Speaking for the trees
Two books examine our place — and responsibility in a changing world
Years ago, I came across a video on some random website that curates the random videos that catch their editor's eyes. It was of a somewhat new piece of equipment, mounted on a skidder crane that an operator would clamp around the trunk of a tree. From there, it would cut the base, and drop it, then run up to the top, slicing the log up into manageable lengths while also cutting off the branches.
It was a video that chilled me: it looked like some sort of Lovecraftian nightmare, full of gears and blades, one designed to reduce a forest to products on an industrial scale quickly and efficiently. I came away with a thought that's lived rent-free in my head ever since: "why do we hate trees so much?"
I grew up in the woods: my parents owned a nice swath of a mountain in Central Vermont and I have an endless stream of memories exploring and playing between the trees. As I've grown older, I've gravitated towards forests, trying to spend time walking and hiking through them, taking in their towering figures and observing the ecosystems that they support.
In the last year, I've gravitated toward a pair of books that examines our relationship with the natural world. The first was Christopher Brown's A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places, (which comes out in trade paperback today, October 7th) and Ethan Tapper's How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World. Both books are engrossing works of nature writing and tackle the delicate moment in which we're currently living: in a moment where we're finally forced to grapple with the role that humanity has played in changing our planet's climate, but also how we can find better to live in some sort of balance with the natural world.
For years now, I've been a fan of Brown's excellent newsletter, Field Notes, in which he investigates what he calls the edgelands – the natural spaces that bump up against human spaces. It's an optimistic look at the world (and I can't recommend it highly enough), showing that nature will often find ways to to claw back its territory.
In a blend of memoir and observation, Brown recounts how he came to build his unique home in Austin, Texas – Edgeland House, constructed on a reclaimed brownfield and designed to emulate an indigenous pit house that at the same time pays homage to the site's industrial space. It's good focal point that neatly sums his view of the changing world: pay close attention to the natural world and find alternatives ways to coexist with it.
Andrew Liptak
The book, like the newsletter that inspires it, shows plenty of those observations: glimpses of the predators that he sees in game cameras evade fences and artificial lines that define our property, the ways that the sod roof of his home invites plenty of insects and reptiles into his spaces, and how urban development has changed the land around him.
Brown muses about the unnatural structures that we've imposed on the land: the buildings, roads, bridges, but especially the underlying property laws that underpin it all. These boundaries slice up the land and provide us with the legal reckoning to say what's mine or yours, and how they've been used to exploit that land in detrimental ways. It's this legal infrastructure that largely stands in the way of real environmental reform.
Yet, the natural world is generally happy to ignore those invisible lines that we've surrounded ourselves. We might have plowed down forests and grasslands to replace them with buildings, roads, and "natural" spaces filled with invasive species, but life finds ways of going around or infiltrating them in their own ways. Animals adapt to our presence, sometimes thriving, sometimes hiding, and often treating the slightest sign of neglect as an invitation to put down roots and find ways to grow in the cracks and fissures of the abandoned lots.
That resiliency means that we can't bulldoze over everything and just put up a parking lot and expect that to be the end of the story. If we can't control nature or the spaces that we occupy, we should find ways instead to work with the flora and fauna that surrounds us: finding better ways to build homes and communities that make it easier for them to thrive.
It's a book that is quietly radical: one in which Brown shows that this isn't a situation where it's all or nothing; nature or people. Our future can be one of cohabitation, and that the sins we've inflicted upon the world are maybe not entirely reversable, but something that we can change moving forward. But to do so means taking incredible will and effort to fix the underlying systems that have allowed us to run amok across the planet. But even as we figure that out, we can take smaller steps, finding ways to allow nature to thrive in the wild spaces between our homes, roads, and buildings in order to build a more resilient and healthier world for all of us.
Behind the museum where I work is a hill and wooded park. I try and take walks up the half-mile to the tower at the top, enjoying the sun filtering through the trees and the occasional animal or bird that I catch sight of as I do so. Recently, the forest has been changing: foresters have been going through and flagging trees with orange tape, and for a week or so, the trails were closed off as they set about doing their work, cutting down clumps of trees, opening up the canopy to the brilliant sun.
Ethan Tapper's book sheds some light on this practice. He's a consulting forester here in Vermont who purchased a plot of land in Richmond and realized that he had to do something unthinkable: in order to save his little forest, he has to bring in loggers and pesticides to destroy parts of it.
It's hard to believe, but in the 19th and early 20th century, Vermont's green mountains were almost completely deforested: settlers tapped the state's old growth forests for lumber and clear-cut large portions to make way for their herds of cows and sheep. As the state's population aged and moved away – and as the early environmental movement began to advocate for the value of forests – the forests began to return, taking over those formerly clear spaces.
Vermont is now nearly 80% forested, but the forests that returned are a far cry from the old-growth groves that once covered the state. Tapper uses his time and pages to recount how he came to realize and understand that these forests are deeply unnatural: forests that are at times deeply unhealthy because they are so young. Old growth forests, he explains, are complicated spaces, ones that feature great depth to their canopies and ecosystems. A forest shouldn't be the pristine, clean stands of trees that we've shaped to our preferences: these types of forests don't make for good habitats for the migratory birds and animals that had long adapted to the forests we chopped down, and thus, the chains of life that made for a healthy environment have been broken.
He cites one noteworthy example: the demise of the passenger pigeon. These birds were said to have flocked in such numbers that they blackened the sky – their population is thought to have been in the billions. They left enormous amounts of excrement and broken branches in their wake and as a result played critical roles in the health of the forest: helping with fires, spreading seeds, and helped build the resilient and rich forests that existed when settlers arrived to the Americas in the 1500s. In another, he points to the arrival of the emerald ash borer to Vermont; an invasive insect that's slowly been killing off the state's ash trees, which will join the elm and chestnuts in relative extinction here, furthering the permanent changes that we've inflicted to the natural world.
Tapper weaves all of this together to explain how he's come to tend to his forest: finding the places where it's unhealthy and bringing in loggers to open the canopy up for sun to filter down, to return nutrients to the soil, while also identifying the invasive plants that threaten to choke out the native ones. These small steps, he reasons, might seem counterintuitive and are hard to stomach, but will hopefully turn this one small plot of land into a more resilient and healthy forest.
Both How to Love a Forest and A Natural History of Empty Lots feel as though they're in conversation with a central idea: that while humanity has inflicted enormous damage to our ecosystem, nature can be a resilient force and that we can change and adapt our ways to prevent further damage. Each looks as how our artificial constructs of property lines and built spaces have played a role in fueling this damage, and that reforming them would help with this process: rethinking how we exist alongside the modern world will help us figure out how to survive in a future that's fraught with massive and destructive natural disasters like wildfires or hurricanes, and how to withstand the slow-moving ones like drought and ecological collapse.
These are works that recognize that the damage has been done, but are optimistic that we can find creative solutions to change how we live moving forward. They're books that have rekindled and reinvigorated my love of the forests that surround me, and force me to look closely at the fingerprints that we've left behind: in the form of cracked pavement to unhealthy forests. Hopefully, they'll serve as catalysts, books that quietly radicalize their readers into recognizing our problematic relationship with the world around us, and pushing us to make better choices for our future.