Season 6 kicks off in the deep dark woods: the simplified, post-industrial forests of the world — the only forests that many of us have ever known.

Join us as we meet foresters in British Columbia, Vermont, and Scotland, all working to embrace the messy art of ecological forestry. Because if we want our forests to be old growth-ier, we might not be able to just wait and leave them alone. It might mean challenging some assumptions and getting out of our comfort zone, but that's what it'll take to see the forest for the trees.

— — —

With the voices of Ethan Tapper, Brian Duff, Keith Erickson, and Herb Hammond

Music by Thumbug, Spencer W Stuart, Nathan Shubert, and Sunfish Moon Light

See also:

• FE3.4 - Dama Drama
• Galiano Conservancy Association
• NNRG's "A Forest of Your Own"
• FernGully: The Last Rainforest

For photos from our time in the ancient old growth, citations, a transcript, and more, click here.

– – –

🌱 If you like what we do, you can help us to do it ✨

Support the production of Future Ecologies by contributing any amount at futureecologies.net/join

Our entire community of supporters get early episode releases, bonus content, discord server access, and a 50% discount on all merch. Our biggest supporters get to show off with stickers, patches, and now toques (aka beanies).

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You are listening to Season Six of

Future Ecologies.

Okay. Hey, Adam. Welcome back.

Hi, Mendel. Can you believe it? Season six and

we still have no idea what we're doing.

I think we're getting better, just not

necessarily faster.

That is true.

So what's up? What's with all the hammering?

Well, knock, knock, Mendel.

Who's there?

Wood.

Wood, who?

Would you care to go with me on a stroll through

the forest?

Always. What kind of forest are we strolling

through?

Okay, if you can picture it, the trees here are

all young, pretty much all the same. They're the same age,

they're the same height, they're all Douglas firs.

Right. We're talking like a Christmas tree

farm.

A Christmas Tree farm, if the Christmas trees

were, I don't know, 20 meters tall, and only green up at the

very top. So they wouldn't make very good Christmas trees, I

guess. Down here on the ground, it's mostly just tree trunks in

every direction, and lots of dead twigs sticking out from

those trunks. You know, poking you in the face, crunching

underfoot. And even though it's it's sunny outside today, it's

pretty dark down here. There's not much growing at ground

level.

Okay, so what are we doing here? What's with

all the noise?

Right. This is not what a forest usually sounds

like. Welcome to my day job.

Oh, I hope we're not interrupting.

Nah, you're fine. It's take your podcast co-host

to work day.

Aw.

And my colleagues and I have just managed to haul

about a 50 pound chain hoist 10 meters up a tree, and we've

secured it up there with these massive steel nails that you

pound into the tree. They look like they've been around since

the Second World War.

Sounds like fun.

It's a huge pain in the ass, honestly.

Okay, and...?

And now we've run the chain from the chain hoist

down to the base of the tree. We call that the 'spar' tree,

through a pulley, which is called a 'snatch block', for

reasons I don't understand. And that pulley guides it to the

base of another tree, I don't know, about 20 meters away. We

call that the 'pivot' tree. It's called the pivot tree because

from that tree there's another snatch block at the base. The

chain pivots out to a third tree. We wrap the chain about

five meters up, and we call that the 'cull' tree. So three trees,

a chain and cables running between them, and we've got a

smaller chain hoist over there.

What's that one for?

We use that one to tighten everything up and get

ready.

Get ready for what?

To pull the third tree down.

Excuse me?

We're going to pull that cull tree, the third

tree, we're gonna pull it over. You know, trees are usually

vertical, but we're gonna make this one horizontal.

I got that part. Why? Why are you pulling this

poor tree down?

Oh, it's nothing personal. There are just too

many trees here.

Too many trees... That's a thing?

Oh yeah, wait just a second, this is the best part.

...what happened to you this summer? Did a tree

fall on your head? You're getting paid for this mischief.

Yeah, pretty cool, eh? we do this with kids too.

You're pulling kids over?

No, the the kids pull the tree down. They wear

cute little hard hats and everything.

Okay, I'm feeling pretty lost.

Well, you wouldn't be the first person to stray

into the deep, dark woods and get a little bit lost. But in

all seriousness, what I'd like to do with this episode is to

let some light into this dark forest. For the past couple of

years, I've been interviewing foresters across the temperate

world, and they've all said more or less the same thing — that

when it comes to the management of the woody places of the

world, we've been failing to see the forest for the trees. But

all of that is starting to change. To save the forests, we

may have to cut down some trees. Like, a lot of trees. So many

trees. So to kick off our sixth season of future ecologies, I'm

Adam.

I'm lost in the woods...

And this is forest tree.

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and

asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and

Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape

of our world through ecology, design, and sound.

Okay, before we get any further, you asked me

what happened to me this summer, and I would say the highlight

was actually getting to spend some time with you in a very

different kind of forest. Do you remember?

Of course!

All right, I'm gonna take us back for a minute.

We're lying on the ground on our backs, and the river is humming

gently in the background.

Can I pitch in?

Absolutely.

The air is warm and moist, with the faint scent

of vanilla leaf. We're surrounded by literally 1000

year old Sitka spruce trees towering over us... towering

over even all the other trees, which would seem enormous in any

other context.

But it isn't dark.

No, the trees are huge, but spaced pretty far

apart, so the light is finding its way down to us, and

everything is just covered in moss. Everything is so alive.

Even the dead things are alive! Like just a

stone's throw away, there's this enormous standing snag, bleached

white by the sun, and there are birds nesting in holes up and

down its trunk. And then right here in front of us, a decaying

log the size of a school bus.

Yeah, a horizontal tree. Your favorite.

My favorite. I would call it a nurse log, and

it's covered in moss and shrubs and even small trees, getting a

head start

And on the ground, ferns, herbs, mosses and

mushrooms. The soil is so full of mycelium, it's spongy,

bouncy, almost like a trampoline.

Or a mattress. I remember when we were lying down

there, you said you could smell the layers in the landscape.

I smell the rich duff. I smell the soil here, put

down by these trees, put down by these plants, put down on top of

sand, put down by a river... layer after layer after layer.

There's a lot of time in this place.

I really love how you put that, that there was so

much time in that place. You could literally see the time in

the layers of wood, in the layers of vegetation, in the

layers of sediment.

Yeah, I just wish that, that we could have

spent more time there.

Oh, man, it's not every day you get to spend in an

old growth forest.

An old growth rainforest! Also a UNESCO World

Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve, and the territory of

several First Nations.

Savvy listeners might have guessed already that

you and I were doing some good old fashioned forest bathing in

the Hoh rainforest, on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington,

Followed up by the other kind of bathing in the

Hoh River.

Which was very cold.

Yes.

But we weren't just on location for vacation.

No, of course not. We were there to do some

serious reporting!

Very serious.

In one of the very few forests left on the

entire Pacific Coast that has never been clear cut.

Folks come from all over the world, you and me

included, to experience the Hoh and to walk through the hall of

mosses. It's hard to overstate just how rare these high

productivity, low elevation old growth forests have become. In

the part of the world where you and I live, the vast majority of

these forests have been lost. Or to take it out of the passive

voice, they've been cut down. We've cut them down. I mean, not

you and me personally, but we in general. On the south coast of

British Columbia, where we live, less than 10% of the original,

high productivity old growth forest remains, and a lot of

that is pretty difficult to access.

It's true. I mean, we took two ferries,

crossed an international border and cleared, I don't even know

how many kilometers...

About 200.

- just to be there in person. And of course,

it was amazing. But then as we left and crossed out of the park

boundary, we found ourselves pretty quickly back in a

different kind of forest.

Yeah, the forest that blankets so much of this

coast, the forest that most of us have become accustomed to —

an impenetrable green wall of conifers, same age, same height

and darkness below. And before too long, we pulled into some of

the towns that produced these forests. Communities where,

judging from the signs on the side of the road, you and I

might imagine that tree hugger is a pejorative term, and that

loggers are the underdog heroes. You know, communities where the

war in the woods never ended.

New orders, boys. You're going to Fern Gully.

Oh, I know that voice.

Somehow, I am not surprised. I take it that you

have seen the 1992 animated classic, Fern Gully?

Of course! Of course. I knew that movie by heart when I was a

kid.

Apparently, I still know it by heart. I'm gonna go out on a

limb and say that for our generation, I think this piece

of pop culture was foundational to our perspectives on forestry.

Hmm, yeah. I mean, definitely for me.

For those who haven't seen it, it's about a

lovely rainforest

Called Fern Gully

That is filled with fairies and talking bats

and what I think are little gangs of bugs, and everything

seems peachy. Until, of course, the humans show up.

Humans back in the forest!

Yeah, there goes the neighborhood.

Be nice, Batty.

First thing all these trees go. Then come your

highways, then come your shopping malls and your parking

lots and your convenience stores, and then come [zap].

And then come... animated films about how great

the forest used to be?

Anyway, one of the humans - a handsome blonde lug

named Zak — with a K, without a C... 90s Zak — gets shrunk by

magic to fairy size. And of course, he makes friends with a

lady fairy named Crysta.

I think we all know where this is going.

In typical 90s movie fashion, romance is

preceded by heartache.

What are you doing?

Carving your name, see? C, R, Y, S...

No, no, you mustn't do that! Here, can't you feel its

pain?

Its pain?

Yes!

Humans can't feel anything. They're numb from the

brain down.

Sometimes I feel numb from the brain up.

I can relate to that. Anyway, throughout the

course of the film, Zak and Crysta, and you know, by

extension, the rest of us, we learn a few lessons. Lessons

like trees feel pain, logging is bad, oil is straight up evil.

And, of course, everything is connected.

There are worlds within worlds Crysta. Everything in our

world is connected by the delicate strands of the web of

life, which is balanced between forces of destruction and the

magic forces of creation. Help it grow.

Wow. Can you believe that was over three

decades ago?

I mean, it's like my childhood vanishing before my

eyes. Yeah, I have a lot of gratitude for this old film, but

I bring it up because I think it instilled within me an instinct

that I have since come to doubt.

Huh? And what would that be?

The idea, maybe, maybe just the feeling, since

it's never explicitly stated, that cutting down trees is

inherently bad — that it necessarily hurts the forest.

I mean, that's kind of gospel for a lot of

environmentalists, I think, right? Like we were just saying

how we've lost most of the old growth to logging. All the Fern

Gullies of the world, they are mostly gone... and maybe

forever.

Yes, and we absolutely have to protect the

few that remain, like the Hoh for sure.

So can we say that unequivocally? Like when we

were back in the Hoh, you weren't making plans to pull

down any of the giant Sitka spruce.

Could you imagine?

No.

I think the Hoh is doing just fine on its own. The

forests that we're going to talk about today aren't the Fern

Gullies of the world. The forests that we're going to talk

about are what's left behind after the cartoon villain of

Fern Gully and his industrial machinery have rolled over the

forest, and spit it out the other side. So I'm gonna take

you on a little tour of the plantation forests of the

temperate world to meet some of the folks who work in them.

Okay. Well, let's go.

One quick note before we do. Just to be clear, the forestry

that I'm going to discuss, at least in the North American

context, is settler colonial forestry, right? How it

transformed the diverse, thriving forests of this

continent into collections of trees, and then how we might

turn its own tools towards restoration. There is a long

history of Indigenous forestry on this continent, and that

deserves its own episode another day.

For sure.

All right, first stop Vermont.

Huh.

With our tour guide, Ethan Tapper. He's a

forester and author. He actually just wrote a book called "How to

Love a Forest". And when I spoke to him last year, he was the

Chittenden County forester for the Vermont Department of

forests and recreation.

So we're a 75% forested state. 80% of those

lands are owned by private landowners. As county foresters,

we have this real interest in helping people manage that

private land better.

So Ethan is your friendly local county forester.

Pretty much.

and we're in Vermont, so,

So we're talking about Eastern hardwood forests.

Okay, I'm picturing maples, oaks,

birches... pine? ,

Chestnut, elm, walnut, beech. Forests that turn

bright red and yellow each fall — becoming an irresistible

magnet for the leaf peepers of the world.

Leaf peepers!

But it will probably not surprise you to

know that the forests that we see today are very different

from what they might have looked like in the past.

The vast majority of Vermont's forests 300 years

ago were what we would now call old growth forests. That means a

lot of different things. You know, that's not a monolith. Old

growth forests are defined by their variability.

These forests would have been super diverse

,with dry areas and other areas that were really wet.

We think that prior to the 1600s, which is

when beaver trapping really started in North America by

Europeans, we think that we had 300 beaver dams per square mile

in our valleys. The massive amount of beaver activity that

would have not just completely altered the hydrology of our

riparian areas and our valleys, but also, you know, provided

habitat for this incredible array of other species, and, you

know, fundamentally changed the way that water moved through our

landscape.

And not just beavers, but large herbivores

and predators too.

We think we had a forest dwelling species of elk,

which is now extinct, called Eastern elk, caribou and moose,

and those were our prominent ungulates, and those were all

gone by the late 1700s. And we had two apex predators, the

Eastern Cougar, which we call the Catamount, and wolves, which

were both also bountied, hunted to extinction.

Long story short, those forests were cut down and

the animals were hunted and killed for timber, for furs, but

primarily for agriculture.

Certainly, the biggest single driver of the

clearing that we saw was pasture, and particularly

pasture for the Merino sheep. You know, going from 90 plus

percent forested landscapes in New England, we were down to 20

to 30%

Oh, that... that's a huge change.

Oh, yeah.

You know, the easiest way to understand it is

throughout most of New England, certainly in Vermont, every

forest anyone has ever been in, unless it's extremely remote or

on like the top of a mountain was a pasture in the 1800s.

And that's because, as small scale

agriculture has declined, many of those pastures have been

planted to trees or just allowed to regenerate on their own. But

these new forests are very different from the old growth

forests that existed prior to land clearance.

The forests today that we have are largely 60 to

100 years old. Most of them were a pasture 60 to 100 years ago.

These forests are comprised of a single generation

of trees, often just a single species. Take Eastern White

Pine, for example, which is now really common in Vermont because

—

it's an opportunist, because it's good

at growing in old fields, specifically. And in many cases,

it's growing on a site which will not really be home to white

pine in the future.

Whereas, on the other hand, species like beech,

chestnut, butternut and elm, which used to be really common

and really important, are very uncommon, largely because of

introduced pathogens. Like in the past, a single beech tree

could live to be over 400 years old, and then immediately regrow

new stems from its own clones.

And now it has this disease called Beech bark

disease. So instead of living to be 400 years old, it lives to be

40 years old.

And that's just one example.

You know, chestnuts with chestnut blight.

Butternuts, which is a really cool species, the butternut

canker. Ash trees, emerald ash borer. Elm trees with Dutch elm

disease.

So not only have some native tree species been

almost completely wiped out, the ones that are left behind are

just different.

Like their role in the forest has shifted?

Exactly. And Ethan called this "cryptic function

loss". You know, whenever a species has ceased to perform

its full range of ecological services. But it's not only the

trees. The hydrology and soils are no longer performing their

full range of ecological services either.

The way that water works in general, in our forest

is just completely altered now. I mean, we obviously have

ditches and we have streams that have been straightened and

drained and damned. And then we also are missing many of the

structures that help the forest slow down water, absorb it,

spread it out, help it infiltrate, especially dead

wood.

Okay, so if I was a leaf peeper and I wanted

to see some nice fall color, I could be stumbling around these

younger forests in Vermont, and I have no idea that what I'm

seeing is, in many cases, not really a forest so much as a

bunch of trees that happen to grow up on an abandoned pasture.

I mean, it begs the question, what is a forest,

exactly? Those might be the only forests that many Vermonters

have ever known. Okay, so that's a little portrait of Vermont.

Let's put a pin in that for now, and hop across the pond to the

Scottish Highlands... through the power of radio. Okay, you

ready?

Uh huh...

3, 2, 1, hop!

My name is Brian Duff. I work for Forestry and

Land Scotland, and I'm based in Glenmore Forest Park.

I chatted with Brian earlier this summer. He

works up in this mountain range called the Cairngorms.

Yeah, Cairngorms is in the north northeast of

Scotland. It's the largest area in Great Britain that is above

4000 feet. They're very rounded hills, so they're quite unusual

from that point of view, well weathered over the millennia.

And they're also part now of the National Park, the Cairngorm

National Park, which is the largest national park in Great

Britain.

And unlike in New England, where European

colonization resulted in lots of small private landowners,

Scotland has a legacy of large private landowners.

Scotland's got a tradition of estates and in the

past that was kind of used for recreation purposes, i.e.

hunting, culling, deer, grouse shooting, that sort of thing.

Hmm, these would have been the playgrounds of the

upper class gentlemen hunters that we talked about in Season

Four, huh?

Definitely. But these folks weren't just

hunting. The woodlands where Brian works have a long history

of silviculture as well.

It was exploited heavily for timber in the 18th

century. It was a deer forest, as they called it. And that's

quite a weird expression in Scotland, because there wasn't a

lot of forest in a deer forest. It was mostly just deer, to be

honest.

For reasons which will become apparent later, the

idea of a forest that has more deer than trees absolutely

chills my blood. And at Glenmore, that was before the

war.

Then the first world war came, and guys, funny

enough, from Canada, came and... flattened the whole forest,

virtually.

Flattened?!

Yeah, yeah. It was quite, quite incredible,

actually. 450 guys and they built a railway system and two

saw mills, etc. And it's just quite incredible. They were

there for less than a year.

Hmm, nobody does it quite like us.

Resource extraction know-how, baby.

Canada's greatest export. Anyway, when Forestry and Land

Scotland acquired Glenmore,

When we took this land on, there was only about 80

hectares or so of native woodland left. And at that time,

before and after the Second World War, the rest of it was

planted up with what we would call non-native species now. And

that would be species from America, like spruces, larch,

douglas fir as well from the Pacific coast. And nobody really

thought anything more about that.

What's there to think about? That seems fine.

What could go wrong?

What could go wrong? So just like in Vermont,

over in Scotland, they've got forests that are not only very

young. They are very different from the historical woodlands.

Yes, different in terms of species, age, structure

and also density of trees.

During this reafforestation, a lot of

planting of Scots Pine was done, and that was done at what we

call commercial spacing. So at year five, we're looking for two

and a half thousand trees per hectare.

And I take it, that's a lot. Is this what you

meant by having too many trees?

Yeah, we actually don't really know what the

historic density of Scots Pine woodlands would have been but

just for reference, an old growth forest out here on the

coast would have maybe 80 to 120 trees per hectare.

Okay, so this is like an order of magnitude more.

Yes, two and a half thousand trees is wild.

Some of the densest forests I've ever been in are around 1500

trees per hectare, and it's actually difficult to even walk

through those. Speaking of which, we have one more forest

to visit... or to revisit. We're headed back to the West Coast.

Aha... back to where we started off?

Yes, back to my neck of the woods – Galiano

Island. That particular forest is broadly representative of the

forests left behind by industrial forestry throughout

our region, if a particularly extreme example. It's called the

Pebble Beach reserve, and my organization, the Galiano

Conservancy, purchased it back in the late 1990s

They had this 160 acre piece of land that was

a forest plantation that had been nuked, in terms of

industrial forestry terminology, or the terminology I use for

industrial forestry. And so the next question was, what are we

going to do with this?

This is Keith Erickson. He was the one running

the chain hoist at the top of the episode.

Chain hoist guy!

As I am sure he would love to be known. He's a biologist. Worked

for the Galiano Conservancy for many years and has been a mentor

to me. But when he got his first job out of university a couple

decades back right here at Pebble Beach, he was pretty

green behind the ears. And luckily, he found his own

mentors on the job, the late director of the Galiano

Conservancy, Ken Millard, and the renowned eco forester, Herb

Hammond.

I still remember how startlingly degraded it was.

It was not just a plantation, but it was a plantation where

trees had been planted after the site had been windrowed. And

they just scraped all the material, the fallen trees, all

the organic matter and a good share of the topsoil into these

windrows. And then in between, they planted them with nicely

spaced trees. And the plan on MacMillan Bloedel's part was to

harvest that mechanically.

MacMillan Bloedel, the major logging company that

owned, cleared, and planted this lot, used it as kind of an

experimental, free-for-all test site. They were trying to

eliminate an endemic parasite called laminated root rot that

affects Douglas fir trees, and they imagined harvesting the

trees using giant machines like the one in Fern Gully.

Uhh.... I'm picturing, like, cutting down

rows of trees as if they were wheat.

That's actually not too far from what they were

imagining as well. But it didn't work out like they had hoped.

Take a walk in this forest today, and Keith will tell you

about the kind of ecosystem that that plantation turned into.

You get a sense of that... bulldozed, low light

conditions, dense Douglas fir, very monoculture, not much going

on here. Youu look at the soil — pits and mounds and the

undulating structure in the mature forest. And here you look

out, it's pretty darn flat. Jump up and down in the mature

forest, and of course, it's got a little bit of spring to it,

and you jump up and down here, and it's like mineral soil.

Okay, I'm sensing the pattern. Wherever

you might go, healthy old forests have some similarities.

They have trees of varying species, varying ages. Some are

old, some are very young. They have wide spacing and gaps, so

plenty of light gets down to the understory. They have lots of

dead trees standing and dead trees lying down. They have

layers of different vegetation, which makes for a lot of little

niches for all the different species who make their homes in

forests, and you can even bounce on their soil like a trampoline.

Yes, they are complex and messy and lovely,

Mhm... whereas industrial forests kind of look

like industrial farms.

Tree farms! They are often just called tree

farms.

Right, so,monocultures of trees. The

same age, the same height, at high densities, and so you lose

all that light, and from that you lose the diversity and the

wildlife habitat.

And that is most forests. Sometimes they're

created intentionally, like at the Pebble Beach reserve, and

sometimes they occur when disturbed sites are abandoned,

like those Vermont pastures.

So what can we do about it? You can't just

magically make a forest older...

No, that's not how time works, and we are not

fairies.

Well, Imean, speak for yourself.

Fair enough. You're right, we can't make

forests older at will, which is another reason why it's so

important to protect our remaining old forests. But we

can help younger forests acquire old growth characteristics. We

can make them old growth-ier.

Huh. And that's a technical term?

It's what you might call a term of art. We

really don't have the language for this yet, but what we're

trying to do is imbue younger forests with old growthiness.

Okay, cut to the chase. How are we supposed to do

that?

I will tell you... after the break.

And we're back. I'm Mendel.

I'm Adam. This is Future Ecologies, and I have

just finished taking Mendel on a whirlwind tour of the plantation

forests of the world.

The deep, dark woods.

And now we're going to follow a trail of

gingerbread crumbs to grandmother's house.

Meaning, now you're gonna tell me why you

were pulling a tree down.

Yes, that, yes.

Come on, Adam, what would the fairies say?

No, no, you mustn't do that! Can't you feel its pain?

Okay, well, let's talk for a minute about the

fairy-approved strategy. We left off with the question, how can

we take a young, simplified forest and make it older and

more complex? And the traditional answer to that

question would be to protect it and leave it alone, let time do

its work, right?

Old growth forests are amazing. They're diverse.

They provide all this really amazing habitat. They store lots

of carbon.

Ethan Tapper again, our forester from

And so how do we make forests old growth? And the

Vermont.

most intuitive explanation for how we do that is that we leave

them alone for a long, long time, and they become old

growth, and they sort of start to embody all of those different

values. And that's what they call proforestation.

Proforestation... I mean, I guess I'm pro

forestation, right?

You know, I wasn't familiar with this term either,

but basically, proforestation means letting forests grow and

recover on their own.

In general, I believe that most of the people

who are involved in proforestation believe that this

is what it means to love a forest. It makes all the sense

in the world. If you love a forest, you don't cut any trees

and you leave it alone.

Yeah, I mean that that seems like the obvious

and reasonable reaction to seeing clear cuts everywhere.

Those places look horrible and so fair enough to feel like do

exactly the opposite of that.

Yeah, those two polarities, it's almost, I

think, like indicative of so many of the problems that we

have where we think it has to be like completely one thing or

completely the other, because we can't picture a world in which

it's sort of one thing and sort of the other and both things and

neither.

So Ethan is saying that the world might

actually be a little bit more nuanced than Fern Gully would

have us believe.

Maybe. I mean, I think it's important to

acknowledge that so many of us who got inspired to care for the

more than human world, we start from a strong desire to protect

it.

I came to forestry from a place of not necessarily

being interested in management, but just from loving forests and

just from wanting to be around them and in them. And really,

actually, I think when I started, I was just sort of more

interested in protecting them, and, you know, figuring out how

to leave them alone. Through the course of my career, and through

the course of my time at the University of Vermont, really

started to understand the beauty and the importance of

management, that these forests were not systems that could just

exist, that they were extremely altered, highly degraded, and

that there was a role for people in making them really healthy

and vibrant and abundant ecosystems.

So we're talking about a middle path between

leaving forests alone and managing them like tree farms.

But what's what's wrong with proforestation? Why not just let

them grow old on their own.

Well, we can, and frankly, we do. Once a forest is

no longer under the purview of industrial forestry, we tend to

just leave it alone, right? We protect it. But I think there

are several good arguments for why we should get more hands on.

And the first one is that forests take a long time to

develop old growth characteristics. It's right

there in the name.

So if you're in a forest that is 100 years old, it

might take another 200 years to develop that full complement of

functions and values, you know, just by leaving it alone.

Yeah. Who has that kind of time.

You know, if we want improved habitat and carbon

storage now, we don't have that kind of time. Also, like any

kind of monoculture plantation, forests are highly susceptible

to disease and disturbance.

Makes sense.

So whether it's laminated root rot or bark

beetles or budworms, windstorms or mega fires, there's a

significant risk for these forests that they will never get

the chance to grow that old if we leave them alone.

Got it. They don't only take longer to get

there. They might not make it at all.

And then finally, there are actual timber

considerations here. If you have all of these dense trees that

are going through the same phase of life at the same time

together, they're all competing for the same resources, and that

stresses them out. It curtails their growth. So if you want

nice, big trees eventually, you need healthy trees. And if you

want healthy trees, you might need less trees. And frankly, if

we want to use wood, but we don't want to be seeing clear

cuts, then we're going to have to find a way to fall in love

with selective tree cutting.

Right... we all use wood products.

There's something really radical about consuming

local resources, consuming local renewable resources, which would

often is even if that makes us uncomfortable.

This is a conversation that I think is

going to take us a little bit out of our comfort zone. And

Ethan experienced that directly, the first time that he visited

an acreage that he would come to own.

It had every problem that a forest could

have, truly. I mean, it had massive invasive plant issues.

It had been high graded. So loggers had come, they cut all

the healthiest trees, which are the most valuable, and left all

the least healthy trees. And the first time I walked through it,

I actually remember walking through and saying, I cannot

find any healthy trees. I have not seen a healthy tree on 175

acres. It had old skid roads, forest roads that were eroding.

It was just tough, really, really tough. And this has come

to be a piece of land, you know, a forest that I love

intrinsically. It doesn't have to do anything for me, doesn't

have to give anything to me. I think it and its biological

community has the right to exist, and yet I could not

pretend that, in light of all of these things, that just leaving

it alone could be a kindness. Going out there and doing things

as bittersweet as cutting trees, killing deer, spraying herbicide

on invasive plants were acts of compassion.

Wow... we've talked about killing deer in a

previous episode. Are... are we going to talk about herbicide

now?

No, that is for another time. The point here is

that there's a lot of land where proforestation is just not

working out so well.

Okay, so then the alternative is giving these

woodlands some hands-on attention. What does that look

like? How do you actually restore a forest?

I have been waiting for you to ask me that.

This is where it gets really fun. So on my little island, at

Pebble Beach in the 90s, back when Keith and Ken and Herb were

thinking about this, there really was no recipe for this

work. There wasn't any guide. And so Herb turned to the

forests themselves to provide the answers.

We set out to do something initially that no one

had ever done, and that's to restore an old growth forest

from a tree plantation following clear cutting. There was no

question that there wasn't a step by step kind of process

here. So what we relied upon was, let's create as many

examples of natural disturbances that would have occurred in a

young forest that would lead it eventually towards the diversity

that would make up an old growth forest.

So the idea is basically mimic natural

disturbances.

Yes, and this idea is a through line through all of

the conversations that I've had.

It's important to recognize that old growth

forests are not just valuable because they're old. They are

valuable because of the attributes that they have. And

we can create these conditions, not perfectly, but certainly to

a much greater extent than would be represented in our forests

today, centuries sooner than they would naturally occur.

Remember, these are all very different forests

that we're talking about, so the techniques vary a bit from place

to place, but at heart, the concepts and values are quite

similar. And the first and foremost intervention that many

of these forests just desperately need is to be

thinned.

And by thinned, you mean cutting down a certain

percentage of the trees?

Yes... in a way... but it's more of an art form

than that, because it ends up being less about what you're

removing than what you're leaving behind.

I'm not thinking about the tree that I'm cutting.

I'm thinking about the forest that I am manifesting, which is

diverse and complex, more like these old forests that were here

for 1000s of years, and to which all of our native species are

adapted.

If you've got a whole plantation of the same

trees growing at the same height with no variation, it's about

trying to influence that and to break that up.

And to just create weirdness, what we would call

complexity, or I call weirdness — irregularity, little mixes of

habitat that are novel and unique.

Mimic what nature does. Windthrow is one of the

main natural disturbance regimes in these systems.

Hey, Mendel — do you know what windthrow is?

If I had to guess, it's when the wind blows

trees over.

And windthrow is there for a purpose — to open up

the canopy, to allow more light in for a diversity of plants,

and then with that, a diversity of animals that depend upon the

plants.

So every 15 years, we'd be going in and thinning

and opening it up and opening it up.

And once we make the forest less dense through

thinning, there's all sorts of different techniques to create

diversity in the forest that remains. There are elements of

pro forestation.

Legacy trees are just trees that we're leaving

them in the forest forever, so we're never going to cut them

down. These don't have to be the most valuable trees from a

commercial perspective in your forest. So these can be trees

that are hollow, that are full of cavities. You know, are sort

of half dead, that have all of these functions which are

actually really important wildlife habitats.

And even in the most simplified forests, there

remain these little opportunities for diversity.

There was a few places where there was still

indigenous vegetation, oceanspray and red elderberry,

alder. A few little patches, and those became focal points that

we wanted to build off — our anchors for the restoration. And

then the other thing we did was tip trees over which created

root balls and root cavities, which provided exposed soil for

indigenous plants to seed and take root in.

You know, don't just make it a clear cut, even

though that's what most people will intuitively want to do,

because it will look really neat and tidy. Make it messy.

That whole thing has changed even in my lifetime in

forestry, when I first started, you know, the forest had to be

clean, and no foresters would accept trees just blown over or

lying about, as it were.

You're looking for opportunities to put dead wood

on the ground.

Dead wood is a very vital part of structure of the

forest.

We not only top trees to introduce rot.

So there'd be hand winching, ring barking.

The next thing we tried was girdling trees.

That's where we take the cambium layer off the bark,

the cambium layer off the tree, and kill it standing up.

... to make snags. And I still remember that it was

just a matter of days, or maybe a week or two, before we had

pileated woodpeckers back on the site

Anyway. We just have to go in with it.

And to think I was shocked when you were

pulling one tree over. These guys are like a windstorm, a

wildfire, a plague of locusts, and an earthquake all at the

same time.

Yeah it turns out there are lots of different ways

to kill trees. The chain hoist system that I introduced you to

is just one particularly creative way that the late Ken

Millard devised to simulate windthrow. But you can kill

trees with pulleys, with knives, with saws. I think you could do

it with fire too. There are probably other ways.

Surely.

For our next intervention, it's not only the

trees that need to be thinned out.

I don't know what it's like in Canada, but

certainly here it's this can be quite an evotive subject. People

still have this sort of like, I don't know, Bambi feeling about

about deer? I don't know

Oh, deer.

I think as an organization in the whole

Scotland, Forestry and Land Scotland cull nearly 40,000 deer

a year. So we're one of the bigger players in Scotland, and

it's still not touching what it should be, really, and that's a

crazy thing. Because we don't have an apex predator.

We know that part of the story from Season

Three. But what's the problem here? Are the deer hungry enough

to eat all your freshly downed logs?

Oh, I mean, in this case, it's not the logs

that we need to be worried about. If you're creating gaps

in the canopy and you're hoping that a diversity of forest

species are going to grow up to fill those gaps, in most places,

it's just not going to happen without fewer deer. And unless

you have natural predators, which is not the case for any of

the forests in this episode, then you need to be the

predator. You need to hunt them.

I think there's a lot of people argue when the

last wolf was shot in Scotland, but probably 250, 300 years ago

now. So there's been nothing since then. Basically, if it's

not old age or a bullet, nothing's going to stop deer,

really.

Yikes.

I mean, it's true. And in Scotland, they sell the

venison.

All our venison goes to what we call a game dealer.

You know, we got a contract with them. They come and pick the

carcasses up from our larder, and it goes into the food chain,

basically.

I'm part of the food chain! How do I get my

hands on some of this venison?

We've done a couple of successful open days, what

they call Hill to Grill, to get in the public along to see the

whole process, and to taste the product. Because venison is a

fantastic meat to eat, and we should be actually using much

more of it.

Sure yeah, I'll put in a little plug for

venison. I mean, it's actually one of the most delicious meats

I've ever tried. It's kind of funny that they... it seems like

they need to put in a lot of effort just to market it.

You know what they don't have to put much effort

into marketing?

What?

The wood! Timber sales can actually help pay for

the forest restoration, at least in Scotland, where they often do

clear whole areas of introduced valuable species, like Douglas

fir, in addition to their forest thinning.

Timber is harvested and sold on a commercial basis

to the local timber trade, when we're doing clear felling and

thinnings. So the larger material, saw logs will go for

manufacturing products, and smaller round wood goes to this

board factory — orientated strand board, or pallet wood as

well, and sometimes fencing materials.

So this kind of commercial cost recovery can

generate useful materials locally. At a minimum, it helps.

And in some cases, it actually enables the restoration to be

done in the first place.

And that was really eye opening, realizing

that commercial forest management is not just a

necessary compromise, it's also what allows work to occur.

Okay, hold on for just a second. Isn't there

like an inherent conflict between managing forests

commercially and managing them for old growthiness? Like even

if we can do commercial forestry more selectively, there's got to

be trade offs, right?

There's always trade offs. Mendel,

The ecologically ideal situation would be cutting

all these trees to create these canopy gaps, and to thin around

our healthiest trees. And we'd be just leaving them on the

ground, because there'd be more dead wood there at that time.

But the difference is that, because this is a commercial

forest management project, not only are we producing local

renewable resources, which is incredibly valuable, but it is

the commerciality of that project that is allowing it to

occur. So we wouldn't have been in there, creating gaps, putting

dead wood on the ground, doing any of this stuff, if it wasn't

commercial. And so in that way, it's I... I really believe it to

be a really happy compromise.

Okay, so there, there is still a compromise.

If you trust Ethan, a happy compromise.

Hmmm... but I guess what he's saying is that

it's worth it, because otherwise we'd be back in that black and

white, clear cuts or proforestation kind of world

view.

Yes, the argument is that it is possible to take

some wood out and still leave some on the ground. And you

know, it's going to be a different balance in every

place. Perhaps in some areas we want to remove more wood to

generate value for the community, or to limit fire

risk, right? Perhaps in other areas, we can afford to leave

more on the ground, and allow it to build the soil. What really

struck me listening to all of these folks from around the

world, is that what we're talking about is a kind of

forestry that balances the needs of the forest as a whole with

the lives of individual trees, and that brings the humans back

into the forest.

What I'm not creating here is a tree museum.

I would really like it to be managed in the future. You know,

the woods should be there for people, whether it be through

recreation, but especially through working. Should actually

have more people involved in the forest, really, if we can, not

less.

And that, to me, is like the most profound

expression of what it means to be the steward of a forest at

this moment in time. Like, we get the world that we get. Here

we are. And we have the forest that we have. The question is,

what are we going to do about it? We already have the power to

address these issues. We just have to decide to do it. Not

leaving these forests alone, but asking "what can we do to make

these ecosystems healthy again" is truly radical, and truly an

expression of love for them.

Okay Adam, I just have one question left.

And what would that be?

Does any of this actually work?

Oh, I mean, there are always successes and

setbacks with work like this, but the short answer is... yes.

I remember us having this conversation that we

would never live long enough to see this place feel different

and look different, but we were really wrong. It was a matter of

months, or a year plus, and it had a totally different look and

feel to it than it did when we started.

You're telling me you can see changes inside of

a year.

Oh yeah. Forests can be amazingly responsive.

Much of the forest diversity might be pushed to the brink,

but wherever it remains, it's ready to bounce back. For

instance, in Scotland, they have the capercaillie. It's an

endangered bird, kind of like a grouse. And for the

capercaillie, after just a few decades, breaking up the tree

canopy is already showing results.

There's more light getting in, there's more heat

generated, there's more insect life. The capercaillie seem to

thrive on that.

But results like these take persistence and

coordination at a landscape scale. Brian's work with

Glenmore is part of a project called Cairngorms Connect that

links a number of large landowners that are all working

together to recover ancient woodlands, to manage deer, to

restore wetlands. It's an incredibly exciting, holistic

vision for the whole region, and I wish I could talk about it

more.

Maybe some other time.

The thing is, it's such a long term vision. At

Cairngorms Connect, we say 250 years. You know, in human terms,

that's difficult sometimes to get your head around. In

ecological terms, it's nothing really. You know we're talking

about pine woodlands being here for 8000 years, since the last

ice age.

But that doesn't mean that they don't already see

results.

The areas we felled out in the 1990s in Glenmore

have regenerated really well, and now we've got what we call

our Pinewood reserve — nearly 1000 hectares there of pure

regenerated pine woodlands. And it looks, it looks fantastic.

Forest regenerating of all shapes and sizes of tree. The

plan is in 200 years, people will be walking through from one

end of Cairngorms Connect area to the other, through this

gnarly old pine woodland.

It's incredible to think that we have the power to

change the forest, but if we want that change to be for the

better, we have to allow the forest to change us too.

So the first step in order to get there is to

change our relationship with forests. And changing our

relationship with forests means to move from exploitation and

extraction to protection and restoration.

The most important thing that I've

learned from that is about creating a relationship with a

place, and being attuned to the place where you live and where

you work. And I got to know that land so well in the time that I

was able to study it and to try and help it to heal. And there's

a real relationship that gets born out of that. And it's about

us becoming part of the landscape and finding our place

there.

Hmm... so what about you, Adam, have you found

your place in the forest?

I mean, somewhere between a windstorm and an

earthquake, yeah, I'm helping to make an absolute mess, and I am

having a lot of fun doing it. And, you know, I guess what I

have learned is that if we're doing forest restoration, if

we're trying to restore a forest, we have to embrace the

messiness of it. We have to make an art of the messiness. Because

messy things are full of life, destruction and creation.

Hmm well, maybe Fern Gully had it right all

along.

Everyone can call on the magic powers of the web of life.

You have to find it in yourself.

There are lots of people to thank for this

episode, and also a lot of material that did not make the

final cut. So for all of our patrons on Patreon who support

the show, you can expect some extras that dive deeper into

some of the conversations that we've raised here. And in the

meantime, I'm actually involved in a forest restoration project

right now. On a site called Quadra hill here on Galiano

Island.

Well, please let us know how it goes.

I definitely will. Okay, as always, Future

Ecologies is an independent podcast supported by our amazing

community on Patreon. If you like what we do, you can help us

to do it, by contributing any amount at

futureecologies.net/join

All of our patrons get access to early

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Discord server.

And our biggest supporters get to show off with

stickers, embroidered patches,and now toques! That's a

beanie for American listeners.

In this episode, you heard Keith Erickson, Herb

Hammond, Ethan Tapper, Brian Duff,

and just a little bit of Ria Okuda, my colleague

at the GCA.

And music by Thumbug, Spencer W Stuart,

Nathan Schubert, and Sunfish Moon Light.

You can find Ethan's new book, How to Love a

Forest, at ethantapper.com/book. You can learn more about

Cairngorms connect at cairngormsconnect.org.uk. And if

you're curious about my day job at the Galiano Conservancy. You

can find us galianoconservancy.ca

This episode was produced by Adam Huggins, and me

Mendel Skulski, with help from Eden Zinchik, and cover art by

Ale Silva.

Special thanks to Ethan for nudging us into

telling this story; to Lizzie Brotherston for connecting us

with Brian; to all my colleagues at the Galiano Conservancy for

letting me record them while working; To Thomas Heinrich, who

interviewed some folks in the San Juans who will be featured

in a sub-episode because we just couldn't fit them in here; and

to Tal Engel for his engaging conversations on this topic. We

also found the Northwest Natural Resource Group's new book A

Forest of Your Own to be really helpful in putting this episode

together.

Okay, we've got an amazing season lined up for

you full of great new stories.

Keeping us very, very busy.

And you know what that means?

Yeah! Beaucoup overtime.

Oh what a miraculous device. I'm really getting the

hang of this.