Understanding Forest Management Walk

Join Ethan Tapper for “Understanding Forest Management,” a walk of an active forest management project at the Hinesburg Town Forest (HTF).

Done well, modern forest management can be restorative and regenerative, helping create more diverse, vibrant, resilient forests with great wildlife habitat, helping forests recover from the effects of human land use and creating old forest attributes sooner than they would naturally occur. At the same time, forest management generates local, renewable resources which get turned into building materials, paper, power and more. Like local food, local wood supports our working landscape and our rural communities and mitigates the use of resources produced under more adverse ecological and social conditions elsewhere in the country or the world. We will walk the management area and talk about forests, forest management, and forest ecology. Please bring an open mind and all those questions you’ve never had a chance to ask about forest management.

This walk will happen “rain (snow, mud) or shine.” Participants should be ready to spend a couple hours outdoors walking over uneven and potentially slippery surfaces in whatever weather we find ourselves in, and also to spend extended periods of time standing and talking. Directions on where to meet will be sent to participants in advance.

Ethan Tapper is a forester, author and digital creator from Vermont. His bestselling book – How to Love a Forest – was published in 2024. For more than a decade, Ethan has been recognized as a thought-leader and a disruptor in the forestry and conservation communities of the northeastern United States and beyond, winning multiple regional and national awards for his work. Ethan is a regular contributor to Northern Woodlands magazine and a variety of other publications, is a digital creator with tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook, and runs a consulting forestry business: Bear Island Forestry.

In his personal life, Ethan works, writes, hunts and birds at Bear Island – his 175-acre working forest, homestead, orchard and sugarbush –and plays in his 10-piece punk band, The Bubs.