those in the woods to create this deadwood habitat that
we really need and everybody will make more money and
will do a better job in the forest. So that's
a change. And also not trying to create like these
just generation after generation of like timber trees, but to
actually like to be harvesting trees within the context of
a more complex forest.
Speaker 1: So you guys, I mean, that's what I was going
to ask you about too, is the diversity of species
that you have. I mean, you guys are planting obviously too, right,
No no planting, just natural regeneration or.
Speaker 2: What natural regeneration.
Speaker 1: Well, that's cool that you guys have have enough of
a seed bank for that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, I mean I think I think now we're going
to end up planting, I think just because of climate change,
but we're really not doing it on a large scale net.
Speaker 1: Yeah you don't need to, right yeah. So, but so
it's already like a diverse forest. It's not a plantation.
Speaker 2: It's not a monoculture, correct, Yeah, And we also have
like you know, for us with these natural processes, these
disturbance processes. You know, of course we're doing more than
just like recruiting many different species of trees, right Like
when we cut trees down, we're also have this explosion,
the temporary sort of explosion of herbaceous plant diversity that
shrubs that are recruiting trees, and so we actually get
you know, not just like a bunch of different species
of trees, but like this whole succession of different cool stuff.
Speaker 1: So you so, how do you how do you determine
what individual trees to cut?
Speaker 2: I mean, it depends, it depends on a lot of
different stuff. What I try to do is is there's
this concept out here. I don't think it's widespread, because
I've talked to folks all across the country about it,
and I think it seems like only folks in the
Northeast know about it, which is this concept of a
natural community. And basically the concept of a natural community
is it's a it's a more expansive definition for like
the thing that we call a forest or another ecosystem
as the case may be, where it's like inclusive of
all of the living in trees, the plants, the animals,
all the living stuff, the physical environment, the non living stuff,
and then the natural processes and all of that is included,
and then it's kind of like an attempt to describe
that ecosystem beyond even like what it is now. So
when we have this landscape of these altered ecosystems, you know,
I might be looking into a stand that is one
hundred percent eastern white pine, and I might be able
to tell from the indicator plants, you know, especially, and
you know other you know, things I can tell about
the soil and whatever blow up the aspect where it
is located, the position on the slope that it's actually this,
this forest that is today one hundred percent white pine
is actually original of their harwood forest, which should be
this multiaged forest that's comprised of these rich site tree
species like sugar maple, American basswood, white ash. You know,
in the understory we see some of our rich site
indicator plants which would be here, like blue cohash and
searsucker sedge, some of our spring ephemeral love flowers made
in hair fern aty anthem and like all this like really,
you know this very specific site, but you know, you
might have none of that stuff that's present at the moment.
And so what we try to do is to look
into those forests that we have today, compare that to
that sort of natural community character that we can deduce,
and then to manage, you know, to cut trees in
a way that sort of steers them in that direction,
and sometimes you need to. It takes multiple steps. So
like if I'm looking at a hundred percent white pine forests,
I might not I might, but I might not just
go cut all the white pine trees, Like we might
want to create small openings to start to recruit those
hardwoods that are going to then naturally regenerate, and then
over time, over the next thirty years, we're going to
gradually remove that white pine overstory, probably retaining some of
those trees as biological legacies anyway, but then bringing it
along into this multi aged forest that's well suited to
the site.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna say so it would be you know,
because I would think if I if I was doing
something like that, it would be Okay, there's too many
of this one thing. So the higher density species, if
there's more of a density there's one species, I would
remove a few of those and let in some more
diversity or a part of it.
Speaker 2: I mean, but it depends like the we want to
We want species diversity for like climate resilience reasons, and
we want and for habit because we're very vulnerable, you know,
if we only have one species of tree, all these
different elements of global change. But but then you know,
you you could also have forest types like that rich
near the Harbord forest that might be naturally seventy sugar maple.
So then it's like you have to balance the need
for that diversity with the thing we also need to
manage for which is like you know, forests that are
well suited to where they're growing species. Yeah, it is, yeah,
and you have you know, other systems. So like you
got to come out here and check out the forest,
because you'll have like you'd be walking up a north
facing slope and you'll have all that stuff sugar maple,
white ash, bass woods, maine hair fern and the understory.
And then you'll you'll crest the top of a hill
and go down into a south facing slope and it'll
be American beach and red oak and red maple, this
rich or this dry poresite community, you know, and you'll
have like blueberry and huckleberry and bracken fern and these
poor site species just just based on the aspect of
the hill.
Speaker 1: That's gonna be so important to me. Man, I've never
been to New Hampshire for my careful way careful inviting me.
I'll actually do it. Man, Can I sleep on your
floor right?
Speaker 2: No? I saw you went and visited Kyle.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I'll do it. I'll come out there. I'll
make time next streak do it.
Speaker 2: I'll show you. I'll show you.
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 2: So it's like we think about it too here. You know,
you sort of have to think about it on multiple scales,
so you're like, you know, one of the other in
addition to like, because of land use history, we don't
have level of diversity like within our forests that we
would have had thousands of years ago, you know, that
multi generationality, of these other qualities we also don't. We're
also lacking landscape level diversity. You know. So three even
just three hundred years ago, there were these you know,
beavers that were creating these areas of young forest on
the landscape where all the trees over a large area
would die and then regenerate these megaflocks of these hundreds
of or even billions of passenger pigeons that were you know,
creating these massive holes in these forests just by by
nesting there and destroying all the trees.
Speaker 1: That's gonna be wild and you.
Speaker 2: Know, and so we're also seeing all of the species
of wildlife that are associated with what we call early
successional forests are also declining on the landscape, and so
we like, sometimes we want to also create these areas
where we're creating larger openings to create habitat for those species.
And then we want to think about you know, sometimes
you're just in a forest and you're like, well, there's
just a healthy oak tree right there, and even though
you know, maybe it's like not the best suited for
this site, it's the only oak tree for a few acres,
and so you sort of think about it on the
individual tree level as well. So with all the management
that I do, I think about it sort of on
all those different levels. And one thing that I always
do is I am I'm part of a new program
from Audubon. I'm an Audubon endorsed forester, which is like
spoocy receive this pest special training and endorsement to manage
forests for bird habitat. And one of the things that
they do is when you make a forest management plan,
you take like you take a shot of a twenty
five hundred acre area around the given parcel where you're working,
and you identify all of the different habitat types and
all the different forest ages and you know, in the
different compositions within that twenty five acre area, because we
want to have sort of like you know, a certain
amount of early successional forests, a certain amount of especial
forests and other qualities within each twenty five hundred acre
block on the landscape. And so if you're looking at
that twenty five acre block and you're like there's no
young forest, or there's a lot of young forests and
no older forests, then you might make choices on how
you manage a forest based on that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean. But the thing that I think is
really cool that you're doing is you're obviously out there
every day or every other day. You're out there a lot,
basically walking around on the land and observing things and
noticing things and then making decisions based on that, which
I don't think most forests are doing. I don't. I
just don't they've got, you know, from what I could tell,
especially you know what, from what I've seen out west.
I mean, people get hired to go out there and
do survey something, but it's it's a chain of command,
and the people making the decisions are far removed from
you know, the boots on the ground observations and decisions
that are made.
Speaker 2: It's pretty cool to work for myself, I'll say that, yeah,
you know, and just to do like you know, someone
who's who's a little bit. I think the way that
my mind works, I'm always like trying to think of
a better ways to do stuff, and and so I
don't I don't think i's trying to do that I
think a lot of people are just trying to do
the job that they were trained to do well, you know,
and a lot of and a lot of them are.
But that doesn't you know, it doesn't mean that the
job that a forester was trained to do forty years
ago was a good fit for what we're actually being
asked to do now, you know, I think there is Yeah,
I I think there's just uh a need for update,
updating our mindset of what our goals are, like, what
are we actually trying to do and to be like
our job as foresters needs to care for for us,
A for us is an ecosystem that can provide stuff
for us, but is also its own thing. And the
point of all of this is, you know, a force
to sustain human communities and apps to also sustain these
natural communities. And it can't be one of those things,
you know, it can't be that we're just managing a
first human benefits without reference to its to it's you
know the fact that it is also an ecosystem. Yeah,
it's beautiful in its own right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's I mean, that's an insane outlook and it's
also thoroughly stupid, and it's it causes so many more
problems down the line. Again, short term gain, long term loss.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think doesn't it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: You're someone you're someone that obviously loves the land and
the things that you're seeing on at the living organisms
you're seeing on it. Do you think this kind of
First off, how many aggres do you have are you
in charge of?
Speaker 2: I own? I own? Oh, I own one seventy five
that I live on that's Fair Island, and then I
manage I don't know, maybe fifteen thou like that.
Speaker 1: That's a I mean, it's it's significant acreage. Yeah, that's
a large question. Do you think that do you think
that this kind of I mean what you're doing as
a single person up or single you know, running your
own business, do you think that do you think this
could ever be applicable on a large scale? Say you
got someone in charge of a major company who wasn't
a greedy shithead and wasn't disconnected from this.
Speaker 2: Oh, I know it is. I know it is, and
you know, like it's it's really like the stuff that
I'm talking about too, is you know, like when I
work with I work with timber companies, and I work
with bloggers, and I work with mills, and I work
with all kinds of different people and and you know,
none of the stuff that I'm asking for is has
to be like a threatening thing. And like I have,
I have a whole group of loggers that I work
with all the time, Like I have that I keep
them busy, we're cutting wood all the time. They're happy,
you know, they're doing well for themselves, they're making good money.
And part of this is like approaching this stuff in
the right in the right way sometimes where it's not
like I'm not coming for you. I'm not coming for
your job. I'm not I'm trying to help you, and
I'm trying to like to bring us all along in
a way that is good for everybody. And it's not
it doesn't have to be this like big scary thing.
It can be this thing about like how do we
all do better? And like the loggers that work for me,
they don't make less money than the loggers that don't
work for me, they make more, right, because it's not
just about uh, you know, austerity.
Speaker 1: Number right, there's not a numbers get away with underpaying
our employees, you know, while pleasing the shareholders.
Speaker 2: You know, I want everybody to do well and and
and it's a proof of concept, right that we actually
can do environmentally responsible ecosystem management and everybody can do better. Yeah,
And that's like I think that that's a big, a
big part of it that makes it less threatening, makes
less people freak out a little bit less is when
we do it, we start from a place of respect
and like care and compassion and we go forward from there.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Man, I mean those loggers are the people you
need to get on on board. You know. It's like,
it's it's crazy. I mean, they're they're out there. You know,
I was. I was fucking border patrol down here and
I you know, these guys, it's it's whoever you encounter
in the brush. I mean, most of these dudes are
just working class mooks who are like, you know whatever.
They're not like all gung ho about the political side
of it. They just need a job. But they'll come
on and they'll they'll come up on me and they'll
sniff on me whatever. I don't care. I've used to it.
They'll sniff on me like a dog. What are you
doing here? And I I just love talking to them.
It's so fun. I just fucking I just you know,
most of the time they just get bored and quickly
disperse and run away, which is fucking great. That's kind
of part of why I do it. But sometimes if
they're bored, you know, I'll tell them and I'll be like,
you should log things, do ie net. You should start
trying to to look take pictures the cool stuff you
see instead of just sitting in your truck. Man, get out,
like you got opportunities to see stuff you have. You know,
you can go all these like take pictures, I mean
with the hope that like maybe one of them will
get you know, indoctrinate. It's like it'll be slow, you
know what I mean.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is the thing you were talking about
with like the individual person versus individual people being great
versus like groups of people. Is I'll bet if you
like drill down with those guys, you know that they'll
tell you they're like, you know, like these with these loggers.
You're talking to them and they first they're like, they
don't want to talk to me, and then they're like,
next thing, you know, we're talking about how their grandpa
used to like make his own baskets. He go collect
willow shoots and make his own baskets and they transplant
showy orchids. Yeah, it's like all this cool stuff like that,
where you know, I think a lot of this stuff
we just like build up all these like structures and
worldviews around a lot of this stuff that's just so
common sense and it's for everybody. And if we can
like break it down a little bit, I think we
can arrive it at a bed place just strategically.
Speaker 1: And I'm just thinking like a criminal here, if you know,
my strategy is to convince people to see what I'm seeing.
And if my strategy is that, the last thing I
want to do is, you know, I want to recruit people.
I don't want to just shit, I'm not going to
fight them and ship on them and shame them, you know.
I want to recruit people. And so like I had
a fucking guy at I got sent the secondary inspection once, uh,
when I was crossing the border on foot down here
in South Texaco. I live round on the Mexican border,
Like I can smell Mexico's garbage fires every night. But uh,
you know, and the guy, the guy recognized me, like
are you that that crime pace guy? And I was
like yeah. I was like, yeah, it's me and and
he was like, oh man, I like that stuff. It's
but what's up we kill you lawn, you know, And
I was I was like, here's my ind you know.
I'm like, man, have you ever spent time in some
of the like remnant crumbs of habitat there down here?
It's fascinating. There's so much cool stuff down here, you know,
like there you have no there's plants that grow here
that don't grow anywhere else in the world. And he's like, oh, really,
you know, and he was I mean, I'm sure he
never thought about it again, but it was you know,
that's a that's an opening. I think you can convince
some of those it's yeah, man, there's a better way.
There's a better way, and it's not shutting down all logging,
and it's not I mean, people need wood. It's about
learning how to run the living machine, for the health
of the living machine being the main focus, and then
getting you know, the the lumber is a benefit like
har harvesting the the fruits of it, you know, like
the and they'll be abundant fruit. There'll be a abundant
you know fruit. If you can run it, right if
you can keep it for the health of everything else,
the health of the beavers, the understory species everything.
Speaker 2: It's really an analogy for the whole world, right, which
is that we have this planet which is actually abundant, right,
And and then it's our responsibility not to just be like, what,
you know, what can we mind from here? What can
we you know, pull out of here? And instead to
be like what does this place have to offer us?
You know, and like how do we sustain this place?
And then reaped the fruits of all of the amazing
things that it has to offer within this that that
it already has, right, Yeah, Like there's enough stuff here
for us to be alive. Yeah, And it just is
it just is like about shifting that flipping that mindset.
Speaker 1: Around, I think, yeah, and it goes you know, it
goes for people too. It's like I want everyone to
be educated and have the opportunities and not be worrying
about you know, how am I going to pay for
healthcare if I get sick? Or how am I gonna
I mean, it goes so much, you know, you could
take it everywhere, Like I want the collective society I'm
a part of to do better and be more well
off and more enlightened and more intelligent and you know,
and uh and we're definitely not there, but you know
it's possible.
Speaker 2: By the next time you and me talk, we'll have
this all clean.
Speaker 1: Yeah god, yeah, man, I could keep talking to you.
I'm so curious about some of the forests up there
and the stuff you see.
Speaker 2: But yeah, let's uh, let's try again soon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, I appreciate your time. Thanks again, and uh
yeah man, I'll stay in touch and I'm gonna come
I'll probably come busy you at some point here next
year or two.
Speaker 2: Let's do it, all right, man,