FE6.1 - FOREST / TREE - Future Ecologies

Episode Transcript
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Introduction Voiceover (00:02):
You are listening to Season Six of
Future Ecologies.

Mendel Skulski (00:09):
Okay. Hey, Adam. Welcome back.

Adam Huggins (00:13):
Hi, Mendel. Can you believe it? Season six and
we still have no idea what we'redoing.

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 thesame. They're the same age,
they're the same height, they'reall 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 meterstall, and only green up at the
very top. So they wouldn't makevery good Christmas trees, I
guess. Down here on the ground,it's mostly just tree trunks in
every direction, and lots ofdead twigs sticking out from

(01:20):
those trunks. You know, pokingyou in the face, crunching
underfoot. And even though it'sit's sunny outside today, it's
pretty dark down here. There'snot 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 10meters up a tree, and we've
secured it up there with thesemassive steel nails that you
pound into the tree. They looklike 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. Wecall that the 'spar' tree,
through a pulley, which iscalled a 'snatch block', for
reasons I don't understand. Andthat pulley guides it to the
base of another tree, I don'tknow, about 20 meters away. We
call that the 'pivot' tree. It'scalled the pivot tree because

(02:30):
from that tree there's anothersnatch block at the base. The
chain pivots out to a thirdtree. We wrap the chain about
five meters up, and we call thatthe 'cull' tree. So three trees,
a chain and cables runningbetween 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 makethis 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'regetting 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 andeverything.

Okay, I'm feeling pretty lost.

Well, you wouldn't be the first person to stray
into the deep, dark woods andget a little bit lost. But in
all seriousness, what I'd liketo do with this episode is to
let some light into this darkforest. For the past couple of
years, I've been interviewingforesters across the temperate
world, and they've all said moreor less the same thing — that

(04:28):
when it comes to the managementof the woody places of the
world, we've been failing to seethe forest for the trees. But
all of that is starting tochange. 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 sixthseason of future ecologies, I'm

(04:51):
Adam.

I'm lost in the woods...

And this is forest tree.

Introduction Voiceover (05:07):
Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and
asserted territories of theMusqueam, Squamish, and
Tsleil-Waututh, this is FutureEcologies – 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 spendsome time with you in a very
different kind of forest. Do youremember?

Of course!

All right, I'm gonna take us back for a minute.
We're lying on the ground on ourbacks, 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'resurrounded by literally 1000
year old Sitka spruce treestowering 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 findingits way down to us, and
everything is just covered inmoss. Everything is so alive.

Even the dead things are alive! Like just a
stone's throw away, there's thisenormous standing snag, bleached
white by the sun, and there arebirds nesting in holes up and
down its trunk. And then righthere 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 shrubsand even small trees, getting a
head start

And on the ground, ferns, herbs, mosses and
mushrooms. The soil is so fullof mycelium, it's spongy,
bouncy, almost like atrampoline.

Or a mattress. I remember when we were lying down
there, you said you could smellthe layers in the landscape.

I smell the rich duff. I smell the soil here, put
down by these trees, put down bythese plants, put down on top of
sand, put down by a river...layer after layer after layer.
There's a lot of time in thisplace.

I really love how you put that, that there was so
much time in that place. Youcould literally see the time in
the layers of wood, in thelayers 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 BiosphereReserve, and the territory of
several First Nations.

Savvy listeners might have guessed already that
you and I were doing some goodold fashioned forest bathing in
the Hoh rainforest, on theOlympic 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 hasnever been clear cut.

Folks come from all over the world, you and me
included, to experience the Hohand to walk through the hall of
mosses. It's hard to overstatejust how rare these high
productivity, low elevation oldgrowth forests have become. In
the part of the world where youand I live, the vast majority of

(09:44):
these forests have been lost. Orto 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 ingeneral. On the south coast of
British Columbia, where we live,less than 10% of the original,
high productivity old growthforest remains, and a lot of
that is pretty difficult toaccess.

It's true. I mean, we took two ferries,
crossed an international borderand 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 weleft and crossed out of the park
boundary, we found ourselvespretty quickly back in a
different kind of forest.

Yeah, the forest that blankets so much of this
coast, the forest that most ofus have become accustomed to —
an impenetrable green wall ofconifers, same age, same height
and darkness below. And beforetoo long, we pulled into some of
the towns that produced theseforests. Communities where,

(10:54):
judging from the signs on theside of the road, you and I
might imagine that tree huggeris a pejorative term, and that
loggers are the underdog heroes.You know, communities where the
war in the woods never ended.

Hexxus (11:10):
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 animatedclassic, Fern Gully?
Of course! Of course. I knewthat movie by heart when I was a
kid.
Apparently, I still know it byheart. I'm gonna go out on a
limb and say that for ourgeneration, I think this piece
of pop culture was foundationalto our perspectives on forestry.

Unknown (11:44):
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 littlegangs of bugs, and everything
seems peachy. Until, of course,the humans show up.

Crysta (12:05):
Humans back in the forest!

Batty (12:07):
Yeah, there goes the neighborhood.

Crysta (12:09):
Be nice, Batty.

Batty (12:10):
First thing all these trees go. Then come your
highways, then come yourshopping malls and your parking
lots and your conveniencestores, 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 aC... 90s Zak — gets shrunk by
magic to fairy size. And ofcourse, 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.

Crysta (12:54):
What are you doing?

Zak (12:56):
Carving your name, see? C, R, Y, S...

Crysta (12:59):
No, no, you mustn't do that! Here, can't you feel its
pain?

Zak (13:06):
Its pain?

Crysta (13:07):
Yes!

Batty (13:08):
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 andCrysta, and you know, by
extension, the rest of us, welearn a few lessons. Lessons
like trees feel pain, logging isbad, oil is straight up evil.
And, of course, everything isconnected.

Magi (13:39):
There are worlds within worlds Crysta. Everything in our
world is connected by thedelicate strands of the web of
life, which is balanced betweenforces of destruction and the
magic forces of creation. Helpit 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 ofgratitude for this old film, but
I bring it up because I think itinstilled 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 itnecessarily 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 oldgrowth to logging. All the Fern
Gullies of the world, they aremostly gone... and maybe
forever.

Yes, and we absolutely have to protect the
few that remain, like the Hohfor sure.

So can we say that unequivocally? Like when we
were back in the Hoh, youweren't making plans to pull
down any of the giant Sitkaspruce.

Could you imagine?

No.

I think the Hoh is doing just fine on its own. The
forests that we're going to talkabout today aren't the Fern
Gullies of the world. Theforests that we're going to talk
about are what's left behindafter the cartoon villain of
Fern Gully and his industrialmachinery have rolled over the
forest, and spit it out theother side. So I'm gonna take

(15:47):
you on a little tour of theplantation forests of the
temperate world to meet some ofthe 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, atleast in the North American
context, is settler colonialforestry, right? How it

(16:10):
transformed the diverse,thriving forests of this
continent into collections oftrees, and then how we might
turn its own tools towardsrestoration. There is a long
history of Indigenous forestryon this continent, and that
deserves its own episode anotherday.

For sure.

All right, first stop Vermont.

Huh.

With our tour guide, Ethan Tapper. He's a
forester and author. He actuallyjust wrote a book called "How to
Love a Forest". And when I spoketo him last year, he was the
Chittenden County forester forthe Vermont Department of
forests and recreation.

Ethan Tapper (16:49):
So we're a 75% forested state. 80% of those
lands are owned by privatelandowners. As county foresters,
we have this real interest inhelping 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 ofthe world.

Leaf peepers!

But it will probably not surprise you to
know that the forests that wesee today are very different
from what they might have lookedlike in the past.

The vast majority of Vermont's forests 300 years
ago were what we would now callold growth forests. That means a
lot of different things. Youknow, that's not a monolith. Old
growth forests are defined bytheir variability.

These forests would have been super diverse
,with dry areas and other areasthat were really wet.

We think that prior to the 1600s, which is
when beaver trapping reallystarted in North America by
Europeans, we think that we had300 beaver dams per square mile
in our valleys. The massiveamount of beaver activity that
would have not just completelyaltered the hydrology of our
riparian areas and our valleys,but also, you know, provided
habitat for this incrediblearray of other species, and, you

(18:27):
know, fundamentally changed theway 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, calledEastern elk, caribou and moose,
and those were our prominentungulates, and those were all
gone by the late 1700s. And wehad two apex predators, the
Eastern Cougar, which we callthe Catamount, and wolves, which
were both also bountied, huntedto extinction.

Long story short, those forests were cut down and
the animals were hunted andkilled for timber, for furs, but
primarily for agriculture.

Certainly, the biggest single driver of the
clearing that we saw waspasture, and particularly
pasture for the Merino sheep.You know, going from 90 plus
percent forested landscapes inNew 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 mountainwas a pasture in the 1800s.

And that's because, as small scale
agriculture has declined, manyof those pastures have been
planted to trees or just allowedto regenerate on their own. But
these new forests are verydifferent from the old growth
forests that existed prior toland clearance.

The forests today that we have are largely 60 to
100 years old. Most of them werea pasture 60 to 100 years ago.

These forests are comprised of a single generation
of trees, often just a singlespecies. Take Eastern White
Pine, for example, which is nowreally 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 whichwill 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 veryuncommon, largely because of
introduced pathogens. Like inthe past, a single beech tree
could live to be over 400 yearsold, and then immediately regrow
new stems from its own clones.

And now it has this disease called Beech bark
disease. So instead of living tobe 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 reallycool species, the butternut
canker. Ash trees, emerald ashborer. Elm trees with Dutch elm
disease.

So not only have some native tree species been
almost completely wiped out, theones 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 aspecies has ceased to perform
its full range of ecologicalservices. But it's not only the
trees. The hydrology and soilsare no longer performing their
full range of ecologicalservices 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 thathave been straightened and
drained and damned. And then wealso are missing many of the
structures that help the forestslow down water, absorb it,
spread it out, help itinfiltrate, especially dead
wood.

Okay, so if I was a leaf peeper and I wanted
to see some nice fall color, Icould be stumbling around these
younger forests in Vermont, andI have no idea that what I'm
seeing is, in many cases, notreally a forest so much as a

(22:26):
bunch of trees that happen togrow up on an abandoned pasture.

I mean, it begs the question, what is a forest,
exactly? Those might be the onlyforests that many Vermonters
have ever known. Okay, so that'sa little portrait of Vermont.
Let's put a pin in that for now,and hop across the pond to the
Scottish Highlands... throughthe power of radio. Okay, you

(22:52):
ready?

Uh huh...

3, 2, 1, hop!

Brian Duff (23:00):
My name is Brian Duff. I work for Forestry and
Land Scotland, and I'm based inGlenmore Forest Park.

I chatted with Brian earlier this summer. He
works up in this mountain rangecalled the Cairngorms.

Brian Duff (23:16):
Yeah, Cairngorms is in the north northeast of
Scotland. It's the largest areain Great Britain that is above
4000 feet. They're very roundedhills, so they're quite unusual
from that point of view, wellweathered over the millennia.
And they're also part now of theNational Park, the Cairngorm

(23:36):
National Park, which is thelargest national park in Great
Britain.

And unlike in New England, where European
colonization resulted in lots ofsmall private landowners,
Scotland has a legacy of largeprivate landowners.

Brian Duff (23:54):
Scotland's got a tradition of estates and in the
past that was kind of used forrecreation purposes, i.e.
hunting, culling, deer, grouseshooting, that sort of thing.

Hmm, these would have been the playgrounds of the
upper class gentlemen huntersthat we talked about in Season
Four, huh?

Definitely. But these folks weren't just
hunting. The woodlands whereBrian works have a long history
of silviculture as well.

Brian Duff (24:24):
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 inScotland, 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 moredeer than trees absolutely
chills my blood. And atGlenmore, that was before the
war.

Brian Duff (24:52):
Then the first world war came, and guys, funny
enough, from Canada, came and...flattened the whole forest,
virtually.

Flattened?!

Brian Duff (25:03):
Yeah, yeah. It was quite, quite incredible,
actually. 450 guys and theybuilt a railway system and two
saw mills, etc. And it's justquite 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,

Brian Duff (25:25):
When we took this land on, there was only about 80
hectares or so of nativewoodland left. And at that time,
before and after the SecondWorld War, the rest of it was
planted up with what we wouldcall non-native species now. And
that would be species fromAmerica, like spruces, larch,
douglas fir as well from thePacific coast. And nobody really

(25:47):
thought anything more aboutthat.

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 gotforests that are not only very
young. They are very differentfrom the historical woodlands.

Yes, different in terms of species, age, structure
and also density of trees.

Brian Duff (26:15):
During this reafforestation, a lot of
planting of Scots Pine was done,and that was done at what we
call commercial spacing. So atyear five, we're looking for two
and a half thousand trees perhectare.

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 Pinewoodlands would have been but
just for reference, an oldgrowth forest out here on the
coast would have maybe 80 to 120trees 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'veever been in are around 1500
trees per hectare, and it'sactually difficult to even walk
through those. Speaking ofwhich, we have one more forest
to visit... or to revisit. We'reheaded back to the West Coast.

Aha... back to where we started off?

Yes, back to my neck of the woods – Galiano
Island. That particular forestis broadly representative of the
forests left behind byindustrial forestry throughout
our region, if a particularlyextreme example. It's called the
Pebble Beach reserve, and myorganization, the Galiano
Conservancy, purchased it backin the late 1990s

Keith Erickson (27:43):
They had this 160 acre piece of land that was
a forest plantation that hadbeen nuked, in terms of
industrial forestry terminology,or the terminology I use for
industrial forestry. And so thenext 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 ofthe episode.
Chain hoist guy!
As I am sure he would love to beknown. He's a biologist. Worked
for the Galiano Conservancy formany years and has been a mentor
to me. But when he got his firstjob out of university a couple
decades back right here atPebble Beach, he was pretty

(28:21):
green behind the ears. Andluckily, he found his own
mentors on the job, the latedirector of the Galiano
Conservancy, Ken Millard, andthe renowned eco forester, Herb
Hammond.

Herb Hammond (28:34):
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 thesite had been windrowed. And
they just scraped all thematerial, the fallen trees, all

(28:55):
the organic matter and a goodshare of the topsoil into these
windrows. And then in between,they planted them with nicely
spaced trees. And the plan onMacMillan Bloedel's part was to
harvest that mechanically.

MacMillan Bloedel, the major logging company that
owned, cleared, and planted thislot, used it as kind of an
experimental, free-for-all testsite. They were trying to
eliminate an endemic parasitecalled laminated root rot that
affects Douglas fir trees, andthey imagined harvesting the
trees using giant machines likethe one in Fern Gully.

Uhh.... I'm picturing, like, cutting down
rows of trees as if they werewheat.

That's actually not too far from what they were
imagining as well. But it didn'twork out like they had hoped.
Take a walk in this foresttoday, and Keith will tell you
about the kind of ecosystem thatthat 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 themature forest. And here you look
out, it's pretty darn flat. Jumpup and down in the mature
forest, and of course, it's gota little bit of spring to it,

(30:23):
and you jump up and down here,and it's like mineral soil.

Okay, I'm sensing the pattern. Wherever
you might go, healthy oldforests have some similarities.
They have trees of varyingspecies, varying ages. Some are
old, some are very young. Theyhave wide spacing and gaps, so

(30:50):
plenty of light gets down to theunderstory. They have lots of
dead trees standing and deadtrees lying down. They have
layers of different vegetation,which makes for a lot of little
niches for all the differentspecies who make their homes in
forests, and you can even bounceon 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, athigh densities, and so you lose
all that light, and from thatyou lose the diversity and the
wildlife habitat.

And that is most forests. Sometimes they're
created intentionally, like atthe Pebble Beach reserve, and
sometimes they occur whendisturbed 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 isanother reason why it's so
important to protect ourremaining old forests. But we
can help younger forests acquireold 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 languagefor this yet, but what we're
trying to do is imbue youngerforests 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 awhirlwind tour of the plantation
forests of the world.

The deep, dark woods.

And now we're going to follow a trail of
gingerbread crumbs tograndmother'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?

Crysta (33:58):
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 leftoff with the question, how can
we take a young, simplifiedforest and make it older and
more complex? And thetraditional answer to that
question would be to protect itand leave it alone, let time do

(34:24):
its work, right?

Old growth forests are amazing. They're diverse.
They provide all this reallyamazing 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 forhow we do that is that we leave
them alone for a long, longtime, and they become old
growth, and they sort of startto embody all of those different
values. And that's what theycall proforestation.

Proforestation... I mean, I guess I'm pro
forestation, right?

You know, I wasn't familiar with this term either,
but basically, proforestationmeans letting forests grow and
recover on their own.

In general, I believe that most of the people
who are involved inproforestation believe that this
is what it means to love aforest. It makes all the sense
in the world. If you love aforest, you don't cut any trees
and you leave it alone.

Yeah, I mean that that seems like the obvious
and reasonable reaction toseeing clear cuts everywhere.
Those places look horrible andso fair enough to feel like do
exactly the opposite of that.

Yeah, those two polarities, it's almost, I
think, like indicative of somany of the problems that we
have where we think it has to belike completely one thing or
completely the other, because wecan't picture a world in which
it's sort of one thing and sortof the other and both things and
neither.

So Ethan is saying that the world might
actually be a little bit morenuanced than Fern Gully would
have us believe.

Maybe. I mean, I think it's important to
acknowledge that so many of uswho got inspired to care for the
more than human world, we startfrom 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 aroundthem and in them. And really,
actually, I think when Istarted, I was just sort of more
interested in protecting them,and, you know, figuring out how
to leave them alone. Through thecourse of my career, and through

(36:45):
the course of my time at theUniversity of Vermont, really
started to understand the beautyand the importance of
management, that these forestswere not systems that could just
exist, that they were extremelyaltered, highly degraded, and
that there was a role for peoplein making them really healthy
and vibrant and abundantecosystems.

So we're talking about a middle path between
leaving forests alone andmanaging them like tree farms.
But what's what's wrong withproforestation? 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 ofindustrial forestry, we tend to
just leave it alone, right? Weprotect it. But I think there
are several good arguments forwhy we should get more hands on.
And the first one is thatforests take a long time to

(37:43):
develop old growthcharacteristics. 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 todevelop 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 thatkind 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, windstormsor mega fires, there's a
significant risk for theseforests that they will never get
the chance to grow that old ifwe leave them alone.

Got it. They don't only take longer to get
there. They might not make it atall.

And then finally, there are actual timber
considerations here. If you haveall of these dense trees that
are going through the same phaseof life at the same time
together, they're all competingfor the same resources, and that
stresses them out. It curtailstheir growth. So if you want
nice, big trees eventually, youneed healthy trees. And if you

(39:02):
want healthy trees, you mightneed less trees. And frankly, if
we want to use wood, but wedon't want to be seeing clear
cuts, then we're going to haveto 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 localrenewable resources, which would
often is even if that makes usuncomfortable.

This is a conversation that I think is
going to take us a little bitout of our comfort zone. And
Ethan experienced that directly,the first time that he visited
an acreage that he would come toown.

It had every problem that a forest could
have, truly. I mean, it hadmassive invasive plant issues.
It had been high graded. Sologgers had come, they cut all
the healthiest trees, which arethe most valuable, and left all
the least healthy trees. And thefirst time I walked through it,
I actually remember walkingthrough and saying, I cannot
find any healthy trees. I havenot seen a healthy tree on 175

(40:01):
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 haveto do anything for me, doesn't
have to give anything to me. Ithink it and its biological

(40:22):
community has the right toexist, and yet I could not
pretend that, in light of all ofthese 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 ofcompassion.

Wow... we've talked about killing deer in a
previous episode. Are... are wegoing to talk about herbicide
now?

No, that is for another time. The point here is
that there's a lot of land whereproforestation is just not
working out so well.

Okay, so then the alternative is giving these
woodlands some hands-onattention. What does that look
like? How do you actuallyrestore a forest?

I have been waiting for you to ask me that.
This is where it gets reallyfun. So on my little island, at
Pebble Beach in the 90s, backwhen Keith and Ken and Herb were
thinking about this, therereally was no recipe for this
work. There wasn't any guide.And so Herb turned to the

(41:38):
forests themselves to providethe answers.

We set out to do something initially that no one
had ever done, and that's torestore an old growth forest
from a tree plantation followingclear cutting. There was no
question that there wasn't astep by step kind of process
here. So what we relied uponwas, let's create as many
examples of natural disturbancesthat would have occurred in a

(42:04):
young forest that would lead iteventually towards the diversity
that would make up an old growthforest.

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 valuablebecause they're old. They are
valuable because of theattributes that they have. And
we can create these conditions,not perfectly, but certainly to
a much greater extent than wouldbe represented in our forests
today, centuries sooner thanthey would naturally occur.

Remember, these are all very different forests
that we're talking about, so thetechniques vary a bit from place
to place, but at heart, theconcepts and values are quite
similar. And the first andforemost intervention that many
of these forests justdesperately 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 upbeing less about what you're
removing than what you'releaving behind.

I'm not thinking about the tree that I'm cutting.
I'm thinking about the forestthat I am manifesting, which is
diverse and complex, more likethese old forests that were here
for 1000s of years, and to whichall of our native species are
adapted.

Brian Duff (43:35):
If you've got a whole plantation of the same
trees growing at the same heightwith no variation, it's about
trying to influence that and tobreak that up.

And to just create weirdness, what we would call
complexity, or I call weirdness— irregularity, little mixes of
habitat that are novel andunique.

Mimic what nature does. Windthrow is one of the
main natural disturbance regimesin 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 lightin for a diversity of plants,
and then with that, a diversityof animals that depend upon the
plants.

Brian Duff (44:26):
So every 15 years, we'd be going in and thinning
and opening it up and opening itup.

And once we make the forest less dense through
thinning, there's all sorts ofdifferent techniques to create
diversity in the forest thatremains. There are elements of
pro forestation.

Legacy trees are just trees that we're leaving
them in the forest forever, sowe're never going to cut them
down. These don't have to be themost valuable trees from a
commercial perspective in yourforest. So these can be trees
that are hollow, that are fullof cavities. You know, are sort
of half dead, that have all ofthese functions which are

(45:07):
actually really importantwildlife habitats.

And even in the most simplified forests, there
remain these littleopportunities for diversity.

There was a few places where there was still
indigenous vegetation,oceanspray and red elderberry,
alder. A few little patches, andthose became focal points that
we wanted to build off — ouranchors for the restoration. And
then the other thing we did wastip trees over which created

(45:36):
root balls and root cavities,which provided exposed soil for
indigenous plants to seed andtake root in.

You know, don't just make it a clear cut, even
though that's what most peoplewill intuitively want to do,
because it will look really neatand tidy. Make it messy.

Brian Duff (45:54):
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 wouldaccept trees just blown over or
lying about, as it were.

You're looking for opportunities to put dead wood
on the ground.

Brian Duff (46:11):
Dead wood is a very vital part of structure of the
forest.

We not only top trees to introduce rot.

Brian Duff (46:19):
So there'd be hand winching, ring barking.

The next thing we tried was girdling trees.

Brian Duff (46:24):
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 maybea week or two, before we had
pileated woodpeckers back on thesite

Brian Duff (46:45):
Anyway. We just have to go in with it.

And to think I was shocked when you were
pulling one tree over. Theseguys 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 hoistsystem that I introduced you to
is just one particularlycreative way that the late Ken
Millard devised to simulatewindthrow. But you can kill
trees with pulleys, with knives,with saws. I think you could do
it with fire too. There areprobably other ways.

Surely.

For our next intervention, it's not only the
trees that need to be thinnedout.

Brian Duff (47:28):
I don't know what it's like in Canada, but
certainly here it's this can bequite an evotive subject. People
still have this sort of like, Idon't know, Bambi feeling about
about deer? I don't know

Oh, deer.

Brian Duff (47:42):
I think as an organization in the whole
Scotland, Forestry and LandScotland cull nearly 40,000 deer
a year. So we're one of thebigger players in Scotland, and
it's still not touching what itshould be, really, and that's a
crazy thing. Because we don'thave an apex predator.

We know that part of the story from Season
Three. But what's the problemhere? Are the deer hungry enough
to eat all your freshly downedlogs?

Oh, I mean, in this case, it's not the logs
that we need to be worriedabout. If you're creating gaps
in the canopy and you're hopingthat a diversity of forest
species are going to grow up tofill those gaps, in most places,
it's just not going to happenwithout 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

(48:31):
predator. You need to hunt them.

Brian Duff (48:33):
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 nothingsince 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.

Brian Duff (48:54):
All our venison goes to what we call a game dealer.
You know, we got a contract withthem. 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?

Brian Duff (49:10):
We've done a couple of successful open days, what
they call Hill to Grill, to getin the public along to see the
whole process, and to taste theproduct. Because venison is a
fantastic meat to eat, and weshould be actually using much
more of it.

Sure yeah, I'll put in a little plug for
venison. I mean, it's actuallyone of the most delicious meats
I've ever tried. It's kind offunny that they... it seems like
they need to put in a lot ofeffort 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 leastin Scotland, where they often do
clear whole areas of introducedvaluable species, like Douglas
fir, in addition to their forestthinning.

Brian Duff (50:00):
Timber is harvested and sold on a commercial basis
to the local timber trade, whenwe're doing clear felling and
thinnings. So the largermaterial, saw logs will go for
manufacturing products, andsmaller round wood goes to this
board factory — orientatedstrand board, or pallet wood as

(50:21):
well, and sometimes fencingmaterials.

So this kind of commercial cost recovery can
generate useful materialslocally. At a minimum, it helps.
And in some cases, it actuallyenables the restoration to be
done in the first place.

And that was really eye opening, realizing
that commercial forestmanagement is not just a
necessary compromise, it's alsowhat allows work to occur.

Okay, hold on for just a second. Isn't there
like an inherent conflictbetween managing forests
commercially and managing themfor old growthiness? Like even
if we can do commercial forestrymore 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 thesecanopy gaps, and to thin around
our healthiest trees. And we'dbe just leaving them on the
ground, because there'd be moredead wood there at that time.
But the difference is that,because this is a commercial
forest management project, notonly are we producing local
renewable resources, which isincredibly valuable, but it is

(51:33):
the commerciality of thatproject that is allowing it to
occur. So we wouldn't have beenin there, creating gaps, putting
dead wood on the ground, doingany 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 otherwisewe'd be back in that black and
white, clear cuts orproforestation kind of world
view.

Yes, the argument is that it is possible to take
some wood out and still leavesome on the ground. And you
know, it's going to be adifferent balance in every
place. Perhaps in some areas wewant to remove more wood to
generate value for thecommunity, or to limit fire
risk, right? Perhaps in otherareas, we can afford to leave

(52:31):
more on the ground, and allow itto build the soil. What really
struck me listening to all ofthese folks from around the
world, is that what we'retalking about is a kind of
forestry that balances the needsof the forest as a whole with
the lives of individual trees,and that brings the humans back

(52:51):
into the forest.

Brian Duff (52:53):
What I'm not creating here is a tree museum.
I would really like it to bemanaged in the future. You know,
the woods should be there forpeople, whether it be through
recreation, but especiallythrough working. Should actually
have more people involved in theforest, really, if we can, not
less.

And that, to me, is like the most profound
expression of what it means tobe the steward of a forest at
this moment in time. Like, weget the world that we get. Here
we are. And we have the forestthat we have. The question is,
what are we going to do aboutit? We already have the power to
address these issues. We justhave to decide to do it. Not
leaving these forests alone, butasking "what can we do to make

(53:37):
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 tosee this place feel different
and look different, but we werereally wrong. It was a matter of
months, or a year plus, and ithad a totally different look and
feel to it than it did when westarted.

You're telling me you can see changes inside of
a year.

Oh yeah. Forests can be amazingly responsive.
Much of the forest diversitymight be pushed to the brink,
but wherever it remains, it'sready to bounce back. For
instance, in Scotland, they havethe capercaillie. It's an
endangered bird, kind of like agrouse. And for the
capercaillie, after just a fewdecades, breaking up the tree

(54:53):
canopy is already showingresults.

Brian Duff (54:55):
There's more light getting in, there's more heat
generated, there's more insectlife. The capercaillie seem to
thrive on that.

But results like these take persistence and
coordination at a landscapescale. Brian's work with
Glenmore is part of a projectcalled Cairngorms Connect that
links a number of largelandowners that are all working
together to recover ancientwoodlands, to manage deer, to
restore wetlands. It's anincredibly exciting, holistic

(55:25):
vision for the whole region, andI wish I could talk about it
more.

Maybe some other time.

Brian Duff (55:29):
The thing is, it's such a long term vision. At
Cairngorms Connect, we say 250years. You know, in human terms,
that's difficult sometimes toget your head around. In
ecological terms, it's nothingreally. You know we're talking
about pine woodlands being herefor 8000 years, since the last
ice age.

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

Brian Duff (55:54):
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 — nearly1000 hectares there of pure
regenerated pine woodlands. Andit looks, it looks fantastic.
Forest regenerating of allshapes and sizes of tree. The

(56:16):
plan is in 200 years, peoplewill be walking through from one
end of Cairngorms Connect areato the other, through this
gnarly old pine woodland.

It's incredible to think that we have the power to
change the forest, but if wewant that change to be for the
better, we have to allow theforest to change us too.

So the first step in order to get there is to
change our relationship withforests. And changing our
relationship with forests meansto move from exploitation and
extraction to protection andrestoration.

The most important thing that I've
learned from that is aboutcreating a relationship with a
place, and being attuned to theplace where you live and where
you work. And I got to know thatland so well in the time that I
was able to study it and to tryand help it to heal. And there's

(57:16):
a real relationship that getsborn out of that. And it's about
us becoming part of thelandscape 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 tomake 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'redoing forest restoration, if
we're trying to restore aforest, we have to embrace the

(57:57):
messiness of it. We have to makean art of the messiness. Because
messy things are full of life,destruction and creation.

Hmm well, maybe Fern Gully had it right all
along.

Magi (58:25):
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 ofmaterial that did not make the
final cut. So for all of ourpatrons on Patreon who support
the show, you can expect someextras that dive deeper into
some of the conversations thatwe've raised here. And in the
meantime, I'm actually involvedin a forest restoration project

(59:04):
right now. On a site calledQuadra hill here on Galiano
Island.

Well, please let us know how it goes.

I definitely will. Okay, as always, Future
Ecologies is an independentpodcast supported by our amazing
community on Patreon. If youlike what we do, you can help us
to do it, by contributing anyamount at
futureecologies.net/join

All of our patrons get access to early
episode releases, exclusivebonus content, and our community
Discord server.

And our biggest supporters get to show off with
stickers, embroideredpatches,and now toques! That's a
beanie for American listeners.

In this episode, you heard Keith Erickson, Herb
Hammond, Ethan Tapper, BrianDuff,

and just a little bit of Ria Okuda, my colleague
at the GCA.

And music by Thumbug, Spencer W Stuart,
Nathan Schubert, and SunfishMoon Light.

Adam Huggins (01:00:06):
You can find Ethan's new book, How to Love a
Forest, at ethantapper.com/book.You can learn more about
Cairngorms connect atcairngormsconnect.org.uk. And if
you're curious about my day jobat the Galiano Conservancy. You
can find usgalianoconservancy.ca

Mendel Skulski (01:00:26):
This episode was produced by Adam Huggins, and me
Mendel Skulski, with help fromEden Zinchik, and cover art by
Ale Silva.

Special thanks to Ethan for nudging us into
telling this story; to LizzieBrotherston for connecting us
with Brian; to all my colleaguesat the Galiano Conservancy for
letting me record them whileworking; To Thomas Heinrich, who
interviewed some folks in theSan Juans who will be featured
in a sub-episode because we justcouldn't fit them in here; and
to Tal Engel for his engagingconversations on this topic. We

(01:00:59):
also found the Northwest NaturalResource Group's new book A
Forest of Your Own to be reallyhelpful 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?

Tony (01:01:16):
Yeah! Beaucoup overtime.

Hexxus (01:01:20):
Oh what a miraculous device. I'm really getting the
hang of this.

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