KENT, Conn.—In a charmingly low-key presentation Thursday night, acclaimed forester, ecologist and bestselling author Ethan Tapper introduced Kent residents to the concept of “How to Love a Forest.”
“Basically, I am a forester from Vermont,” he told attendees at the gathering, which was sponsored by the Kent Land Trust, the Conservation Commission, and Parks and Recreation. “But now I say I don’t know what I am because I have a published work and have traveled all over talking about the book and what it contains.”
That book, “How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World,” published in 2024, has been named to several bestseller lists and won the 2025 New England Book Award for non-fiction. In 2025, Ethan partnered with illustrator Frances Cannon to publish “Willow and the Storm,” a children’s book about forest ecology, resilience and mortality, and in October will release “The Forest Year: Finding Hope in a World Worth Saving.”
“I think holding out hope is more than good for us—it’ our responsibility to each other,” he told his audience. “Apathy is the worst human emotion, but hope is a self-fulfilling prophecy When we feel hope, we do things. You’ll encounter people who will tell you individual action doesn’t matter, that you need big government programs. You will encounter people that feel only individual action matters. But there needs to be big stuff and little stuff.”
Tapper said that just as ecosystems must be resilient, so too must be those trying to preserve and conserve them. “We have to take pride in ourselves for experiencing setbacks and going forward,” he said.
At the core of his message, he said, was the “radical but incredibly ancient idea of stewardship. … The radical part is not to walk away. To stay and be with the forest as times change and we change with them.”
He observed there is a dichotomy in the way people think about stewardship. “One attitude is we don’t care about ecosystems. The second is we love them and want to put a fence around them and leave them alone. But when you spend more time with an ecosystem, you start to see that neither describes what we should try to do. A lot of time what is necessary is not to leave it alone, but to take action. We need to do things we never thought we would have to do.”
In 2017, Tapper began a transformative period in his own life when he bought the 175-acre forest that he now calls “Bear Island.”
“I was looking for a forest to take care of,” he said. “I heard about this land, and it was kind of cheap, so I went to take a look.” He found a desolate landscape covered in trash, overrun by invasives, with hardly a healthy tree in the forest.
“Thirty years before, a previous owner brought in a logger and said, ‘Go cut every tree over 10 inches in diameter.’ They cut almost all the high-grade trees and left the low-grade trees. That’s the inverse of what a responsible owner would do. I thought I would go find a forest easier to love.”
But over the summer, he slowly changed his mind. On a second visit, be discovered there were some healthy trees, some plants he loved, and he decided to buy the tract.
“In an effort to heal Bear Island, I had two superpowers: ADHD and that I am not a purist,” he said wryly. “I had to cut down unhealthy trees to give the healthy trees a chance. Thirty years ago, loggers came to my forest using tools like cable skidders and chainsaws and created all these problems that I will take care of for the rest of my life. Now the tools I use to help heal the forest are a cable skidder and chainsaws. Those tools used one way can harm and degrade a forest and used in another way can heal it.”
Similarly, he relies on herbicides to fight invasives. “Herbicides can play a role,” he said. He described invasive plants as “like a wolf in a hen house—they just go wild.”
As many as one third of the plants in the United States are non-native, which is not to say they are all invasives, “But there are a couple of dozen plants that are hyper-competitive, hyper-resilient,” he said. “If you try controlling them without herbicides, it is borderline impossible. I have never seen it done.”
His use of herbicides jars many of his readers. “The people who want to control invasives and those who believe herbicides are evil are 99 percent the same people,” he said. “The success rate is zero without herbicides. I reached out to the best ecologists and biologists—and they all said they use herbicides. Can we do this and protect our environment and biodiversity? The answer is yes.”
Ironically, he said, “It has become my job to evangelize cutting trees, using herbicides and killing deer … it’s all about ecosystems.”
He described himself as on a “journey of inquiry,” and cautioned his listeners against confirmation bias.
“Confirmation bias supports and affirms biases we already have,” he said. “What we want instead is an open-ended journey, following lines of inquiry wherever they go. If this is what is happening to forests now, if we are dealing with global change, if we are losing important functions—what do we do about it?”
When he became owner of Bear Island, he called it “the most degraded forest” he had ever seen. “Even though I was a forester, I didn’t know how to heal this forest. I just did what I could one day at a time, one hour at a time,” he said. “It is not a symbol of every forest, but for what is possible. It speaks to the incredible power of life if we love forests with our whole bodies.”
“Really what we are, are temporary caretakers of this land. At some point we will pass it to the world of the future,” he concluded. “We have this idea of trying to stop the bleeding. I am not interested in that at all. What we can do is not just stop the bleeding—we can also build a better world. We are all standing here with incredible power and a choice.”
