Cover artwork by Ale Silva
Summary
Season 6 kicks off in the deep dark woods: the simplified, post-industrial forests of the world — the only forests that many of us have ever known.
Join us as we meet foresters in British Columbia, Vermont, and Scotland, all working to embrace the messy art of ecological forestry. Because if we want our forests to be old growth-ier, we might not be able to just wait and leave them alone. It might mean challenging some assumptions and getting out of our comfort zone, but that's what it'll take to see the forest for the trees.
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Show Notes and Credits
This episode was produced by Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski, with help from Eden Zinchik
With the voices of Ethan Tapper, Brian Duff, Keith Erickson, and Herb Hammond
And music by Thumbug, Spencer W Stuart, Nathan Shubert, and Sunfish Moon Light
Special thanks to Lizzie Brotherston, Adam’s colleagues at the GCA, Thomas Heinrich, Tal Engel
See also:
This episode includes audio recorded by RutgerMuller, Nic3_one, Artninja, FreqMan, Stefan021, betchkal, tim.khan, IESP, Hyperionn, CGEffex, michael_grinnell, egomassive, AngelicWings, jgrzinich, accessed through the Freesound Project, and protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses, and clips from “FernGully: The Last Rainforest”, used under fair use (with love and appreciation).
Ancient old growth in the Hoh Rainforest
Citations
Gerzon, M., Seely, B., & MacKinnon, A. (2011). The temporal development of old-growth structural attributes in second-growth stands: A chronosequence study in the Coastal Western Hemlock zone in British Columbia. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 41(7), 1534–1546.
Swanson, M. E., Franklin, J. F., Beschta, R. L., Crisafulli, C. M., DellaSala, D. A., Hutto, R. L., Lindenmayer, D. B., & Swanson, F. J. (2011). The forgotten stage of forest succession: Early‐successional ecosystems on forest sites. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 9(2), 117–125.
Franklin, J. F., Cromack, K., Denison, W. Jr., McKee, A., Maser, C., Sedell, J., Swanson, F., & Juday. G. (1981). The Ecology of Old-Growth Douglas-fir Forests. USDA Forest Service.
Pacific Northwest Research Station. (2002). Second-Growth Forests and Habitat Diversity
Forestry Commission Scotland. (2014). Scotland’s Native Woodlands: Results from the Native Woodland Survey of Scotland.
Scholz, O., Erickson, K., & Azevedo, J. (2004). Restoring the Forest in a Young Coastal Douglas-fir Plantation.
D’Amato, A., & Catanzaro, P. (2022). Restoring Old-Growth Characteristics. University of Massachusetts.
Kuehne, C., & Puettmann, K. J. (2008). Natural Regeneration in Thinned Douglas-fir Stands in Western Oregon. Journal of Sustainable Forestry, 27(3), 246–274.
Hohendorf, Q. V., Eng, B., & Weihenstephan-Triesdorf, H. (n.d.). Monitoring Forest Restoration Effectiveness on Galiano Island, British Columbia: Conventional and New Methods. 115.
Tapper, E. (2024). How to Love a Forest. Broadleaf Books, Minneapolis.
Mitchell, S. R., Harmon, M. E., & O’Connell, K. E. B. (2009). Forest fuel reduction alters fire severity and long-term carbon storage in three Pacific Northwest ecosystems. Ecological Applications, 19(3), 643–655.
DeMeo, T., Haugo, R., Ringo, C., Kertis, J., Acker, S., Simpson, M., & Stern, M. (2018). Expanding Our Understanding of Forest Structural Restoration Needs in the Pacific Northwest. Northwest Science, 92(1), 18.
D’Amore, D. V., Oken, K. L., Herendeen, P. A., Steel, E. A., & Hennon, P. E. (2015). Carbon accretion in unthinned and thinned young-growth forest stands of the Alaskan perhumid coastal temperate rainforest. Carbon Balance and Management, 10(1), 25.
Gullett, P. R., Leslie, C., Mason, R., Ratcliffe, P., Sargent, I., Beck, A., Cameron, T., Cowie, N. R., Hetherington, D., MacDonell, T., Moat, T., Moore, P., Teuten, E., & Hancock, M. H. (2023). Woodland expansion in the presence of deer: 30 years of evidence from the Cairngorms Connect landscape restoration partnership. Journal of Applied Ecology, 60(11), 2298–2308.
Harrop-Archibald, H. (2010) Soil Nutrient and Vegetation Response to Ecological Restoration in a Coastal Douglas-fir Plantation on Galiano Island, BC. University of Victoria.
Koele, N. (2005). The soil nutrient state of an ecological restoration area compared to natural regeneration on Galiano Island, BC, Canada. Proceedings of the 2005 SER-BC Annual Conference.
Scholz, O., Gaylor, N., & Erickson, K. (2005). A monitoring baseline for a Forest Restoration Project on Galiano Island. Proceedings of the 2005 SER-BC Annual Conference.
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Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
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're doing.
Mendel Skulski 00:21
I think we're getting better, just not necessarily faster.
Adam Huggins 00:25
That is true.
Mendel Skulski 00:28
So what's up? What's with all the hammering?
Adam Huggins 00:31
Well, knock, knock, Mendel.
Mendel Skulski 00:34
Who's there?
Adam Huggins 00:35
Wood.
Mendel Skulski 00:37
Wood, who?
Adam Huggins 00:38
Would you care to go with me on a stroll through the forest?
Mendel Skulski 00:42
Always. What kind of forest are we strolling through?
Adam Huggins 00:46
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.
Mendel Skulski 00:57
Right. We're talking like a Christmas tree farm.
Adam Huggins 00:59
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.
Mendel Skulski 01:31
Okay, so what are we doing here? What's with all the noise?
Adam Huggins 01:35
Right. This is not what a forest usually sounds like. Welcome to my day job.
Mendel Skulski 01:40
Oh, I hope we're not interrupting.
Adam Huggins 01:43
Nah, you're fine. It's take your podcast co-host to work day.
Mendel Skulski 01:46
Aw.
Adam Huggins 01:47
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.
Mendel Skulski 02:04
Sounds like fun.
Adam Huggins 02:05
It's a huge pain in the ass, honestly.
Mendel Skulski 02:07
Okay, and...?
Adam Huggins 02:09
And now we've run the chain from the chain hoist down to the base of the tree. We call that the 'spar' tree, through a pulley, which is called a 'snatch block', for reasons I don't understand. And that pulley guides it to the base of another tree, I don't know, about 20 meters away. We call that the 'pivot' tree. It's called the pivot tree because from that tree there's another snatch block at the base. The chain pivots out to a third tree. We wrap the chain about five meters up, and we call that the 'cull' tree. So three trees, a chain and cables running between them, and we've got a smaller chain hoist over there.
Mendel Skulski 02:47
What's that one for?
Adam Huggins 02:49
We use that one to tighten everything up and get ready.
Mendel Skulski 02:53
Get ready for what?
Adam Huggins 02:57
To pull the third tree down.
Mendel Skulski 02:59
Excuse me?
Adam Huggins 03:01
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.
Mendel Skulski 03:12
I got that part. Why? Why are you pulling this poor tree down?
Adam Huggins 03:17
Oh, it's nothing personal. There are just too many trees here.
Mendel Skulski 03:21
Too many trees... That's a thing?
Adam Huggins 03:24
Oh yeah, wait just a second, this is the best part.
Mendel Skulski 03:39
...what happened to you this summer? Did a tree fall on your head? You're getting paid for this mischief.
Adam Huggins 03:49
Yeah, pretty cool, eh? we do this with kids too.
Mendel Skulski 03:53
You're pulling kids over?
Adam Huggins 03:54
No, the the kids pull the tree down. They wear cute little hard hats and everything.
Mendel Skulski 04:01
Okay, I'm feeling pretty lost.
Adam Huggins 04:04
Well, you wouldn't be the first person to stray into the deep, dark woods and get a little bit lost. But in all seriousness, what I'd like to do with this episode is to let some light into this dark forest. For the past couple of years, I've been interviewing foresters across the temperate world, and they've all said more or less the same thing — that when it comes to the management of the woody places of the world, we've been failing to see the forest for the trees. But all of that is starting to change. To save the forests, we may have to cut down some trees. Like, a lot of trees. So many trees. So to kick off our sixth season of future ecologies, I'm Adam.
Mendel Skulski 04:52
I'm lost in the woods...
Adam Huggins 04:54
And this is forest tree.
Introduction Voiceover 05:07
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.
Adam Huggins 05:50
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?
Mendel Skulski 06:04
Of course!
Adam Huggins 06:05
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.
Mendel Skulski 06:15
Can I pitch in?
Adam Huggins 06:16
Absolutely.
Mendel Skulski 06:18
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.
Adam Huggins 06:39
But it isn't dark.
Mendel Skulski 06:41
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.
Adam Huggins 06:56
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.
Mendel Skulski 07:15
Yeah, a horizontal tree. Your favorite.
Adam Huggins 07:18
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
Mendel Skulski 07:29
And on the ground, ferns, herbs, mosses and mushrooms. The soil is so full of mycelium, it's spongy, bouncy, almost like a trampoline.
Adam Huggins 07:43
Or a mattress. I remember when we were lying down there, you said you could smell the layers in the landscape.
Mendel Skulski 07:52
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.
Adam Huggins 08:20
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.
Mendel Skulski 08:35
Yeah, I just wish that, that we could have spent more time there.
Adam Huggins 08:38
Oh, man, it's not every day you get to spend in an old growth forest.
Mendel Skulski 08:44
An old growth rainforest! Also a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve, and the territory of several First Nations.
Adam Huggins 08:54
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,
Mendel Skulski 09:04
Followed up by the other kind of bathing in the Hoh River.
Adam Huggins 09:07
Which was very cold.
Mendel Skulski 09:09
Yes.
Adam Huggins 09:09
But we weren't just on location for vacation.
Mendel Skulski 09:12
No, of course not. We were there to do some serious reporting!
Adam Huggins 09:16
Very serious.
Mendel Skulski 09:17
In one of the very few forests left on the entire Pacific Coast that has never been clear cut.
Adam Huggins 09:23
Folks come from all over the world, you and me included, to experience the Hoh and to walk through the hall of mosses. It's hard to overstate just how rare these high productivity, low elevation old growth forests have become. In the part of the world where you and I live, the vast majority of these forests have been lost. Or to take it out of the passive voice, they've been cut down. We've cut them down. I mean, not you and me personally, but we in general. On the south coast of British Columbia, where we live, less than 10% of the original, high productivity old growth forest remains, and a lot of that is pretty difficult to access.
Mendel Skulski 10:06
It's true. I mean, we took two ferries, crossed an international border and cleared, I don't even know how many kilometers...
Adam Huggins 10:14
About 200.
Mendel Skulski 10:15
- 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.
Adam Huggins 10:34
Yeah, the forest that blankets so much of this coast, the forest that most of us have become accustomed to — an impenetrable green wall of conifers, same age, same height and darkness below. And before too long, we pulled into some of the towns that produced these forests. Communities where, judging from the signs on the side of the road, you and I might imagine that tree hugger is a pejorative term, and that loggers are the underdog heroes. You know, communities where the war in the woods never ended.
Hexxus 11:10
New orders, boys. You're going to Fern Gully.
Mendel Skulski 11:17
Oh, I know that voice.
Adam Huggins 11:20
Somehow, I am not surprised. I take it that you have seen the 1992 animated classic, Fern Gully?
Adam Huggins 11:23
Of course! Of course. I knew that movie by heart when I was a kid.
Adam Huggins 11:26
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.
11:44
Hmm, yeah. I mean, definitely for me.
Adam Huggins 11:47
For those who haven't seen it, it's about a lovely rainforest
Mendel Skulski 11:51
Called Fern Gully
Adam Huggins 11:53
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.
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 your shopping malls and your parking lots and your convenience stores, and then come [zap].
Mendel Skulski 12:20
And then come... animated films about how great the forest used to be?
Adam Huggins 12:28
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.
Mendel Skulski 12:43
I think we all know where this is going.
Adam Huggins 12:44
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.
Mendel Skulski 13:12
Sometimes I feel numb from the brain up.
Adam Huggins 13:16
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.
Magi 13:39
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.
Mendel Skulski 14:15
Wow. Can you believe that was over three decades ago?
Adam Huggins 14:19
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.
Mendel Skulski 14:34
Huh? And what would that be?
Adam Huggins 14:37
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.
Mendel Skulski 14:50
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.
Adam Huggins 15:08
Yes, and we absolutely have to protect the few that remain, like the Hoh for sure.
Mendel Skulski 15:13
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.
Adam Huggins 15:24
Could you imagine?
Mendel Skulski 15:26
No.
Adam Huggins 15:27
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.
Adam Huggins 15:55
Okay. Well, let's go.
Adam Huggins 15:59
One quick note before we do. Just to be clear, the forestry that I'm going to discuss, at least in the North American context, is settler colonial forestry, right? How it transformed the diverse, thriving forests of this continent into collections of trees, and then how we might turn its own tools towards restoration. There is a long history of Indigenous forestry on this continent, and that deserves its own episode another day.
Mendel Skulski 16:28
For sure.
Adam Huggins 16:29
All right, first stop Vermont.
Mendel Skulski 16:32
Huh.
Adam Huggins 16:33
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.
Ethan Tapper 16:49
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.
Mendel Skulski 17:01
So Ethan is your friendly local county forester.
Adam Huggins 17:06
Pretty much.
Mendel Skulski 17:07
and we're in Vermont, so,
Adam Huggins 17:10
So we're talking about Eastern hardwood forests.
Mendel Skulski 17:14
Okay, I'm picturing maples, oaks, birches... pine? ,
Adam Huggins 17:21
Chestnut, elm, walnut, beech. Forests that turn bright red and yellow each fall — becoming an irresistible magnet for the leaf peepers of the world.
Mendel Skulski 17:33
Leaf peepers!
Adam Huggins 17:35
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.
Ethan Tapper 17:43
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.
Adam Huggins 17:57
These forests would have been super diverse ,with dry areas and other areas that were really wet.
Ethan Tapper 18:04
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.
Adam Huggins 18:30
And not just beavers, but large herbivores and predators too.
Ethan Tapper 18:35
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.
Adam Huggins 18:55
Long story short, those forests were cut down and the animals were hunted and killed for timber, for furs, but primarily for agriculture.
Ethan Tapper 19:07
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%
Mendel Skulski 19:26
Oh, that... that's a huge change.
Adam Huggins 19:29
Oh, yeah.
Ethan Tapper 19:30
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.
Adam Huggins 19:44
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.
Ethan Tapper 19:59
The forests today that we have are largely 60 to 100 years old. Most of them were a pasture 60 to 100 years ago.
Adam Huggins 20:08
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 —
Ethan Tapper 20:22
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.
Adam Huggins 20:32
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.
Ethan Tapper 20:54
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.
Adam Huggins 21:02
And that's just one example.
Ethan Tapper 21:04
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.
Adam Huggins 21:14
So not only have some native tree species been almost completely wiped out, the ones that are left behind are just different.
Mendel Skulski 21:25
Like their role in the forest has shifted?
Adam Huggins 21:27
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.
Ethan Tapper 21:46
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.
Mendel Skulski 22:05
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.
Adam Huggins 22:30
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?
Mendel Skulski 22:52
Uh huh...
Adam Huggins 22:53
3, 2, 1, hop!
Brian Duff 23:00
My name is Brian Duff. I work for Forestry and Land Scotland, and I'm based in Glenmore Forest Park.
Adam Huggins 23:10
I chatted with Brian earlier this summer. He works up in this mountain range called the Cairngorms.
Brian Duff 23:16
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.
Adam Huggins 23:42
And unlike in New England, where European colonization resulted in lots of small private landowners, Scotland has a legacy of large private landowners.
Brian Duff 23:54
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.
Mendel Skulski 24:07
Hmm, these would have been the playgrounds of the upper class gentlemen hunters that we talked about in Season Four, huh?
Adam Huggins 24:16
Definitely. But these folks weren't just hunting. The woodlands where Brian 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 in Scotland, because there wasn't a lot of forest in a deer forest. It was mostly just deer, to be honest.
Adam Huggins 24:40
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.
Brian Duff 24:52
Then the first world war came, and guys, funny enough, from Canada, came and... flattened the whole forest, virtually.
Mendel Skulski 25:02
Flattened?!
Brian Duff 25:03
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.
Mendel Skulski 25:14
Hmm, nobody does it quite like us.
Adam Huggins 25:17
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 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.
Mendel Skulski 25:49
What's there to think about? That seems fine.
Adam Huggins 25:51
What could go wrong?
Mendel Skulski 25:52
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.
Adam Huggins 26:06
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 at year five, we're looking for two and a half thousand trees per hectare.
Mendel Skulski 26:28
And I take it, that's a lot. Is this what you meant by having too many trees?
Adam Huggins 26:36
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.
Mendel Skulski 26:53
Okay, so this is like an order of magnitude more.
Adam Huggins 26:58
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.
Mendel Skulski 27:19
Aha... back to where we started off?
Adam Huggins 27:21
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
Keith Erickson 27:43
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?
Adam Huggins 28:00
This is Keith Erickson. He was the one running the chain hoist at the top of the episode.
Adam Huggins 28:05
Chain hoist guy!
Adam Huggins 28:06
As I am sure he would love to be known. He's a biologist. Worked for the Galiano Conservancy for many years and has been a mentor to me. But when he got his first job out of university a couple decades back right here at Pebble Beach, he was pretty green behind the ears. And luckily, he found his own mentors on the job, the late director of the Galiano Conservancy, Ken Millard, and the renowned eco forester, Herb Hammond.
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 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.
Adam Huggins 29:11
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.
Mendel Skulski 29:33
Uhh.... I'm picturing, like, cutting down rows of trees as if they were wheat.
Adam Huggins 29:47
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.
Keith Erickson 30:01
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.
Mendel Skulski 30:28
Okay, I'm sensing the pattern. Wherever you might go, healthy old forests have some similarities. They have trees of varying species, varying ages. Some are old, some are very young. They have wide spacing and gaps, so plenty of light gets down to the understory. They have lots of dead trees standing and dead trees lying down. They have layers of different vegetation, which makes for a lot of little niches for all the different species who make their homes in forests, and you can even bounce on their soil like a trampoline.
Adam Huggins 31:11
Yes, they are complex and messy and lovely,
Mendel Skulski 31:16
Mhm... whereas industrial forests kind of look like industrial farms.
Adam Huggins 31:23
Tree farms! They are often just called tree farms.
Mendel Skulski 31:26
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.
Adam Huggins 31:41
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.
Mendel Skulski 31:53
So what can we do about it? You can't just magically make a forest older...
Adam Huggins 32:03
No, that's not how time works, and we are not fairies.
Mendel Skulski 32:08
Well, Imean, speak for yourself.
Adam Huggins 32:10
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.
Mendel Skulski 32:31
Huh. And that's a technical term?
Adam Huggins 32:36
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.
Mendel Skulski 32:51
Okay, cut to the chase. How are we supposed to do that?
Adam Huggins 32:55
I will tell you... after the break.
Mendel Skulski 33:26
And we're back. I'm Mendel.
Adam Huggins 33:29
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.
Mendel Skulski 33:39
The deep, dark woods.
Adam Huggins 33:41
And now we're going to follow a trail of gingerbread crumbs to grandmother's house.
Mendel Skulski 33:47
Meaning, now you're gonna tell me why you were pulling a tree down.
Adam Huggins 33:52
Yes, that, yes.
Mendel Skulski 33:55
Come on, Adam, what would the fairies say?
Crysta 33:58
No, no, you mustn't do that! Can't you feel its pain?
Adam Huggins 34:04
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?
Ethan Tapper 34:26
Old growth forests are amazing. They're diverse. They provide all this really amazing habitat. They store lots of carbon.
Adam Huggins 34:33
Ethan Tapper again, our forester from Vermont.
Ethan Tapper 34:36
And so how do we make forests old growth? And the 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.
Mendel Skulski 34:52
Proforestation... I mean, I guess I'm pro forestation, right?
Adam Huggins 35:01
You know, I wasn't familiar with this term either, but basically, proforestation means letting forests grow and recover on their own.
Ethan Tapper 35:09
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.
Mendel Skulski 35:24
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.
Ethan Tapper 35:39
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.
Mendel Skulski 35:59
So Ethan is saying that the world might actually be a little bit more nuanced than Fern Gully would have us believe.
Adam Huggins 36:07
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.
Ethan Tapper 36:21
I came to forestry from a place of not necessarily being interested in management, but just from loving forests and just from wanting to be around them and in them. And really, actually, I think when I started, I was just sort of more interested in protecting them, and, you know, figuring out how to leave them alone. Through the course of my career, and through the course of my time at the University of Vermont, really started to understand the beauty and the importance of management, that these forests were not systems that could just exist, that they were extremely altered, highly degraded, and that there was a role for people in making them really healthy and vibrant and abundant ecosystems.
Mendel Skulski 37:07
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.
Adam Huggins 37:20
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.
Ethan Tapper 37:47
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.
Mendel Skulski 37:58
Yeah. Who has that kind of time.
Adam Huggins 38:00
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.
Mendel Skulski 38:15
Makes sense.
Adam Huggins 38:16
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.
Mendel Skulski 38:29
Got it. They don't only take longer to get there. They might not make it at all.
Adam Huggins 38:40
And then finally, there are actual timber considerations here. If you have all of these dense trees that are going through the same phase of life at the same time together, they're all competing for the same resources, and that stresses them out. It curtails their growth. So if you want nice, big trees eventually, you need healthy trees. And if you want healthy trees, you might need less trees. And frankly, if we want to use wood, but we don't want to be seeing clear cuts, then we're going to have to find a way to fall in love with selective tree cutting.
Mendel Skulski 39:15
Right... we all use wood products.
Ethan Tapper 39:18
There's something really radical about consuming local resources, consuming local renewable resources, which would often is even if that makes us uncomfortable.
Adam Huggins 39:28
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.
Ethan Tapper 39:40
It had every problem that a forest could have, truly. I mean, it had massive invasive plant issues. It had been high graded. So loggers had come, they cut all the healthiest trees, which are the most valuable, and left all the least healthy trees. And the first time I walked through it, I actually remember walking through and saying, I cannot find any healthy trees. I have not seen a healthy tree on 175 acres. It had old skid roads, forest roads that were eroding. It was just tough, really, really tough. And this has come to be a piece of land, you know, a forest that I love intrinsically. It doesn't have to do anything for me, doesn't have to give anything to me. I think it and its biological community has the right to exist, and yet I could not pretend that, in light of all of these things, that just leaving it alone could be a kindness. Going out there and doing things as bittersweet as cutting trees, killing deer, spraying herbicide on invasive plants were acts of compassion.
Mendel Skulski 40:44
Wow... we've talked about killing deer in a previous episode. Are... are we going to talk about herbicide now?
Adam Huggins 40:54
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.
Mendel Skulski 41:05
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?
Adam Huggins 41:17
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.
Herb Hammond 41:41
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.
Mendel Skulski 42:12
So the idea is basically mimic natural disturbances.
Adam Huggins 42:16
Yes, and this idea is a through line through all of the conversations that I've had.
Ethan Tapper 42:23
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.
Adam Huggins 42:45
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.
Mendel Skulski 43:04
And by thinned, you mean cutting down a certain percentage of the trees?
Adam Huggins 43:08
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.
Ethan Tapper 43:20
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.
Brian Duff 43:35
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.
Ethan Tapper 43:47
And to just create weirdness, what we would call complexity, or I call weirdness — irregularity, little mixes of habitat that are novel and unique.
Herb Hammond 43:57
Mimic what nature does. Windthrow is one of the main natural disturbance regimes in these systems.
Adam Huggins 44:05
Hey, Mendel — do you know what windthrow is?
Mendel Skulski 44:09
If I had to guess, it's when the wind blows trees over.
Herb Hammond 44:13
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.
Brian Duff 44:26
So every 15 years, we'd be going in and thinning and opening it up and opening it up.
Adam Huggins 44:32
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.
Ethan Tapper 44:45
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.
Adam Huggins 45:09
And even in the most simplified forests, there remain these little opportunities for diversity.
Herb Hammond 45:15
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.
Ethan Tapper 45:45
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.
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 would accept trees just blown over or lying about, as it were.
Ethan Tapper 46:08
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.
Herb Hammond 46:16
We not only top trees to introduce rot.
Brian Duff 46:19
So there'd be hand winching, ring barking.
Herb Hammond 46:22
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.
Herb Hammond 46:31
... 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
Brian Duff 46:45
Anyway. We just have to go in with it.
Mendel Skulski 46:50
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.
Adam Huggins 47:02
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.
Mendel Skulski 47:22
Surely.
Adam Huggins 47:23
For our next intervention, it's not only the trees that need to be thinned out.
Brian Duff 47:28
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
Mendel Skulski 47:41
Oh, deer.
Brian Duff 47:42
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.
Mendel Skulski 47:59
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?
Adam Huggins 48:09
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.
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 nothing since then. Basically, if it's not old age or a bullet, nothing's going to stop deer, really.
Mendel Skulski 48:49
Yikes.
Adam Huggins 48:50
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 with them. They come and pick the carcasses up from our larder, and it goes into the food chain, basically.
Mendel Skulski 49:05
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 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.
Mendel Skulski 49:28
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.
Adam Huggins 49:41
You know what they don't have to put much effort into marketing?
Mendel Skulski 49:44
What?
Adam Huggins 49:44
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.
Brian Duff 50:00
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.
Adam Huggins 50:24
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.
Ethan Tapper 50:36
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.
Mendel Skulski 50:46
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?
Adam Huggins 51:08
There's always trade offs. Mendel,
Ethan Tapper 51:10
The ecologically ideal situation would be cutting all these trees to create these canopy gaps, and to thin around our healthiest trees. And we'd be just leaving them on the ground, because there'd be more dead wood there at that time. But the difference is that, because this is a commercial forest management project, not only are we producing local renewable resources, which is incredibly valuable, but it is the commerciality of that project that is allowing it to occur. So we wouldn't have been in there, creating gaps, putting dead wood on the ground, doing any of this stuff, if it wasn't commercial. And so in that way, it's I... I really believe it to be a really happy compromise.
Mendel Skulski 51:50
Okay, so there, there is still a compromise.
Adam Huggins 51:55
If you trust Ethan, a happy compromise.
Mendel Skulski 51:58
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.
Adam Huggins 52:09
Yes, the argument is that it is possible to take some wood out and still leave some on the ground. And you know, it's going to be a different balance in every place. Perhaps in some areas we want to remove more wood to generate value for the community, or to limit fire risk, right? Perhaps in other areas, we can afford to leave more on the ground, and allow it to build the soil. What really struck me listening to all of these folks from around the world, is that what we're talking about is a kind of forestry that balances the needs of the forest as a whole with the lives of individual trees, and that brings the humans back into the forest.
Brian Duff 52:53
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.
Ethan Tapper 53:13
And that, to me, is like the most profound expression of what it means to be the steward of a forest at this moment in time. Like, we get the world that we get. Here we are. And we have the forest that we have. The question is, what are we going to do about it? We already have the power to address these issues. We just have to decide to do it. Not leaving these forests alone, but asking "what can we do to make these ecosystems healthy again" is truly radical, and truly an expression of love for them.
Mendel Skulski 53:50
Okay Adam, I just have one question left.
Adam Huggins 53:53
And what would that be?
Mendel Skulski 53:54
Does any of this actually work?
Adam Huggins 54:02
Oh, I mean, there are always successes and setbacks with work like this, but the short answer is... yes.
Herb Hammond 54:10
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.
Mendel Skulski 54:26
You're telling me you can see changes inside of a year.
Adam Huggins 54:30
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.
Brian Duff 54:55
There's more light getting in, there's more heat generated, there's more insect life. The capercaillie seem to thrive on that.
Adam Huggins 55:03
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.
Mendel Skulski 55:28
Maybe some other time.
Brian Duff 55:29
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.
Adam Huggins 55:50
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 — 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.
Adam Huggins 56:28
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.
Herb Hammond 56:40
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.
Keith Erickson 56:55
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.
Mendel Skulski 57:29
Hmm... so what about you, Adam, have you found your place in the forest?
Adam Huggins 57:34
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.
Mendel Skulski 58:08
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.
Adam Huggins 58:44
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.
Mendel Skulski 59:08
Well, please let us know how it goes.
Adam Huggins 59:12
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
Mendel Skulski 59:29
All of our patrons get access to early episode releases, exclusive bonus content, and our community Discord server.
Adam Huggins 59:37
And our biggest supporters get to show off with stickers, embroidered patches,and now toques! That's a beanie for American listeners.
Mendel Skulski 59:46
In this episode, you heard Keith Erickson, Herb Hammond, Ethan Tapper, Brian Duff,
Adam Huggins 59:52
and just a little bit of Ria Okuda, my colleague at the GCA.
Mendel Skulski 59:56
And music by Thumbug, Spencer W Stuart, Nathan Schubert, and Sunfish Moon Light.
Adam Huggins 1:00:06
You can find Ethan's new book, How to Love a Forest, at ethantapper.com/book. You can learn more about Cairngorms connect at cairngormsconnect.org.uk. And if you're curious about my day job at the Galiano Conservancy. You can find us galianoconservancy.ca
Mendel Skulski 1:00:26
This episode was produced by Adam Huggins, and me Mendel Skulski, with help from Eden Zinchik, and cover art by Ale Silva.
Adam Huggins 1:00:36
Special thanks to Ethan for nudging us into telling this story; to Lizzie Brotherston for connecting us with Brian; to all my colleagues at the Galiano Conservancy for letting me record them while working; To Thomas Heinrich, who interviewed some folks in the San Juans who will be featured in a sub-episode because we just couldn't fit them in here; and to Tal Engel for his engaging conversations on this topic. We also found the Northwest Natural Resource Group's new book A Forest of Your Own to be really helpful in putting this episode together.
Mendel Skulski 1:01:07
Okay, we've got an amazing season lined up for you full of great new stories.
Adam Huggins 1:01:12
Keeping us very, very busy.
Mendel Skulski 1:01:14
And you know what that means?
Tony 1:01:16
Yeah! Beaucoup overtime.
Hexxus 1:01:20
Oh what a miraculous device. I'm really getting the hang of this.