What led to your change of heart regarding whether the best way to care for forests was to simply leave them alone or to act?

I think that a, a big theme behind How to Love a Forest is, is this concept, right? That I think in our culture, you know, we've seen the way that people have harmed ecosystems.

And so it makes sense in some ways to, to think that the way that we must care for these ecosystems is by just protecting them, and what that means is to protect them from ourselves, right? Just keep humans out of them.

We caused all these problems, and so it must be that the way that we take care of them is, is to just remove ourselves from them.

And, you know, an important thing to recognize with that is that, you know, we can't do it, that actually we talk about forests as these socio-ecological systems.

We are forever a part of these ecosystems, and we always will be, and you really can't make that separation at all objectively.

Uh, but then also, when you really enter into a sort of deep understanding and deep relationship with these ecosystems, as you do when you work in them every day, the veil is sort of, like, pulled away from your eyes, and you see them as they truly are and where they truly are.

Have you found that others are also more open to the idea of acting to aid in the resiliency of forests? Has that been a challenging argument to make to your peers?

So what are things that you would do to advance a property in these scenarios?

Totally.

And yeah, I think, uh, another thing that, you know, just to, to add on to what you said at the beginning there, that probably the most important words in land stewardship are, it depends, right? There's, there's no right answer for any of these things.

There's, there's just options that have different trade-offs, sacrifices, require more or less physical energy, require more or less money, require more or less time.

And so a lot of these things that we're gonna talk about can sort of...

You can see them almost as like a continuum of choices.

I would say that one way that I think about it now is that when we have these degraded systems, uh, we have fewer choices, right? So one thing that we're doing as we're enriching these systems and making them more diverse and having healthier trees and stuff like that, is giving future generations a, a place where they have more choices, more different options that they can take.

Right

So what are things that you would do to advance a property in these scenarios?

Totally.

And yeah, I think, uh, another thing that, you know, just to, to add on to what you said at the beginning there, that probably the most important words in land stewardship are, it depends, right? There's, there's no right answer for any of these things.

There's, there's just options that have different trade-offs, sacrifices, require more or less physical energy, require more or less money, require more or less time.

And so a lot of these things that we're gonna talk about can sort of, you can see them almost as like a continuum of choices.

I would say that one way that I think about it now is that when we have these degraded systems, uh, we have fewer choices, right? So one thing that we're doing as we're enriching these systems and making them more diverse and having healthier trees and stuff like that, is giving future generations a, a place where they have more choices, more different options that they can take.

Um, one of the options that we have in forests that are healthier is to do management within a commercial context, right? Which allows us to do some cool stuff at scale.

Right

So let's, let's kind of walk that mindset into your property.

Sure.

So, you know, a lot of times what we'll do, just to give sort of like a big picture, what I like to do is I like to compare the forest that we have toward, to what we would expect there to have been, uh, in, like, an old growth system, like the forest that was here for thousands of years.

Um, and the reason I do that is not because I'm, like, interested in, uh, history, though I am, or that I'm like this, this anachronistic old school, like, "Let's, ooh, let's just, you know, blast from the past.

Let's see what it was like, and the untrammeled wilderness," or anything like that.

The reason is because what old growth systems do is they give us a window into the conditions that were present on the landscape for thousands of years, which are also the conditions that all of these species that live here, all of these critters, and, and also all these natural processes have existed within for millennia.

So when we look at these old growth systems, it can, it can tell us some things about, like, what conditions might be missing on the landscape.

What did you do in your situation?

So let's kinda walk through some of that thinking on your, on your side of the, the house.

Will do.

Yeah, and I, and I should say just we, we should talk more about this, but, uh, sort of for the big picture, one of the interesting things about the work that I get to do now where I just travel all over the continent and talk about, talk to folks in all different kinds of areas about forests is, is realizing that like, you know, me, when I started this journey, uh, and I'd been working as a consulting forester for a decade, and, um, and a service forester as well, and, you know, I thought that I just really had, had figured it out.

Like, I thought I figured out how forests work, and what forests were supposed to be like, and how we're gonna take care of them, and all this stuff.

And, and, um, what I realized is that every, every forest is different.

Uh, and you know, the forest that I'm really...

There are, there are overarching themes, which is mostly what I talk about, like, in my writing and, and stuff like that.

So let's, let's kind of walk that mindset into your property.