FE6.1 - FOREST / TREE

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

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

I'm lost in the woods...

And this is forest tree. Introduction Voiceover: 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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 episode releases, exclusive bonus content, and our community 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

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.